The Bay Area, and specifically San Francisco, is one of the shining examples of what growing income inequality looks like. The median price for a home in San Francisco is around $1.38 million and the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment is just under $3,700 a month. While the Bay Area is home to the world’s highest concentration of billionaires, it is also home to the third-highest homeless count in the United States. That’s tens of thousands of people living without a home while a couple of hundred people own enormous swaths of real estate. San Francisco is also the annual site for JPMorgan’s Healthcare Conference, and this year marks the 38th company event.
With more than 9,000 attendees, the hotel and restaurant industry around the area looks forward to the influx of money. According to Bloomberg, hotel rooms for the event cost upwards of $2,000 a night and “meeting tables” can run executives up to $150 an hour. But event participants complain that the homeless population is unsettling to people paying a premium for their business conference. One attendee told the paper that she felt “unsafe” walking around at night.
There are real concerns for safety in major cities, and poverty tends to be a huge part of the problem. And JPMorgan, of all companies, should know that sometimes in order to thrive, you need help. When JPMorgan, which was guilty of helping to create the 2008 financial crisis by passing around toxic assets, found itself going under, the American taxpayer gave JPMorgan and its CEO Jamie Dimon $25 billion in bailout money. JPMorgan only had to give back a reported $13 billion of that money years later—for breaking the law and perpetuating fraud, mind you. And JPMorgan is still getting big government handouts, as the Trump- and Republican-backed tax cuts added a reported $3.7 billion in profits to the company’s coffers last year.
It’s this unsightliness and these safety worries that led Oracle, a company that has Bay Area sports arenas named after it, to announce in December that its annual trade show would be moving from San Francisco to Las Vegas. It’s hard to drink expensive wine and enjoy a dessert sprinkled with gold leaf when you then have to face up to someone sleeping on the sidewalk, or asking you for money, or being poor.
San Francisco Mayor London Breed has chastised nonprofits and others working with the city’s homeless to help them get their act together and be less dirty and unsightly, specifically in regard to bathroom hygiene. But the issues with unhoused American citizens are myriad, and providing passable public bathrooms and potable water stations is not a solution aimed even remotely close to the root of the problem.
The problems in San Francisco extend out across the Bay and into Oakland, where homes stand empty and homeless mothers are forcefully evicted so that someone (or some fund) can increase a portfolio. The frustration with the city’s inability to do enough is not simply on the back of people like Mayor Breed. The reality is that the wealthiest people don’t want to pay the kinds of taxes needed to create robust social safety net programs that can be used to help those people in need. This is in no small part due to the fact that there is not a single solution to the ills of poverty, other than wealth redistribution. But in lieu of that, programs that include real affordable housing, education, and both physical and psychological healthcare are needed.
Unfortunately, the wealthy in our country, even those who give large-sounding sums of money to well-meaning efforts, are unwilling to truly redistribute even a modest amount of their wealth. And more importantly, they are not mandated to do anything with their money and are willing to spend a lot more of it to make sure they won’t be forced to spend it on anyone other than themselves.
The threat of losing big conference money in San Francisco is a very real concern for those running the city. There have been some small moves made by city officials recently, overtures towards coming up with non-police responses to the unhoused population of the city. However, big cities have historically found it easiest to just punish, imprison, or bus away their “homeless problem,” instead of staring it in the face and realizing that we’ve created it.