San Francisco’s plan to put homeless people in hotels and motels is not going well – IOTW Report

San Francisco’s plan to put homeless people in hotels and motels is not going well

City Journal: One recent morning a disheveled, visibly disturbed man ran frantically around the lobby of the Mark Hopkins Hotel, the historic and elegant property located at the crest of tony Nob Hill. As one of San Francisco’s designated Front-Line Worker Housing (FLWH) hotels, it’s reserved for health-care and public-safety employees working on Covid-19 related matters. But San Francisco is surreptitiously placing homeless people in luxury hotels by designating them as emergency front-line workers, a term that the broader community understands to mean doctors, nurses, and similar professionals.

“Do I look scary to you?” the man demanded. “They’re trying to evict me because I wanted more towels but I’m homeless! They called the cops on me.” He dashed out the door and around the grand circular entrance, where two police officers attempted to resolve the situation. Soon a cab pulled up and an inebriated couple emerged, holding full plastic trash bags. They fought, screaming at each other until the woman entered the lobby and her partner lit a meth pipe in the garage area. More “front-line workers.”

If neighborhood residents were more aware of the influx of these new guests who frequently suffer from drug addiction and severe mental illness as well as having criminal backgrounds, they might object. Consequently, the city has evoked emergency-disaster law to keep the information private. Officials refuse to notify the public about what is happening in their community and are blocking the press by withholding the list of hotels and preventing reporters from entering the properties. The Department of Emergency Management has attempted to spin the secrecy by claiming, “Disclosure of the names of hotels where people are being sheltered could jeopardize the privacy and safety of the vulnerable people whom the City has placed there if the public and the press become aware of the circumstances of their placement and could increase the risk that they will be subject to discrimination or harassment on the basis of their health status or status as an unsheltered person.” more here

28 Comments on San Francisco’s plan to put homeless people in hotels and motels is not going well

  1. Something’s gotta change if we are to remain a functional society and culture.

    We just can’t keep going the same direction we are now and expect to survive.

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  2. Take a lesson from NY’s Cuomo, if you want to rid society of the mentally ill or geriatric population send them to Covid 19 breeding grounds, commonly know as severely infected nursing homes.
    POOF ! Problem solved

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  3. Re-open state mental hospitals and tell the ACLU to pound sand. Make them clean, safe and respectable. I’m ok with tax money going to this, these people need to be OFF the streets of America.

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  4. “Officials refuse to notify the public about what is happening in their community…”

    …when they deinstitutionalized the booby hatches in my neck of the woods 30 odd years ago, they did the same thing. The City and County waived the usual public notification requirements for estabilshing group homes filled with fruitcrackers even as they incentivised SEVERELY undertrained people to take as many as they could into their homes in ostensibly residential neighborhoods. This meant that, unless you previously noticed your neighbor had an unusally large number of unfamiliar people wandering around their backyard, the way you found out you had a newly minted “Group Home” next door was when they tried to set your house on fire because they were pretty sure you were the devil, as that’s what the aliens told them. The keepers were phenominally unqualified so the police and my squad agency usually ended up batting cleanup.

    The “homeless crisis” NOW is, to a large extent, an outgrowth of the Democrats shutting the mental institutions down THEN. Many people literally are NOT mentally capable of living on their own like holding a job, paying bills, not biting themselves to kill the invisible birds crawling on ther arms, etc., which is what the looney bins were for. Then one day everybody saw a movie where a fictional nurse was mean to Jack Nicholson and started to cry that we HAD to end this MEANNESS withou ANY critical thinking involved, Democrats saw a way to get a new group of voters crazy enough to VOTE for them AND wreck the Country so they RAN with it, and now here we are TODAY.

    …while I deride the very, very minimal training and security when they did this back in the day…at least they had SOME. Now, they just dump them into hotels and apartment buildings and say “we’ll be back to take you to the polls on election day”, and leave them to demonstrate their psychosis on whoever or whatever is nearby until then. And forget the squad now, because there’s no cop that would red-tag them to the hospital now, and no hospital that would TAKE them.

    …and this REALLY doesn’t HELP them. One of the ways I was involved in the “community based health care” idiocity was when one of them wandered off, which as pretty frequent and sometimes serious enough to warrant a Search and Rescue response. One of the fictions in mental heath care that persists to this day is the idea of “medically controlled” and while you can debate the efficacy and side effects of this or that drug, you CAN’T debate that it won’t work if you don’t TAKE it, and many of them DIDN’T. Some even said they preferred the way they “feel” when they’re slipping into madness, so it’s a deliberate choice. We’d sometimes find them because they broke in somewhere, but more often they would just wander off to a bridge or a wood and have exposure and malnutrition issues, attempt (sometimes sucessfully) suicide, attack other people randomly, etc., ALL of which is made WORSE when abruptly stopping the psychoactive drugs. I have NEVER personally seen a positive outcome from deinstitutionalization, and LOTS and LOTS of NEGATIVE ones, including the folks wandering around SF hotel lobbies screaming TODAY.

    Some people CAN’T live on their own.

    And your not doing ANYONE, least of all THEM, any favors by pretending otherwise.

    …honestly, this above is pretty mild. One thing I’ve learned to expect from crazy people is to expect ANYTHING from crazy people. Them being crazy means you can’t think like them and every crazy is different, so they are capable of ANYTHING. They don’t necessarily have normal pain responses, give off nonverbal cues about anything, and DEFINITELY don’t have expected EMOTIONAL responses, as the woman who was cutting bits off herself and feeding them to her dog because her nonexistent husband told her to could tell you, if she wasn’t completely crazy and could stop herself from attacking YOU mid-sentence…

    …this is national, and not getting better…and the Democrats don’t WANT it to. Althogh at THIS point, entire Democrat CITIES like SF are completely run BY the insane and POPULATED by the insane, so I’m really surprised in THIS case that anyone could even tell a DIFFERENCE, perhaps the man/woman couple was a tipoff because THAT is getting pretty rare and unacceptable in Democratopia…

    …God help us.

    The Democrats sure as hell won’t, as THEY work 24/7/365 for the other SIDE…

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  5. SNS: A country that cannot care for its mentally ill population is a truly dysfunctional society. That’s where the Dementiacrats have brought this country in forty years. San Francisco, one of the World’s most attractive cities, is simply a beautiful madhouse now.

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  6. SuperNightShade — This sounds like it would be a successful plank in the Trump re-election campaign. Send your comment to Pascale — along with the rest of this thread. Seriously.

    Turn the pitiable, sympathy-inducing term “Homeless” (which implies there are too many people who can’t afford to enjoy the American Dream) into a factual, eye-opening revelation that street denizens are in this predicament because of the Democrats’ unwillingness to deal with mental illness and illicit drug addiction and their inevitable problems.

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  7. I’m curious. How does a Five Star hotel like the Mark Hopkins have no ability to tell the city of SF to shove off? It’s a private hotel, yes? Could it be that the MH and others are enjoying too many tax advantages to be able to say “No!”?

    The beginning of the end for SF included making it illegal to run panhandlers off. The whole downtown area, especially the area around Union Square is filthy with them.

    I used to say that I’ll never go to Mexico or other places where street urchins mob tourists, because that’s not my idea of a vacation. SF is just as bad and their panhandlers don’t even have anything to sell you!

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  8. AbigailAdams JUNE 26, 2020 AT 9:15 AM
    “Send your comment to Pascale”

    …forgive my ignorance but I don’t really do a lot of social media outside of here, but what is Pascale?

    …also, it probably wouldn’t go down well because I used some flippant, non-politically-correct terms for the mentally ill. A developed black humor defense I reverted to when discussing these things among brothers, but that would scarcely be understood by the cancellers who never did anything stressful in their lives that they’d NEED to develop mental defenses for. So while I appreciate greatly your suggestion that they’rd be a broader interest in my stories, I strongly suspect that I’ve invalidated that by not toeing the semantics line with the wider world…

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  9. SNS — That should have been “Parscale”, as in Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign director; not Blaise Pascal, the French physicist of yore. LOL

    Send it to the campaign. Rewrite it as a campaign proposal. I’m serious. Talk to your local Trump people.

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  10. I work with a non-profit in the Denver area (StepDenver.org) that works with the homeless. If you ask anyone there, including the men they are working with, they will tell you that most people on the street are there because they are addicts. If only politicians, with any letter after their name, would understand that…
    Putting most of the homeless in a shelter / hotel / wherever that is free will not solve the problem.

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  11. I will make this short…I have had a great deal of experience with those who have gone insane. Caregivers risk their lives but push costs ever higher for housing until it dawns on them that they can travel the world , stay at posh hotels and live like kings as long as they attend a conference entitled “The Sociopathic Trump Voter, and Will DrugsPlus Imprisonment Improve Desired Outcomes ?”. So, avoiding national bankruptcy, we let them all out and closed the institutions. however, I discovered a cheap and effective method to solve the problems and rural, poor Mexico was where I saw the light. As long as no murder is committed , in villages throughout this great country, when your town is awakened one morning because Jose is screaming and swinging a machete complaining that he cannot breathe because a giant hombre naranja is crushing him and no tequila is suspected, Jose is jumped and chained to the nearby loco tree. There he may live a happy life, fed by tossing excellent tacos to him , visited by relatives at a distance beyond throwing ability etc..good weather is needed so Southern California is a good place . I have seen a few dozen of these loco trees, one had a famous artist who was rich painting away and drawing. Morality you ask…well, here we think we are moral letting the insane harass us, cause harm, become junkies, endanger health city wide and make them vote Democratic, so save me from the sermons.

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  12. @Anonymous June 26, 2020 at 8:09 am

    > Something’s gotta change if we are to remain a functional society and culture.
    >
    > We just can’t keep going the same direction we are now and expect to survive.

    (Squints at CHAZCHOP. Squints at ChelseaIvanka in The White House. Averts view of so many aborted children between.)

    That’s a shame.

  13. A possible, albeit harsh solution:
    Chain, lock, & block all possible hotel exits & entrances. Arson the place to the ground. Block the streets so the fire department can’t put the fire out.
    I said it was harsh.
    (May God forgive me for even thinking such about our weaker brothers & sisters)

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  14. San Francisco is trying hard to win a participation trophy. They did something, spent a lot of money, but accomplished nothing. Democrat right through to the bone.

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  15. RogerF gets it.
    Drugs are the main culprit nowadays.
    Many addicts are nutty, also, so there is some overlap.
    My plan?
    The addicts, or at least 90% of them are beyond help, so write them off.
    Put them in warehouses with tiedowns along each wall, give them food and water, and let them detox, cold turkey.
    Then, all across the country, march every fifth grade class through those warehouses followed by a stern lecture of just exactly what awaits you if you give in to the urge to do drugs that first time.
    I know….I’m a heartless bastid, but what is now going on isn’t working.

    8
  16. Handsome MD
    JUNE 26, 2020 AT 12:50 PM
    “RogerF gets it.
    Drugs are the main culprit nowadays.
    Many addicts are nutty, also, so there is some overlap.
    My plan?
    The addicts, or at least 90% of them are beyond help, so write them off.”

    …you know, my cynical nature and human experience makes me inclined to agree with you. All the addicts I saw on a regular basis for hospital runs (that lived) were amoral scumbags who never got better,terrorized their families and their neigbors on a regular basis to get high, pimped their children out for a buzz, shot up WHILE driving, causing horrific accidents, and were generally nasty assholes unless they were high or dead, and NOTHING pissed them off MORE than saving their life with Narcan because YOU ENDED THEIR HIGH.

    Personally, I’ve known some of my wife’s relative’s children who shot up their way out of numerous good jobs, stole everything in the neighborhood, addicted their baby mommas so they’d have partners in pain, and one time one of them had all the goods in the house like stereos, video games, big TVs, etc., in the foyer ready to ship out for sale when Grandma unexpectedly came home and caught ’em.
    A man I work with who I call brother though we’re not related, who literally saved my life, HIS son was an absolute Horse addict piece of shit who couldn’t even make it to his infant son’s funeral because he got high instead, who’s lost more jobs than I can count, who makes his woman support him after he addicted HER as well, who misses his NEW son’s birthdays n such and has been rehabbed a million times to no effect…yeah, pretty hopeless, what a loser, write THAT guy off as a loss, and good riddance.

    That’s the corporeal man’s assessment.

    But after I was done with my medic time and found a REAL job that made it possible to afford to find my OWN sins to get into (not drugs or booze, there’s lots of crap besides that though but this isn’t a confessional) to where I bathed myself in so much infamy there was NO WAY OUT but suicide…

    …I found someone who didn’t give up on ME.

    My Lord Jesus Christ.

    Can you IMAGINE if you were to hear HIM say, “My plan? Humans, or at least 90% of them are beyond help, so write them off.”?
    What if HE gave US what WE deserve, DEATH, and just wrote US off for our sins and made examples of US for His angels? Pretty terrible fate THAT would be, and well-earned by ALL of us, TOO.

    …tell you a secret…

    …He made those heroin addicts too.

    …and He LOVES them, TOO.

    …sin is sin, to Him. You’re not without it, neither am I, even though we BOTH know better after all these years. Should HE cast US aside as WE would THEM?

    …seems like someone once said, “…He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” (John 8:7).

    I can’t offer hope, I’ve never seen one get better from medicine or therapy.

    But God can offer hope, HE had turned lives around.

    Those punks I know personally? Well, the TV thieves’s parents love them, work with them, get them clean and work them back with family, but they won’t seek God, so they relape.

    But I see the hope and despair in their parent’s eyes. I won’t deny them prayer, as long as there’s breath, there’s hope.

    My friend with the deseased grandson told me TODAY that his son sought rehab on his OWN this time, which is more than he ever did BEFORE. My friend’s been stung so many times he won’t speak optimistically, but I see the Lord’s light of Hope in his eye, and I won’t deny it, but pray for the Lord to change HIS heart, too.

    I could do many, many more, but it all comes to the same thing.

    When you write others off because as a group they cannot be saved,

    Be glad that our Lord doesn’t feel the same way about US.

    God Bless,
    SNS

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  17. @ judgeroybean JUNE 26, 2020 AT 12:05 PM

    I don’t. Pity is the best I have for them, sympathy is completely out of the question. So much so that we have long past by the point at which offering them sympathy is ludicrous. The “good intentions” ship sailed in the last century as the atrocities committed by regimes that the progressive movement supported as they rose in stature and consolidated their power turned into the most efficient engines of innocent human suffering, misery and death the world has ever seen. The facts regarding what progressivism has to offer were on full display and have been documented. Willful ignorance only compounds the complicity of people who have voted for and continue to vote in ways that enable and support this inhuman political philosophy.

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  18. @ Handsome MD
    Sometimes you don’t get another chance in life, not because they didn’t already. It’s just when you don’t take the hint, it’s over, your mind is gone. My nephew happens to be one of them, pretty sad. I was thinking of an island somewhere where they could have all the drugs they want give them some rice and beans and water, that’s it. Then let us know when your test clean for a few years if you want out.

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  19. How do these hotels stay in business? I saw the aftermath of homeless in a hotel and they trashed the place. Plus, word will get around on tripadvisor (for example) and normal tourists won’t go there.

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  20. Iron Man
    JUNE 26, 2020 AT 3:17 PM

    “…The only way white folks can jump on the gravy train too, is it?”

    …well, a White guy can put on a dress and prance a bit to get protected status without being homeless, so there’s that…

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