The misery of homelessness, mental illness and drug addiction hits deep in San Francisco and has turned parts of a beautiful city into a public toilet. Outraged residents Fox News spoke to in late June said they're tired of waiting for their elected officials to come up with a plan and complain no one ever seems to be on the same page.
What's equally frustrating is that the city still manages to blow through hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars each year to address the crisis and blames everyone but themselves when the homeless count rises.
"The city is running out of strategies," Anna Suarez told Fox. "I'm moving to Austin."
Unsurprisingly, the city "leaders" are scapegoating, blaming the rise in homelessness on big tech companies that have moved to the area, including Twitter, Salesforce, NVIDIA and Eventbrite. They say the businesses have brought high-paying jobs with them, which has caused housing prices to soar and pushed people who can't afford to keep up financially out of the area or onto the streets.
Just wait until they get fed up and leave. As has been noted here before, animals across species share a number of commonalities. Among them: if you feed rats, you get more rats. My view has long been that if you cut "services", you'll cut the problem. That's logic 101, but SF doesn't seem to get that - and they don't understand why productive people are leaving.
But at least there's not a plastic straw in sight on the streets.
