It was a big story the other day in the San Francisco Chronicle, with a column-to-column headline in bold capital letters:
TRAPPED IN MISERY
The newspaper’s erstwhile investigative journalists had uncovered yet another scandal: The single-room occupancy (SRO) hotel rooms that the city gives homeless people to live in aren’t very nice places.
There are rats and vermin. Wall paint is peeling, ceilings moldy and cracked, elevators often not working. Water from the tap can be brown. Toilets clog up. Residents fight with each other; visits from SFPD are everyday occurrences. Some residents have “shooting galleries” in their rooms; at least 130 died in 2020 alone. The Chronicle profiled some of the residents; typical was a guy I’ll call Bob. Here’s the paper’s depiction of his situation:
Bob pointed to a rough patch in his ceiling where he said it had recently collapsed, raining debris on him and cutting his hand. As he spoke, his clothes hung from a thin ledge above his bed; there was no other space for them in his small unit. “They just put people in these places—they don’t ask them what they need, they don’t help them out, they just leave them stuck,” Bob said.
This, despite the Chronicle reporting, in the same story, that this past year alone San Francisco spent “a record $1.1 billion budget for homeless services.” That’s nearly as much as Oakland’s entire annual budget of $1.7 billion for everything.
One’s responses to this situation are complex, ranging from compassion for the unfortunate (an emotional response) to the very valid question of how much more money people like “Bob” expect the city to spend on them (an intellectual response). It is, I guess, the old “heart vs. head” thing. One of the standard memes in reporting on shelter for the homeless is that residents frequently complain about their living conditions. We’ve all heard that they refuse to live in communal facilities and insist on having their own rooms. Cities like Oakland have responded to these complaints by providing them with their own rooms.
But then, as in Bob’s case, they tend to find more things that annoy them. Question: is it “amoral” to suggest that they be content with what they have? Is it cruel and uncaring? Obviously, a little more money can always be found to repair an elevator or patch up a cracked ceiling, but just as obviously, an SRO is never going to be a suite at the Ritz. With an annual $1.1 billion poured into homeless services in San Francisco, that city may have reached the limit of its ability to provide those services (and besides, a lot of that money came from one-time pandemic relief). Beyond that, there simply isn’t any more money, so what is San Francisco to do?
We might pose the same question for Oakland. It’s impossible to say how much the city has spent on homelessness in, say, 2020 or 2021. The sources of money range from scores of individual programs and grants emanating from Washington D.C. and from Sacramento, from taxes in Oakland, from philanthropic awards and God only knows where else. I know of no one—not a single journalist or politician—who can put a specific figure on it, but it has got to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. And still, there are those determined to wrest yet more money from the public, such as Carroll Fife and Nikki Bas, who propose to increase Oakland business taxes by tens of millions of dollars--at a time when companies are trying to recover from years of reduced revenues due to COVID. To these City Council members, Bob must be made whole and happy, regardless of the cost or consequences. That is the essence of social justice.
I don’t mean to sound snarky, but we have got to be reasonable about these things. Bob and others in similar situations need to understand that there’s very little more that we can do to improve their lives. What they can do for themselves is get off drugs, accept whatever therapy and job training the city can provide, and attempt to reimagine their future. Hopefully, they can re-enter the workforce and be productive, tax-paying citizens. If they can’t or won’t, they can expect a base level of support from society that may include cracked ceilings and clogged toilets.
Steve Heimoff