As Homelessness Surges in California, So Does a Backlash
Tent encampments across California are testing residents’ tolerance and compassion as street conditions deteriorate.
A homeless encampment in San Francisco. Homelessness is an expanding crisis that many California residents say has tested the tolerance and liberal values for which the state is better known.CreditJim Wilson/The New York Times
By Thomas Fuller, Tim Arango and Louis Keene
OAKLAND, Calif. — Insults like “financial parasites” and “bums” have been directed at them, not to mention rocks and pepper spray. Fences, potted plants and other barriers have been erected to keep them off sidewalks. Citizen patrols have been organized, vigilante style, to walk the streets and push them out.
California may pride itself on its commitment to tolerance and liberal values, but across the state, record levels of homelessness have spurred a backlash against those who live on the streets.
Gene Gorelik, a property developer in Oakland and an aggressive critic of the homeless, recently suggested luring the thousands of homeless people in the San Francisco Bay Area onto party buses stocked with alcohol and sending them on a one-way trip to Mexico. “Refugee camps in Syria are cleaner than this,” he said in an interview at a fast-food restaurant in Oakland that overlooks a homeless encampment.
Homelessness is an expanding crisis that comes amid skyrocketing housing prices, a widening gap between the rich and poor and the persistent presence on city streets of the mentally ill and drug-dependent despite billions of dollars spent to help them.
“Some people who I’d put in the fed-up category, they’re not bad people,” he continued. “They would describe themselves as left of center, and sometimes very left of center, but at some point they reach the breaking point.”
For many, that breaking point was the worsening squalor in the streets of cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco, where open-air drug dealing is rampant in some spots and where human feces and scattered needles and syringes have been found lying about. Those scenes have also proved a potent symbol for Republicans like President Trump to showcase what they call the failures of liberal urban enclaves.
Homelessness has been an intractable problem in the largest California cities for decades, but it has surged in some areas in recent years. San Jose, the nation’s 10th-largest city, counted 6,200 homeless people this year, a 42 percent increase since the last count two years ago. In Oakland, the figure climbed 47 percent. And it rose 17 percent in San Francisco, and 12 percent in Los Angeles, where the county counted so many homeless people — 59,000 — that they could fill Dodger Stadium.
Image
A Public Works crew removing boulders from a sidewalk in San Francisco. Residents had installed them to deter people from erecting tents and dealing drugs there.CreditLiz Hafalia/San Francisco Chronicle, via Associated Press
For the first time in 20 years of surveys, the issue was noted as a major concern for Californians, according to a poll released last month by the Public Policy Institute of California. The situation has grown so dire that some Los Angeles officials have recently called for the governor to declare a state of emergency to free up funding for addressing homelessness, similar to what has been done to address natural disasters.
beating death on Skid Row, an intentional fireat an encampment in Eagle Rock, and an arson attack on Skid Row in which a homeless musician died, Mr. Rubenstein said, the authorities had not seen an increase in violence toward the homeless attributed to the community backlash. (Some cases have involved violence among homeless people, and in others, such as the Eagle Rock case, the motive is unclear.)
Still, he acknowledged a growing frustration among residents. “There are strong, strong feelings on all sides of this issue,” he said.
Logs line a street in Oakland in an effort to discourage tents.CreditJim Wilson/The New York Times
“Putting mentally ill people and people with drug abuse problems in residential areas is careless,” said Paneez Kosarian, a technology company employee who joined neighbors in opposing the shelter, which a judge said could be built.
prompted local news coverage of other attacks by people who appeared to be mentally ill.
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Ms. Kosarian and others cite city estimatesthat half of the homeless people in San Francisco have substance abuse issues, and say the crisis is being misdiagnosed as purely a lack of housing. Mayor London Breed announced this month that San Francisco would begin enforcing a state law that makes it easier to force mentally ill people off the streets.
Gene Gorelik standing outside a chain-link fence at a property in Oakland he once owned and intended to develop into housing.CreditJim Wilson/The New York Times
Candice Elder, the founder and executive director of the East Oakland Collective, an organization that assists homeless people, described Mr. Gorelik’s views as very extreme, even as anti-homeless sentiments had become more widespread.
“When people think about the homeless crisis, sometimes humanity goes out the window,” she said. “People say, ‘I don’t like what’s going on. I don’t want them near our school, get rid of them.’”
Ms. Elder said it was understandable that residents had concerns about cleanliness and safety around the homeless encampments. But she argued that people should not be forced to leave an encampment until they are provided with housing.
“When people complain,” she said, “they are not combining the complaint with a compassionate solution.”
Meanwhile, in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley, homeless people living in an encampment in Chatsworth have had rocks thrown at them from cars, have had insults yelled at them and have been pepper-sprayed, according to Paul Read, 43, who assists the homeless there.
And about two weeks ago, Mr. Read said, he confronted a man shooting pellets from a rifle into a cluster of tents. The man told him it was “target practice.”
Tent encampments across California are testing residents’ tolerance and compassion as street conditions deteriorate.
A homeless encampment in San Francisco. Homelessness is an expanding crisis that many California residents say has tested the tolerance and liberal values for which the state is better known.CreditJim Wilson/The New York Times
By Thomas Fuller, Tim Arango and Louis Keene
- Oct. 21, 2019Updated 12:17 p.m. ET
OAKLAND, Calif. — Insults like “financial parasites” and “bums” have been directed at them, not to mention rocks and pepper spray. Fences, potted plants and other barriers have been erected to keep them off sidewalks. Citizen patrols have been organized, vigilante style, to walk the streets and push them out.
California may pride itself on its commitment to tolerance and liberal values, but across the state, record levels of homelessness have spurred a backlash against those who live on the streets.
Gene Gorelik, a property developer in Oakland and an aggressive critic of the homeless, recently suggested luring the thousands of homeless people in the San Francisco Bay Area onto party buses stocked with alcohol and sending them on a one-way trip to Mexico. “Refugee camps in Syria are cleaner than this,” he said in an interview at a fast-food restaurant in Oakland that overlooks a homeless encampment.
Homelessness is an expanding crisis that comes amid skyrocketing housing prices, a widening gap between the rich and poor and the persistent presence on city streets of the mentally ill and drug-dependent despite billions of dollars spent to help them.
“Some people who I’d put in the fed-up category, they’re not bad people,” he continued. “They would describe themselves as left of center, and sometimes very left of center, but at some point they reach the breaking point.”
For many, that breaking point was the worsening squalor in the streets of cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco, where open-air drug dealing is rampant in some spots and where human feces and scattered needles and syringes have been found lying about. Those scenes have also proved a potent symbol for Republicans like President Trump to showcase what they call the failures of liberal urban enclaves.
Homelessness has been an intractable problem in the largest California cities for decades, but it has surged in some areas in recent years. San Jose, the nation’s 10th-largest city, counted 6,200 homeless people this year, a 42 percent increase since the last count two years ago. In Oakland, the figure climbed 47 percent. And it rose 17 percent in San Francisco, and 12 percent in Los Angeles, where the county counted so many homeless people — 59,000 — that they could fill Dodger Stadium.
Image
A Public Works crew removing boulders from a sidewalk in San Francisco. Residents had installed them to deter people from erecting tents and dealing drugs there.CreditLiz Hafalia/San Francisco Chronicle, via Associated Press
For the first time in 20 years of surveys, the issue was noted as a major concern for Californians, according to a poll released last month by the Public Policy Institute of California. The situation has grown so dire that some Los Angeles officials have recently called for the governor to declare a state of emergency to free up funding for addressing homelessness, similar to what has been done to address natural disasters.
beating death on Skid Row, an intentional fireat an encampment in Eagle Rock, and an arson attack on Skid Row in which a homeless musician died, Mr. Rubenstein said, the authorities had not seen an increase in violence toward the homeless attributed to the community backlash. (Some cases have involved violence among homeless people, and in others, such as the Eagle Rock case, the motive is unclear.)
Still, he acknowledged a growing frustration among residents. “There are strong, strong feelings on all sides of this issue,” he said.
Logs line a street in Oakland in an effort to discourage tents.CreditJim Wilson/The New York Times
“Putting mentally ill people and people with drug abuse problems in residential areas is careless,” said Paneez Kosarian, a technology company employee who joined neighbors in opposing the shelter, which a judge said could be built.
prompted local news coverage of other attacks by people who appeared to be mentally ill.
KRON4 News
✔@kron4news
DISTURBING VIDEO: Terrifying video shows a woman being violently attacked by an unknown man outside a luxury condominium complex in San Francisco
Watch the full video here: https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/video-man-violently-attacks-woman-outside-san-francisco-building/ …
196
4:14 PM - Aug 13, 2019
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236 people are talking about this
Ms. Kosarian and others cite city estimatesthat half of the homeless people in San Francisco have substance abuse issues, and say the crisis is being misdiagnosed as purely a lack of housing. Mayor London Breed announced this month that San Francisco would begin enforcing a state law that makes it easier to force mentally ill people off the streets.
Gene Gorelik standing outside a chain-link fence at a property in Oakland he once owned and intended to develop into housing.CreditJim Wilson/The New York Times
Candice Elder, the founder and executive director of the East Oakland Collective, an organization that assists homeless people, described Mr. Gorelik’s views as very extreme, even as anti-homeless sentiments had become more widespread.
“When people think about the homeless crisis, sometimes humanity goes out the window,” she said. “People say, ‘I don’t like what’s going on. I don’t want them near our school, get rid of them.’”
Ms. Elder said it was understandable that residents had concerns about cleanliness and safety around the homeless encampments. But she argued that people should not be forced to leave an encampment until they are provided with housing.
“When people complain,” she said, “they are not combining the complaint with a compassionate solution.”
Meanwhile, in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley, homeless people living in an encampment in Chatsworth have had rocks thrown at them from cars, have had insults yelled at them and have been pepper-sprayed, according to Paul Read, 43, who assists the homeless there.
And about two weeks ago, Mr. Read said, he confronted a man shooting pellets from a rifle into a cluster of tents. The man told him it was “target practice.”
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fukk all that.
