> "your paper is so consistently out of step with San Francisco values"

Steven, it's clear that you're no spokesperson for San Francisco's values. If your values represented the majority of San Franciscans, we'd have Chris Daly as our mayor and Care not Cash would never have seen the light of day.

Unfortunately, it sounds like you've been misled by the antics of some of our grandstanding politicians. Truth is, San Francisco probably isn't the progressive theme park that you feel so very entitled to.

And CW Nevius is right, the Chronicle didn't create this issue. Rather, resentment of the homeless is a constant fact of life among SF's citizens.

I don't know about your reality but here in the real San Francisco, many of us resent the homeless population. We resent their filth, their smell, their very presence. More than that, we resent how cynics like you use them as a platform to make self serving pronouncements about your value system.

You "resent" them? Sweetie, the homeless aren't living their lives to get back at you for something ... And if you want to revel in your resentment of filth and smell rather than actually do something to help (um, besides contribute to the chron's comment board that is), I've got a power plant in Bayview and a fleet of diesel-spewing Blue Angels to sell you at a real nice price .... not to mention the entire gas-guzzling population of SUV America. Believe me, you'll never get lung cancer from the homeless -- but you may get stress marks from your "resentment."

PS -- "Care Not Cash" obviously didn't work if you peeps are still getting so worked up about the homeless, duh. But hey, let's re-elect the mayor! He PROMISES something unspecified as yet will!

> Believe me, you'll never get lung cancer from the homeless.

Maybe they won't give me cancer, but if I'm not careful, they may give me hepatitis.

And then there are the piles of homeless peoples' trash that I have to tiptoe through while walking down the street or entering the park.

There's the urine soaked doorways, alleyways and buses that I have to avoid. There's the discarded shopping carts that litter my neighborhood. There's the excrement in the bushes and on sidewalks.

There are the broken bottles littering the city and there are the filthing, stinking derelicts that I'm many times forced to endure while riding the bus.

And, lest we forget, there's the ever present panhandlers waiting for me at BART stations, outside the gym, in front of my job, on the medians in the streets, and seemingly every corner of Haight street.

And to top it all off, there are people who cynically exploit the homeless issue to try to intimidate me into supporting their political agenda, inferring that if I don't, I just might wind up being one of those homeless people one day.

Do those things not matter?

I'm not sure how when Nevius exploits the issue to get on the front page that's ok, but when the Guardian calls him out it's "cynical exploitation." As a progressive (and a formerly homeless person) , I too am troubled by the homeless presence -- yes, sometimes I'm frustrated and, heavens, inconvenienced. But I fiercely disagree that all homeless are unsanitary -- let alone dangerous. There's a very long list of more dangerous types than the homeless.

And I'm not so troubled or frustrated about what it's doing to ME -- there are real and giant problems in society that need to be addressed and I would never want to live in a bubble where those problems are "swept" away. I'm troubled about what it says about US as a community, that we don't have the strength or patience to step out of our routine of workouts and fulltime jobs to band together and find humane solutions.

The point of view you represent, jeff, strikes me as incredibly selfish -- and selfishness certainly belongs to no one "agenda" or "ideology." It may seem like bravery to say what you think everyone is thinking, but ...

The homeless population is surely only going to grow, especially with thousands of home foreclosures happening each week and fewer services being offered from trustworthy sources. I'm glad a debate has been sparked. And I'm glad that people are being reminded that problems just don't go away because we shut our eyes or join a gym.

I also know right-wingers feel especially vulnerable now that their policies have failed and their war is lost, so of course they're going to beat up on the defenseless -- they've gotta win something, right? The illusion of pride above all. It's just, well, pitiful really. You don't have to be a liberal to appreciate, and rue, desperate hypocrisy.

PS - I'm also glad you use public transport, though.

PPS -- I step in far more little yippie dog shit on the sidewalks each day than human feces. AND I have to tiptoe around more screeching neo-yuppies on their cell phones on my way to the park than shopping carts. Let's have a sweep of them!

This blog editorial is a perfect example of why I'm so disgusted with San Francisco Politics nowadays.

Unfortunately the opinions so far in this blog will not change the mindset of the Guardian and Mr. Steve Jones, therefore this will give people like Mr. Daly a platform to stand on when it comes to "defending homeless."

I have lived in San Francisco for 34 years. And unfortunately, the story is still the same. The majority of people are frickin fed up with the homeless but the homeless advocates and their "media friends" still have pull in City Hall.

Little does City Hall know that these individuals are clearly not a representation of the city.

This blog editorial and the comments from some of it's readers should clearly state that.

> "Care Not Cash" obviously didn't work if you peeps are still getting so worked up about the homeless, duh.

But all of us who voted for CnC were under no illusions about whether or not it would 'cure' the homeless problem. We saw it as merely a sensible step in the right direction. And the fact that the welfare roles dropped substantially after it was implemented suggests that it did have the intended effect.

> I'm troubled about what it says about US as a community, that we don't have the strength or patience to step out of our routine of workouts and fulltime jobs to band together and find humane solutions

> The point of view you represent, jeff, strikes me as incredibly selfish

It is not inhumane, nor is it selfish to insist that those people whose lives now litter our streets begin living by the standards of social responsibility that the vast majority of us all adhere to. In a community as tightly packed as ours, the very least that people should do is get their shit together so that we're not all having to step over it in the street every day.

> I have to tiptoe around more screeching neo-yuppies on their cell phones on my way to the park than shopping carts. Let's have a sweep of them!

I have to ride the bus with them too. I dislike them as much as the homeless people I mentioned.

I see people complaining about the homeless (their smell, etc.) and then I presume the politicians will never broach the notion of helping the homeless off the street with tax revenues. So the people angry at the smell of the homeless want them to go away with no fuss at no expense to themselves and so seem to get irritated at Mayors who can't make the homeless just 'disappear'.

I get the distinct impression that many people would be entirely fine with picking the homeless up with power shovels and dumping them into the ocean south of Half Moon Bay.

I wonder what would happen if a formerly homeless community suddenly won the Lotto so they could push their own messages in the media. We would start hearing about how they don't like the "stink" of people so involved with their own lives that it's fine to treat other people like embarrassing garbage.

Any one of the people posting here against the homeless, just ask yourself: how many dollars, how many minutes have you spent trying to SOLVE or even ADDRESS the problem? Apart from posting and writing complaints?

If the issue of the homeless bothers you enough to complain about it, then it should bother you enough to get educated about the issue. Having spent a minute or two to recognize that they are real people on the skids, perhaps draconian solutions will not rush so quickly to mind and people can remind themselves that any solution to the problem must be a humane one, after all.

I don't see anyone angry with homelessness making the connection with Iraq War funding to see that the cities might be able to take care of these problems (and many others) if ever we taxpayers got to see our tax monies spent on OUR needs, as opposed to watching the taxes get shunted to war and corporations.

Is that it? Let the big boys impoverish your city and then demand Gestapo answers to "undesirables"? I would rather put the big boys in jail or at least out of business, get our taxes back and put them to use serving human needs - ours AND those of the homeless.

Please remember, folks, that the homeless problem didn't just emerge out of nowhere. In the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan began to abolish federal funding for urban housing; it was part of the big plan to dismantle social programs in America. At the same time, the wealthy (and now, the not-even-that-wealthy) have gotten sweet tax cuts that have made it possible for a lot of us to buy nice homes and condos and gym memberships that we have to step around the homeless to get to.

You want to solve the problem? Cracking down and arresting people won't ever do it; they'll get out of jail and come back. These are human beings, and the reason most of them are homeless is that they can't afford a place to live.

We can fix that. It costs money. Money comes from taxes. If SF had, say, $10 billion right now to build low-cost housing and provide support services (and yes, welfare -- actual cash income so that people won't panhandle or steal money) the homeless problem could actually be solved.

If the tax rate on high earners were even half of what it was under the great Communist Dwight Eisenhower, we'd have plenty of money for that sort of massive investment.

But people in the United States, particularly our wonderful baby boom generation, doesn't want to pay taxes. So we live with the unacceptable problems that come from a selfish society.

For the record, San Francisco has more than a dozen BILLIONAIRES. This is a very, very rich city. We need federal help to come up with $10 billion, of course (and before you vote for a Democrat in the primaries, please ask them all how much money they wil put into rebuilding American cities and which taxes they're going to raise to pay for it) but we can do a lot locally, too. But not free, not cheap, and not without a lot of people chipping in.

Don't bitch. Elect politicians who live in the reality-based community.

And by the way, let me say a word about welfare, since Care Not Cash is all about taking it away.

When I first moved to San Francisco, a disabled woman who I worked with at the Haight Ashbury Switchboard was living on SSI. She and her young son got about $800 a month from the government. Her rent was about $150 a month.

She raised her kid, bought him food and clothing, volunteered with cool programs like the switchboard and lived a decent life. You didn't have to step over her on the sidewalk. In fact, she was spending most of her time making life better for all of us by helping others out.

But SSI has barely increased in the past 25 years, and now that flat she rented back then costs $2500 a month. She can't possibly pay for housing in SF on what SSI pays her.

So now she's homeless. Now she's a "problem."

Is that her fault? Our ours?

All you all that just want the homeless to go away: there still needs to be a place for them to go, and giving them a ticket for sleeping on the streets starts a vicious circle of criminal justice that costs the city a lot of money ($7.8 million over the last 4 years) and doesn't really help.

At the Religious Witness with Homeless People press conference, which neither Chuck Nevius nor Ken Garcia chose to attend, Rabbi Peretz Wolf-Prusan said, "If you give a hungry man a parking ticket...he has a parking ticket."

He's still a hungry man.

Tim, people on SSI never got GA, so they did not have any money taken away with Care Not Cash.

In BeyondChron today, Randy Shaw wrote that in the last 5 years, San Francisco has created 5000 housing units for the formerly homeless, more housing per capita for the formerly homeless than any other city in the US:
http://beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=4984#more

The Bay Guardian wrote that SF can never build enough market rate housing to lower housing prices, because demand for luxury condos will always be higher than supply. Can SF, even with $10 billion, ever build enough low income housing to meet demand? Wouldn't demand be higher for housing available at little or no rent than for $1 million condos? This country has a lot more poor people than millionaires.

That is not to say that we shouldn't build low income housing, but that SF can't solve the American homelessness problem on its own, even with $10 billion.

Oh dear God. Tim wrote "Money comes from taxes." Funny, I thought money came from work, and taxes are what take money AWAY.

Steve,
It has been a while since we last have exchanged words in regards to the "heavy criminal activity" that is happening RIGHT NOW around SOMA. Homeless people are sleeping out doors
*gasp*
SFPD dictates anyone in violation of the law is a criminal, ergo-being homeless is against the law? I'm a little confused myself of the implications and moral, let alone, many civil rights violations this current city administration has shown in its repetitious cycle that this city has seen in the last 20 years.
I agree with the title"enough IS enough". Mayor Newsom didn't listen when we asked him not to cut funds......now look what happened.........

More of my exchange with Nevius (who, BTW, doesn't live in San Francisco, as I learned this morning from his appearance on Forum, where he blasted the homeless while commuting into town from the East Bay):

Nevius wrote:
Well, I'd say you've got a pretty good idea of what you're going to write and my sense is that what I say isn't going to make much difference. I appreciate that you gave me a head's up and I tried to respond. But I don't think -- other than my saying that I'm wrong and you are right -- that I'm going to give you an answer that is going to satisfy you. Thanks again for engaging. CWN

Jones wrote:
Yes, I did have a pretty good idea what I was going to write, but I was hoping that you would more directly answer my central allegations instead of wave them away. You didn't even answer direct questions like do you live in San Francisco. Do you?

Nevius wrote:
Well, frankly, I don't get it. I don't remember agreeing to an interview, but you seem very upset that I don't answer your questions in the way you'd like. You publish my emails without asking, or even warning me. Personally, that's not how I work.
To be honest, I think I've been pretty nice about this. Since you've already written your blog I'm not clear on why you expect me to keep up this dialogue. It certainly didn't help my cause. You know, I think when I wrote about your girlfriend when she was running against Bevan D., I think I was more even-handed than this.

Jones wrote:
My girlfriend wasn't stoking hatred toward poor people, and it wasn't like your paper did her any favors anyway. I'm sorry that you don't think that I've been nice -- and that you've been so awfully tolerant of my inquiries (without answering any) -- but I clearly take this discussion far more seriously than you do. I think what you're doing is irresponsible and it pisses me off. Unlike you, I live in this city and feel a great responsible for trying to keep it a tolerant, progressive-minded place, usually having to work against the Chronicle to do so.
I don't mean to personalize this, but I'm really having a hard time understanding what motivates you. The detached, objective reporter schtick that you present just doesn't jibe with your judgmental and highly opinionated front page columns. You can't have it both ways. It's dishonest.

I have lived in SF since 1994 and I don't give change to the homeless because I just see them as lazy people who don't want to work and just want to live on hand outs from people who feel sorry for them. I put in my 40 hours a week at work, pay my taxes (city, state and federal), don't break any laws and treat my friends and family with respect. When I go to my neighborhood coffee shop or taqueria, I treat the people working in there with respect and always give them a tip 'cause I know many of them need that extra help to make ends meet in our expensive city. They provide me with good service and I appreciate that. Just because I don't spend my free time trying to find solutions to our homeless problem doesn't make me a bad person. You're never going to fix the homeless problem in San Francisco because there will always be people here that are drug addicts and alcoholics that can't hold a job and hence will have to live on the street. Many of them don't want to live in the shelters because there are rules to follow there and, judging by there current predicament, they have never been one to follow rules. We can go on and on about coming up with better programs for the homeless but it will always be a waste of money because most of them will never really appreciate it and there will always be other people to take their place on the street. They don't work, pay taxes or have to take care of family or friends so anything they can get for free is a plus to them. Think of it, they don't have to do anything and somehow there welfare will still be provided for by compassionate San Franciscans who feel sorry for them. I would never want to be in their predicament so that is why I get up early every morning and head into work. After a long, busy work day, the last thing I want to do is give my hard earned money to someone who has no inclination to give back at all to society. I mean, if I saw a homeless person on the street with a broom or mop cleaning up the area around them, I would definitely give them food or money. Anyway, I'm just your average SF resident and I believe many others feel the same way. Good luck with your crusade.

Steve, you should just move to Canada. You could live in a country that's social net is not rivaled anywhere in the western world. Oh ya to maintain it you have the government take greater than 50 cents on every dollar you make. If you don't like how the majority of people are feeling about homelessness in SF you should move. You have options. Like most bleeding heart liberals you don't even support open dialog... it's your way or no way.

Sorry, I live in the city, and think that the homeless here are a blight that not only drain resources, they prevent beneficial economic development. I say institutionalize the crazy; for those who can work but won't, we should turn the screws. Other cities don't have the homeless problem we have because we have some romantic notion that living on the streets is a form of freedom. It's not; it's either a product of mental illness or sociopathy.

Are we really coming back to "Why can't they just get a job?" -- incredible. And why can't people in Africa just get air conditioners.

It seems like the "people" who represent this horrible view have walked right out of the pages of American Psycho. Yes, homelessness will always be with us -- even the Buddha wiped his ass with a tea leaf on the Golden Road -- but surely the answer should be more sophisticated than "let lazy people starve in jail." If that were the case, half the population of white 20-somethings in the 90s would be no longer with us.

Have San Franciscans gotten so blindly self-righteous that they think they can judge who contributes to society best, and then purge those they don't see as fit? Working 40 hours a week and tipping your waitstaff hardly sounds like contributing to society to me. It sounds like maintaining the bare minimum to make you feel better than others, by some seriously distorted standard. (I work 60 hours a week AND I volunteer -- I think lazy people like you who stink of tacos and coffee should be swept out of town!) And posing the homeless situation in terms of "social engineering" sounds a LOT more like the right's dreaded socialism than giving away free food.

I'm just saying, who draws the line here, and where does it end if we start on this path ...

Also, the amount of your taxes that goes to homeless services is so incredibly slight (less than a dime a year) that I think you have incredibly distorted priorities ... compared to the amazingly greater evils that are befalling much huger chunks of your tax money, helping to house and counsel the poor seems, well ...

the only way to solve this problem is to either threaten to or actually turn them into soylent green. watch them scatter to places like santa cruz if we could convince them we were serious.

The best thing about Steven T. Jones posting the email threads here is how much he comes across as a petulant child in the exchange (and probably doesn't realize it).

Steven T. Jones, the only newspaper editor I've ever heard of who publishes his column on the fricken front page of his paper, reveals more than his pinched up self-righteousness and self-aggrandizement, he also reveals something you hear commonly from "progressives" - a general cynicism and elitism toward the general public with "I ... feel a great responsible for trying to keep it a tolerant, progressive-minded place."

As if one day when Steven T. Jones isn't around to spread the gospel of progressive righteousness, the people, without the great head master to lead them toward salvation will descend into chaos, cleaning up their neighborhoods and reintroducing themselves to the old gods of personal responsibility and individualism.

I've got news for you Mr. Jones - nobody reads your paper for the dusty old quasi-socialist screeds. People only pick up the Guardian to see what shows are coming up or where to eat.

Geez, and I thought you guys were all out of high school here.

Publishing personal emails to try to make a point and call someone out without their permission or prior notification? What if the Government did that to you? What if a "real" journalist did that in an article? You guys here would scream that your civil liberties were violated!

It seems that we all want the same thing: the homeless off the street. Obviously, what we've been doing hasn't worked. Now, Newsom & the City are trying a few things on a test basis. At least they are attempting to let those in need know that they are serious about the homeless problem. Maybe it would convince some of the people to actually accept help that is offered, rather than saying fu and staying on the streets.

As for the cops, let 'em hand out tickets to folks shitting on my sidewalk. If they see a dog doing the same, I hope they give the guardian a ticket. Besides, I bet the social service folks don't mind having them around to watch their backs.

I live in San Francisco and I'm glad we are moving from the status quo.

I've been corrected about my statement above. It is NOT unethical to reprint someone's email.

"I have a degree in journalism and I've worked for newspapers for 16 years, dailies and weeklies, and there's nothing unethical about printing e-mails, particularly given that I notified the source when I contacted him that I was seeking comments for a blog post that I was writing.

Steven T. Jones
City Editor
San Francisco Bay Guardian
(415) 487-2552"

Geeze, it's not like the city is going all "Vlad Tepes" on the homeless and layabouts.

Now that was a guy that knew how to handle a homeless problem.

Oh wait, this is a humorless blog. Sorry.

In "overentitled Americans" you mean people who work hard for a living, pay their bills, and when they walk outside their home, some homeless psycho lunges at them, curses at them, or aggressively asks them for money? i guess when you want public safety you are "overentitled"? i better check my values.

and stop implying that homeless and poor are the same thing. i know plenty of poor people that work hard, and make every attempt to pay their bills and be an upstanding citzens. sure, sometimes homeless people are poor people who are down on their luck, but the majority of homeless i see in this city are addicts, and mental cases, not poor people trying to get themselves back on track.

I don't know who prints more irresponsible journalism, the SFBG or the Chron. This story reads like another extraordinary effort from socialists to tie all problems going on in this city to "the rich" - against the typical protaganist, the poor and homeless (even though they aren't the same thing) - and somehow, to the Spanish American War.

San Francisco politics make me sick because not only do most people have their heads up their asses but no one is willing to compromise or give on any issue.

Face it - not only do we need better programs to help people get out of the street, but yes - we also need to kick the druggies and anarchists who don't want to get rehabilitation out of San Francisco. Yes, you can have both at the same time!

These people come to our city because they know we are tolerant and will be generous and put up with their crap. Plus the weather is nice! But the other day I nearly beat a homeless man to the ground because he was following my girlfriend with an exposed needle. Any "urban" raised local should know that your first priority is SAFETY before ultra-liberal politics. My type of encounter is something that happens OFTEN, and it needs STOP.

So why can't we take all the political RICH/POOR jargon out of the equation and put together a more comprehensive policy that helps homeless who want to have jobs and homes and sends other homeless who want to shit in our streets and use drugs to jail!

Tim Redmond and Steve Jones, you are simply wrong and anachronistic. I'm a 30-year resident of San Francisco, and I no longer feel any guilt for wanting the homeless bums who infest our streets to go away. Saying that once upon a time, someone got $800 of free money and paid only $150 rent only infuriates me more. Why should anyone be supported while they don't work and don't produce and don't contribute to society? And as far as blaming Reagan, that's bunk. The reality is that hospitals were closed all over the country because the loony-left won lawsuits that established that the mentally ill could not be treated against their will. Once the hospitals were emptied of patients by those legal rulings, there was little else to do but to close them.

Moreover, the beef of the many San Franciscans who respond to Nevius's columns is not with the "homeless." None of us begrudges a hand up to victims of layoffs, to victims of spousal abuse, to single mothers trying to get their lives on track. We begrudge the welcome mat that's rolled out to smelly, stinky, feral human beings who crap on our streets, harass passers-by, and who refuse the social services that cost us so much money. To hell with them! Few of them are even from California. Hose them down and put them on a bus back to where they came from!

Marke B. -- The homeless cost us a dime a year? With all due respect, you couldn't be more full of crap if we stuffed you like a goose on its way to the pate factory. San Francisco spends something like $150 million dollars a year. There are about 750,000 San Franciscans, so what does that come to? About $200 per person, regardless of age. Why should each of us kick in $200 to enable and support people who don't want to lead honest, working lives?

Robert, it's a lot more complicated than that. Admittedly, I was citing a statistic from the original Care Not Cash debate four years ago (I'll find the relevant link when I have a moment later -- and I would appreciate a citation from you on the 150 million as well), but it's my understanding that the amount spent on homelessness in the city is a combination of money gleaned from federal and state allocations and grants -- which would disappear once we stopped showing a need for them, it would not simply be pocketed by tax payers -- as well as (far less so) from the city's funds, much of which comes from property and development taxes et al.

At this point in our municipal history, that total money, in turn, is mostly granted to non-profit and for-profit companies. As Amanda Witherell's writing in the Guardian has recently shown, ticketing and sweeps -- performed directly by city services --cost a lot to local taxpayers as well, possibly in the millions.
Housing the homeless has become a semi-privatized business that depends mostly on state and federal monies; inept attempts to "clean up" the homeless through police action directly affects the City's budget gleaned from local taxes.

In effect, if the homeless disappeared from San Francisco tomorrow, I seriously doubt you'd receive a yearly refund check for $200, nor would the City simply have $150 million more to play with (In actuality, it's about 300 million people paying for homelessness). And I'm not even gonna touch the "honest" lives remark, it pretty much speaks for itself, let alone the pate reference (somebody call PETA!) ...

Just a personal side note: I live in District 5, which has become incredibly violent in the past couple of years -- three shootings have occurred on my block in the past 5 months, one in broad daylight, none of which involved homelessness (although I certainly suspect an economic factor). I'd much rather the police who live off my own taxes look into preventing violent activity rather than spend their time ticketing homeless campers in the Panhandle because they offend your standard of "honesty." Priorities ...

PS -- our federal government just created 4 million homeless Iraqis, something we're so far completely ignoring -- aren't you "honestly" lucky you don't have to pay for that. Or do you ....

http://www.sfgov.org/site/mayor_page.asp?id=32148

$136 million to be invested in providing services and housing for homeless, including major expansion of permanent supportive housing and a doubling of the Mayor’s Homeless Outreach Teams

$112.4 million total investment in housing, including affordable rentals and homeownership