top
San Francisco
San Francisco
Indybay
Indybay
Indybay
Regions
Indybay Regions North Coast Central Valley North Bay East Bay South Bay San Francisco Peninsula Santa Cruz IMC - Independent Media Center for the Monterey Bay Area North Coast Central Valley North Bay East Bay South Bay San Francisco Peninsula Santa Cruz IMC - Independent Media Center for the Monterey Bay Area California United States International Americas Haiti Iraq Palestine Afghanistan
Topics
Newswire
Features
From the Open-Publishing Calendar
From the Open-Publishing Newswire
Indybay Feature

Wealthy South Beach Residents Organize to Stop Homeless Shelter

by San Francisco Tenant
San Francisco is now a homeless camp, by definition a public health emergency, since there is now no affordable housing for those of us who make less than $100,000 a year, the entire workingclass, unless we are renting an apartment long enough to benefit from rent control. While the City of San Francisco is trying to build enough homeless shelters so that the homeless at least have a bed at a shelter, as is the case in New York City, the rich parasites in the new condominium area of South Beach, have organized a GoFundMe campaign to stop the building of a Navigation Center homeless shelter on the Embarcadero.
See “Wealthy San Francisco residents actually started a GoFundMe to kill a homeless shelter in their neighborhood” by Matthew Chapman, 3/29/19

As usual, they use the handful of children in the neighborhood to defend their homes. They apparently do not care that 2,400 of San Francisco’s school children are homeless.

The attack on the homeless by these rich parasites is not only anti-labor but also racist. African-Americans are less than 6% of San Francisco's population but are 34% to 50% of the homeless, depending on your source. (My source is the Street Sheet, an excellent must read semi-monthly paper distributed by the homeless and low income people for a small donation.)

Seniors, those of us over age 60, especially over age 65, cannot afford the City’s so-called affordable housing for seniors, which start at $1,000 a month rent. The average Social Security monthly payment is $1,404, which means homeless seniors cannot afford to pay any rent, after paying $400 a month for food, paper goods and pharmacy, $135 a month for Medicare, $127 a month for a cell phone, $97 a month for a landline including $38 for the internet, $51 for Comcast TV, $40 a month to Pacific Gas & Electric Co, not including heat, and whatever basic clothing replacements we need.
.
It is apparently all right with the rich that the homeless sleep on the sidewalk in every neighborhood of San Francisco, including the South Beach Area, but sleeping in a shelter is too civilized for them. They apparently would prefer to have their own lives at risk daily as a homeless crisis is by definition a public health emergency since the homeless must use the streets as their bathroom. In a warm climate such as Los Angeles, they already have problems with typhus and hepatitis due to unsanitary conditions for the homeless on the sidewalks.

The rich do not need protection from the homeless; the homeless need protection from the thugs who do the dirty work of the rich. Some 49% of the homeless have been victims of violent attacks and 62% witnessed violence perpetrated against the homeless, including murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault. Some 400 homeless people have died on the streets of San Francisco since 2016.

Most homeless are not drug addicts, although drug addicts certainly deserve a home and treatment for their addiction. Many homeless work at all the workingclass jobs. We workers are not seen as a threat when the rich need our labor to make them richer but when we need housing, we are considered a menace. The threat to humanity is of course these rich parasites. The city needs to stop allowing any luxury housing be built. These parasites have threatened to leave town if this one Navigation Center (a better quality homeless shelter) is built, to which every decent person should say good riddance! Just think, if these rich people left town, the City could take over their property by eminent domain and permanently house the homeless in these homes. The homeless are part of the labor force of San Francisco without whom we have no city.

We, the workingclass, demand that the City builds the Embarcadero Navigation Center and many more such homeless shelters so that every single homeless person has a bed, some 21,000 people in a year, with 8,000 homeless on a given night. The waiting list for the current shelters, which are often just a mat on a floor, is over 1,000 people. We also demand that the City take over all of the empty housing units in San Francisco by right of eminent domain and house the homeless permanently in these units. We have thousands of empty condominiums which are just investments and lots of partially used short-term rentals. There is one estimate of 30,000 empty housing units, more than enough to house the homeless. Whether it takes declaring the whole city a public health emergency, taking over empty homes by right of eminent domain, or any combination of these tactics, the time is now to permanently house the homeless and build affordable housing for the workingclass, the 80% of Americans who sell our labor for less than $80,000 a year.
Add Your Comments
We are 100% volunteer and depend on your participation to sustain our efforts!

Donate

$110.00 donated
in the past month

Get Involved

If you'd like to help with maintaining or developing the website, contact us.

Publish

Publish your stories and upcoming events on Indybay.

IMC Network