The heroin needles, the pile of excrement between parked cars, the yellow soup oozing out of a large plastic bag by the curb and the stained, faux Persian carpet dumped on the corner. It’s a scene of detritus that might bring to mind any variety of developing-world squalor. But this is San Francisco, the capital of the nation’s technology industry, where a single span of Hyde Street hosts an open-air narcotics market by day and at night is occupied by the unsheltered and drug-addled slumped on the sidewalk.There are many other streets like it, but by one measure it’s the dirtiest block in the city. Just a 15-minute walk away are the offices of Twitter and Uber, two companies that along with other nameplate technology giants have helped push the median price of a home in San Francisco well beyond $1 million.This dichotomy of street crime and world-changing technology, of luxury condominiums and grinding, persistent homelessness, and the dehumanizing effects for those forced to live on the streets provoke outrage among the city’s residents. For many who live here it’s difficult to reconcile San Francisco’s liberal politics with the misery that surrounds them.According to city statisticians, the 300 block of Hyde Street, a span about the length of a football field in the heart of the Tenderloin neighborhood, received 2,227 complaints about street and sidewalk cleanliness over the last decade, more than any other. It’s an imperfect measurement — some blocks might be dirtier but have fewer calls — but residents on the 300 block say that they are not surprised by their ranking.The San Francisco bureau photographer, Jim Wilson, and I set out to measure the depth of deprivation on a single block. We returned a number of times, including a 12-hour visit, from 2 p.m. to 2 a.m. on a recent weekday. Walking around the neighborhood we saw the desperation of the mentally ill, the drug dependent and homeless, and heard from embittered residents who say it will take much more than a broom to clean up the city, long considered one of America’s beacons of urban beauty.Human waste has become such a widespread problem in San Francisco that the city in September established a unit dedicated to removing it from the sidewalks. Rachel Gordon, a spokeswoman for the Public Works Department, describes the new initiative as a “proactive human waste” unit.
At 8 a.m. on a recent day, as mothers shepherded their children to school, we ran into Yolanda Warren, a receptionist who works around the corner from Hyde Street. The sidewalk in front of her office was stained with feces. The street smelled like a latrine.“Some parts of the Tenderloin, you’re walking, and you smell it and you have to hold your breath,” Ms. Warren said. As she does every morning, she hosed down the urine outside her office. The city has installed five portable bathrooms for the hundreds of unsheltered people in the Tenderloin, but that has not stopped people from urinating and defecating in the streets. “There are way too many people out here that don’t have homes,” Ms. Warren said.Over the last five years the number of unsheltered homeless people in San Francisco has remained relatively steady — around 4,400 — and the sidewalks of the Tenderloin have come to resemble a refugee camp. The city has replaced more than 300 lampposts corroded by dog and human urine over the last three years, according to the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. Replacing the poles became more urgent after a lamppost collapsed in 2015, crushing a car.A more common danger are the thousands of heroin needles discarded by users. The Public Works Department and a nonprofit organization in the Tenderloin picked up 100,000 needles from the streets over the last year. The Public Health Department, which has its own needle recovery program, has a more alarming figure: It retrieved 164,264 needles in August alone, both through a disposal program and through street cleanups. Larry Gothberg, a building manager who has lived on Hyde Street since 1982, keeps a photographic record of the heroin users he sees shooting up on the streets. He swiped through a number of pictures on his phone showing users in a motionless stupor.“We call it the heroin freeze,” Mr. Gothberg said. “They can stay that way for hours.”Hyde Street is in the heart of the Tenderloin, a neighborhood of aging, subsidized single-occupancy apartment buildings, Vietnamese and Thai restaurants, coin laundromats and organizations dedicated to helping the indigent. Studio apartments on Hyde Street go for around $1,500, according to Mr. Gothberg, cheap in a city where the median rent for apartments is $4,500. A number of people we met on Hyde Street distinguished between the residents of the Tenderloin, many of them immigrant families, and those they called “street people” — the unsheltered drug users who congregate and camp along the sidewalks and the dealers who peddle crack cocaine, heroin and a variety of amphetamines. Disputes among the street population are common and sometimes result in violence. At night bodies line the sidewalks.“It’s like the land of the living dead,” said Adam Leising, a resident of Hyde Street. We met Mr. Leising late one evening after he had finished a shift as a server at a restaurant. As we toured the neighborhood, past a man crumpled on the ground next to empty beer bottles and trash, Mr. Leising told us that the daily glimpses of desperation brought him to the brink of depression.“We are the most advanced country in the world,” Mr. Leising said. “And that’s what people are having to live with here.” Mr. Leising, who is the founder of the Lower Hyde Street Association, a nonprofit that holds cleanup activities on the street, feels that the city is not cracking down on the drug trade on the block because they don’t want it to spread elsewhere. “It’s obvious that it’s a containment zone,” Mr. Leising said. “These behaviors are not allowed in other neighborhoods.”
More from Business Insider:
ShareThe Bay Area's "cruel and inhuman" conditions for homeless residents violate a number of human rights, according to a report written by United Nations Special Rapporteur Leilani Farha. Farha revealed her findings before the UN General Assembly two weeks ago, after previously reporting that homeless residents in San Francisco and Oakland had been denied "access to water, sanitation and health services, and other basic necessities."In January, she went on a fact-finding mission to assess the state of the Bay Area's homeless encampments, which are teeming with trash, feces, and discarded needles. In Oakland, Farha witnessed rats digging through the mud and families camped outside in the cold. These harrowing conditions prompted her to group San Francisco alongside cities like Mumbai and Delhi, which are known for some of the poorest and dirtiest neighborhoods in the world. In a statement to the East Bay Express, Farha compared the Oakland camps to a low-income dwelling in Mexico City that had no running water and was forced to steal electricity. (Read more.)
No comments:
Post a Comment