Bummed out

San Francisco is the capital of bohemian liberalism. It's also a homeless horror show. On Tuesday voters will decide the limits of their compassion.

By Joan Walsh

Nov. 4, 2002 | SAN FRANCISCO -- The city of St. Francis, the capital of American liberalism, goes to the polls Tuesday for a vote on a ballot measure that's been described with only a little bit of melodrama as a struggle for the city's soul, and could be seen as a vote on the future of liberalism itself. San Francisco voters will decide if their famously tolerant city will follow the lead of most large American cities by slashing the cash grant it gives single homeless adults, providing vouchers for housing and services instead.

Known as Care not Cash, Prop. N has divided old friends and political allies, sparked fights and debate, street theater, vandalism and almost daily protest. Despite cries from homeless advocates, the liberal electorate that two years ago sent a lefty majority to the Board of Supervisors is expected to vote overwhelmingly for the measure, which has been bankrolled by conservatives and the business community. Its popularity reflects the growing sense of hopelessness, even among many liberals, over the two-decade-old, ever-worsening homeless crisis.

These are hard times in San Francisco. The high-tech party is over, this glittering dot-com capital is trying to get over its hangover, and the street people are like the phantoms of urban delirium: They're everywhere, increasingly scary and wild. Some sleep on the streets alone; some in vagrant tribes. On a recent Friday night in the Financial District, under the glare of an ambulance's red and orange lights, medical workers took care of one injured homeless man in the middle of a mini-encampment, while in a nearby doorway, another stood hunched over, pants around his knees, vomiting and defecating at the same time. A father and his two horrified young sons hurried past after dinner, rushing back to their car.

And they're not just downtown anymore. These days the homeless sleep in the doorways of closed businesses and failed restaurants, in parks and alleys, all over the city, and what to do about it is setting once-friendly neighbors against one other. Filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola brought down the wrath of nearby businesses by funding a homeless drop-in center in picturesque North Beach that critics say only attracted more street people to the area. In progressive Bernal Heights, there's increasing debate about the homeless folks camped on the neighborhood's landmark hill and in its parks. Business owners in the gay Castro district are saddled with the man who could be the poster boy for the Yes on N campaign: Paul Sanchez, a homeless alcoholic who's been arrested 128 times at last count, who has to be wrapped in a biohazard bag when he's picked up because he's covered in human waste, who spits in the face of the cops and nurses who try to help him.

So Prop. N seems almost unstoppable. Its opponents' only hope has been to demonize its sponsor, Supervisor Gavin Newsom, who'd be a liberal in any other city but is on the right of the left-dominated board. Ever since Mayor Willie Brown appointed Newsom to fill a vacancy in February 1997, and he became the only straight white male on the 11-member board, he's been the face of evil to San Francisco's loud, lefty fringe. He wasn't just any straight white male, mind you, but a Marina-district millionaire restaurateur with a girlfriend (now wife) who's a model turned district attorney; a friend, protégé and business partner to two generations of one of the city's most powerful and patrician families, the Gettys, and lately, the business community's dreamboat candidate for mayor. San Francisco magazine put him on its cover a year ago, calling him a "West Coast Kennedy," and thanks to the photo of Newsom on the front -- his trademark gelled-back hair, his soulful blue eyes -- the issue could have been mistaken for GQ.

The profile was mostly flattering -- it noted that, despite his business ties, Newsom was one of the human service community's best friends, having sponsored drug-treatment on demand legislation -- but it did ask whether the likable fourth-generation San Franciscan was tough enough to govern this fractious city. That was before Prop. N, which has proven Newsom is tough, if nothing else. Opponents have set off stink bombs in his restaurants and clogged the phone lines with phony reservations, posted his photo and his home number and address on posters in the gay Castro district ("He's so hot, come party with Gavin Newsom"), hit him with pies, and picketed his City Hall office and his businesses.

The campaign against Newsom could hurt him politically in the long run, but it's not likely to bring down N, which would reduce the cash grant this liberal city provides from $395 to $59 a month, and replace the rest with vouchers for housing, drug and alcohol treatment and other services. By doing so, N will reallocate $13.9 million of the staggering $104 million the city spends on direct assistance to the homeless. Prop. N targets the roughly 2,700 single homeless adults who rely on what's called county adult assistance. (Homeless families are served by other welfare programs, and the single adults who receive county assistance but use it to pay for housing -- two-thirds of the overall caseload -- are exempt from Prop. N.)

Clearly the measure's real target are three unpopular homeless subgroups, which are not mutually exclusive: Those drawn by San Francisco's generous grant who take up residence here ("immigration" cases); scam artists who may live in other cities and come in to collect San Francisco bucks (almost all of the counties that ring this city have replaced their cash grants with voucher systems much like the one Prop. N would create); and the quality-of-life degraders: the increasingly numerous, often belligerent drunks and druggies who blight the streets and sometimes menace passersby, giving sections of once-beautiful downtown San Francisco a surreally Third World feel. The poster boys and girls for the Prop. N campaign are the homeless who refuse housing and services and spend their welfare checks on drugs and alcohol; who eat, sleep and perform bodily functions; panhandle, party and fight; get drunk, get high, get sick and sometimes die in plain view of the rest of us.

Next page: "True compassion isn't giving homeless people money and watching them die"