You can know that policy and not personal charity is the only answer to homelessness. You can know about American inequality and poverty. Living adjacent to San Francisco’s Tenderloin while surrounded by the city’s tech wealth is another thing entirely.
We were there for a year, the city chosen by a judicial clerkship (not mine), the neighborhood chosen for the commute. I had plenty of reasons for being homesick, for not liking San Francisco specifically, but the grinding poverty and soaring inequality everywhere around me ranked high. How do you see such misery day in, day out and not become at least a little broken, whether by grief or indifference?
We lived on a corner, with the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium across the street from us. I started work at 6 AM PT, and on days the Bill Graham had a show, a white pickup truck with handicapped plates and a camper would pull up right at 6, when the overnight street cleaning parking ban ended. I only saw the man who drove that truck a few times, heading to or from what was obviously a regular gig working shows at the auditorium, but his cane was often visible laying across the dashboard of his truck. The truck was in good shape, and I always wondered where he parked on other nights, whether he had a regular spot or left the city altogether. People like that, people with jobs, are a major part of the current reality of homelessness in San Francisco and on the west coast more generally:
"I've got economically zero unemployment in my city, and I've got thousands of homeless people that actually are working and just can't afford housing," said Seattle City Councilman Mike O'Brien. "There's nowhere for these folks to move to. Every time we open up a new place, it fills up."
There were parts of the city where there were homeless encampments of people with tents and possessions, obviously fighting hard for some stability. In my neighborhood, though … not so much. The first few months we were there, I saw used needles on the sidewalk, but never saw them in use. Then, suddenly, people were shooting up all around me. What had changed, of course, was that I’d learned to see it. I never did learn not to wince a little at the sight of someone sticking a needle in their neck on a city sidewalk. The trifecta, I decided, was public drug use (needles; smoking didn’t count), public urination, and visible open sores. There was one block within sight of our front door where you could usually count on seeing at least two of the three even if you kept your eyes locked straight forward. Two blocks later the same street entered Hayes Valley, a neighborhood of upscale boutiques, and it was like you’d passed through a forcefield that didn’t admit homeless people.
When it rained, the area under the fire escapes of the Bill Graham became a little homeless colony. There we were, in our fancy new apartment building, with a giant picture window looking out on it, as if we were the rich people at Cipriani looking down on Occupy. We rarely saw tents in our neighborhood. The best-equipped people outside our windows had tarps and umbrellas for this very rainy year. On rainy weekends when that little colony sprung up, ambulances came frequently, sometimes more than one in a day. Someone across the street would go still, their friends would gather round and shake them, then debate, then someone would pull out a phone or run down the street to call for help and the ambulance would arrive. Otherwise, the police would generally let people stay until the rain stopped, then drive by and tell them to pack up.
When we were first in San Francisco and waiting for a crosswalk one day, I noticed my baby making eye contact with someone behind me, grinning at them. He made that a habit. I half turned my head as a throaty voice informed me that the baby was smiling because “I showed him my puppy.” To my relief, it really was a puppy—not that a 5-month-old would have known the difference. Through the year, its owner would disappear from my view for weeks or months at a time, then for a few weeks seem to be everywhere I went. Some days she’d be with friends, talking and alert. Some days she’d be sitting quietly in what looked like resigned misery on the sidewalk on Market Street, with a sign saying something like “I don’t have an excuse, I just need help.” Her cherished little dog was always with her, carefully groomed and, in what passes for cold weather in San Francisco, wearing a jacket.
There was the day when, on my way home from daycare pick-up, I came across two police officers holding their guns on four people on the ground. I pulled out my phone and started recording, as maybe a dozen people were already doing—you never know. Two of the people on the ground were raising their heads and remonstrating with the police. They, it seemed, were the bystanders who had intervened when one of the men on the ground had stabbed the other. The man who’d been stabbed was still conscious, still able to raise his head and talk, but when he did, you saw the pool of blood growing under him. The police didn’t start to administer first aid for several minutes after I arrived, until after they had handcuffed the other man, the stabber. According to the brief news report I later found, the bleeding man had been admitted to the hospital with life-threatening wounds.
That was the most drama I saw, but the everyday worst were people sleeping on the sidewalk. A man who’d clearly learned to sleep pillowed on his bicycle, his arms twined around it to protect it from theft. It was a child’s bicycle. A man lying directly on the pavement, smiling in his sleep as a sunbeam warmed him. The green places where people were spaced out like hay bales in the countryside, no one infringing on anyone else’s space.
Or was the worst thing the women who’d sit within a block of Target, toddlers in their laps, panhandling? Shopping at Target had a pretty reliable $20 or more surcharge for me, because I would always hand over some cash or, if I didn’t have cash on me, walk out of the store with diapers or gift cards for those women. I don’t know if they were homeless or housed but desperately poor, but giving to them wasn’t mostly a judgment on panhandlers I didn’t give to. It was a recognition that nothing would make me desperate like not being able to care for my child.
All of us in the United States of America in 2017 live with this degree of inequality, with 1.5 million households with no more than $2 per person, per day, in cash income Meanwhile, Donald Trump stocks his cabinet with billionaires and multimillionaires, and the Koch brothers and the Walmart Waltons buy politicians and policy changes around the country. Maybe there’s something to be said for letting the inequality be visible, as San Francisco does. But I don’t know why anyone would choose to live there in view of it unless their reason was that the weather is good for sleeping on the street year round. And I don’t know how anyone who isn’t sleeping on the street or living in fear of it can look around them every day and not become either hardened or broken.