Homeless Policy: Progress Made, More Accountability Needed, Grand Jurors say

Funny, I still see an overwhelming number of chronic homeless on Downtown's streets. I doubt any progress has been made at all.

It goes without saying that any social service case management regime requires a way to track the process of clients. We have similar programs with GA clients and other programs. There are safeguards in those programs. SFPD can't just demand the GA or SSI address records of a given client who may have warrants, for instance.

The Board will never contribute to solving the homelessness problem because they receive endorsements and campaign assistance from homeless-oriented NGOs who want to be able to keep their service contracts. Downtown wants to see the homeless "moved along" someplace else, which is impossible. The Mayor has turned the issue into a cruel Potemkin Village sideshow with a program that allows corporations and constituents to feel better about themselves on the issue by letting them donate free massages.

The only answer to chronic homelessness is intervention. Implementation of Laura's Law, increased cooperation between MAP and SFPD, and the opening of transitional shelters for cumpulsory committment cases. And the program needs to be run directly by DSS/DPH, not contracted out.

Of course, that would violate the sensibilities of our City's political class, who use the ethical fiction "people have a right to live without money" to defend the presence of the homeless, which they in turn use to propagandize their constituents about the continuing need for their brand of social change - which never seems to arrive despite the fact that they were supposedly elected to enact it.

Richard Ramirez once said "In the absence of government strategies of how to help the lunatic or the destitute, or the addicted, we pass out quarters. In return, the homeless give us the assurance that we live in San Francisco."