For Those of You Voting In San Francisco
For those of you living in San Francisco and planning to vote this coming November, I would strongly encourage you to vote against Measure Q and Measure U, and for Measure J.
Measure Q is a city measure that “bans” tent encampments from the city’s sidewalks. This essentially translates to giving authorities the mandate to seize and impound (“for no fewer than 90 days”) all the belongings of someone living in such an encampment after just 24 hours notice, unless they vacate the area.
Other than being another steel-toed addendum to the city’s lengthy list of ridiculous and costly (~$20m/year) “quality of life laws” that discriminate against the homeless (e.g. prohibiting sitting/lying on public sidewalks from 7:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m), the proposition offers very little in terms of actual solutions. Technically, the 24-hour notice to remove the encampments may only be issued if the city can guarantee “housing or shelter” to the encampment’s occupants, which potentially sounds like a good thing, but not when you consider the fact that provision of “housing or shelter” may merely equate to a single night’s stay at an already over-crowded shelter. The following night that same person will likely be back on the streets, having been displaced, and potentially having had all of their belongings impounded by the city.
Nothing in this measure allocates funding for shelters, affordable housing, healthcare, or transitional centers, but merely continues to turn a blind eye to the housing crisis in the city. The hope with this being that perhaps by making conditions even worse for the victims of this crisis they might simply disappear, therein providing the false illusion that the problem has been solved. However, conditions for the homeless in SF have been increasingly dire for years now, largely thanks to the “Quality-of-Life” laws providing authorities with 3 dozen reasons to hand out infractions or misdemeanors. But somehow this citation-happy approach hasn’t seemed to “convince” people to stop being homeless, with homelessness increasing by ~4% between 2013 and 2015. This suggests that the city’s focus needs to shift to understanding the factors driving people to the streets and keeping them there, rather than giving police 3 dozen-and-one reasons to write them tickets.
Measure Q only clamps down on the most apparent symptom of a complex issue and is a feeble attempt to feign a solution. The main proponent of this measure, city Supervisor Mark Farrell, went as far as to back Measure Q by saying “I strongly believe that it is not compassionate to allow human beings to live on our city streets. Tent encampments are unhealthy and unsafe for the individuals residing in them and for our residents and businesses.”, which is a deplorably weak attempt to spin this sidewalk-shuffling ballot measure as an act of altruism on his part.
A truly “compassionate” suite of policy initiatives would look something like those indicated in the homelessness portion of the city’s Measure J, which actually allocates funds to create housing and transitional resources for the homeless, and a more stringent set of low and middle-income rent structures for market-rate development projects, as well as improved access to healthcare. Increasing availability of healthcare is extremely pertinent given that roughly one-third to a half of SF’s current homeless population battles chronic mental illness, and are without adequate access to counseling or medication. Funding such services may sound costly to welfare skeptics, but the reality is that providing such preventative health services (i.e. counseling and medication) will very likely reduce the cost of current over-reliance on emergency health services by high-risk homeless individuals, which bears a much higher price tag for the city.
Supervisor Farrell is a also a proponent of Measure U, which would eliminate low-income rent requirements for developers, instead folding all required affordable housing concessions into a broader “middle-income” and lower scheme. While Measure U would allow much-needed access to below-market-rate (BMR) housing for the city’s suffering middle class, it would be doing so without actually increasing the already-meager supply of such housing units. Instead, low-income individuals will now have to compete with residents earning annual salaries from $47k — $95k for the same spaces. Under Measure U, all residents earning up to 110% of area median income would be eligible for this slim supply of BMR units, whereas currently, a certain portion of these units are reserved specifically for residents earning 55% of area median income or lower.
That means that people near the poverty line struggling to keep a roof over their heads will now potentially have to vie for the same units with people earning salaries above the area median income, with rent-caps on BMR units doubling (1-bedroom units could cost nearly $2400/month, rather than just below $1200/month currently). Granted, Measure U states that the selection of tenants for BMR units would be done so at random as part of a blind lottery process, and that their rent would be capped at 30% of their gross annual income. However, with the prospect of a doubly-high rent ceiling for “affordable” units, it will not come as a huge surprise if eviction rates for lower-income tenants continue to increase, with landlords looking to supplant them with middle-class renters.
Solutions to the housing crisis means enacting stricter affordable housing regulations to provide ample access to BMR housing for both low and middle-income renters, each with separate rent-caps, so as to not put middle-income and low-income renters in direct competition for the same units. Meanwhile, solutions to the homelessness crisis involves providing people on the streets with adequate resources for transition into housing, healthcare, and employment and empowering them with the knowledge of those resources. If, even after the city has developed these services, there remains some fraction of the homeless population that fails to take advantage of them, then MAYBE something like a toned down version of Measure Q could be warranted (i.e. 30 days notice to clear encampment, not 24 hours) to “prod” them into utilizing such resources.
The reality is that many of the proponents of Measure Q, such as the tech CEOs who have donated hefty contributions to the cause, are dangerously ignorant as to its potentially detrimental impact upon the city’s equity and diversity. They see homeless people on “their” sidewalks and streets and simply want to “delete” them in no less than 24 hours. They fail to recognize the fact that the homeless crisis is simply the most visible symptom of a city-wide income-inequality crisis, which is not only putting more people on the streets, but steadily edging out everyone from teachers and health care workers, to line cooks and artists. So whenever you hear someone defending measures like Q, making the argument the they toiled hard to fight their way to the top, and “shouldn’t have to see the pain, struggle, and despair of homeless people to and from their way to work every day”, kindly remind them that pretty soon they won’t have to see teachers educate their kids, paramedics respond to their 911 calls, or local musicians play their bars, either.
