The beloved local newspaper columnist Herb Caen once said, “If I do go to heaven, I’m going to do what every San Franciscan does who goes to heaven. He looks around and says, ‘It ain’t bad, but it ain’t San Francisco.’”
Herb’s sentiment is understandable. When you live in San Francisco, it’s easy to get caught up in it — the way the air off the Pacific feels on your skin, the way the sunset lights up the fog, streetcars tinkling like toys up and down the hills. It can be idyllic. But San Francisco has a problem — one of forced evictions and mixed chemicals, rotting sores and bare feet black as charcoal. The problem is so pervasive that full awareness of it obliterates any perception of this city as paradisiacal.
The problem is homelessness.
That homelessness exists in San Francisco is not terribly interesting. Herb probably knew that; maybe that’s why he didn’t write all that much about it. What I believe to be more interesting is the manner in which people who move to San Francisco come, over time, to accept homelessness — and more specifically, the presence of oftentimes actively decomposing homeless people — as a regular, uninteresting feature of life here. As something to get used to, like the fog.
I know this to be true, because this is what happened to me. A few weeks ago, while walking west down Howard Street, I passed a middle-aged man in puke-moldy clothes sitting sort of halfway crumpled on the sidewalk against a building, as if he’d been tossed there. He was heating up heroin in the ladle of a small metal spoon. The liquid in the ladle was yellowish-black, like a melted hornet. A needle lay in his lap. I passed him without a second glance.
Two blocks on, I saw a woman sitting with an arm around what looked like her daughter, who couldn’t have been older than six. Their clothes weren’t quite moldy but definitely looked wet, faded brown and matted. The woman had deep lines in her face. The daughter was holding a cardboard sign. I’d seen them before — a few times over the last couple of weeks, in fact, sitting together on the corner. I ignored them as I walked by.
My girlfriend and I moved to San Francisco a few Octobers ago late one Sunday night. We took the BART in from the East Bay, where we’d been staying with my parents. The previous day, we’d signed a lease on an apartment in Cow Hollow, a slightly collapsing but totally doable spot that was four very clean, pastel-infused, Victorian blocks away from Fort Mason. There did not, by my estimation, seem to be very many homeless people around, but there were a lot of tall dudes with man-buns and skinny girls in yoga pants, and lots of cute cafes situated with outdoor seating just perfect for brunching.
It was probably around 11:30 p.m. when we finally got into the city. We’d packed all day, determined to no longer be living with my parents. We arrived entirely unprepared, both wearing the clothes we’d packed in: Alex in a pink, sort-of-peach sundress, I in an impossibly douchey cut-off T-shirt.
We got off the train at Civic Center station with our bags in tow. Quickly, we discovered that the escalators were broken — bogged down, as we would later learn is typical, with human shit. So we lugged our bags up the stairs.
We emerged onto Market Street out of breath, and only then did I realize how dumb we’d been. It was foggy and brutally cold; the wind bit into our bare skin like tiny metal drills into teeth. And so it was with a pained, frigid urgency that we started east, looking for our Uber.
As we walked, the first thing I noticed was how truly dark it was out. The fog swallowed the street lamps, aluminizing the night in a dull, wizardly gloom, rendering the sidewalks on both sides of Market Street ominous. On our side of the street there were multiple stretches of sidewalk shadowed by black plywood walkways, which, I supposed, had been built to accommodate daytime construction. These walkways were nearly pitch black. In and out of them emerged and disappeared people in varying forms of decay, congregating in clumps. In one loose huddle, a group of men were passing around a blunt. Out of an old, busted stereo at their feet thumped a thick, heavily distorted baseline. They stopped talking as Alex and I walked by. They called at Alex to come over and asked what was in our suitcases. We kept our eyes forward, away from the shadows, but at the same time we had to take care not to kick any of the bodies lying scattered and incapacitated along the pavement among cigarette butts and broken glass, in front of storefronts locked down by steel bars and polluted by whorls of black and blue graffiti.
On the corner of 7th and Market, in front of Donut World, a woman whose amputated legs ended in bandage-plastered stubs where her knees had originally been was starting up an argument with a white man who had tattoos on his face, and whose only rebuttal to the woman’s accusations was a desperate, chaotic “I’ll have it tomorrow!”
Crossing the street at 6th, we saw a younger woman with mascara bleeding down her face, screaming into her cell phone that she “wanted a fucking bed tonight.” That’s when our Uber canceled on us. We stopped at the corner and waited for another one, standing there in the open, freezing. People continued floating by, looking like underworld defectors, scratching at their faces and talking to themselves. Very few were wearing jackets, but some were draped in ratty blankets.
As we waited, we made sure to stand facing Market, on the edge of the curb, where there were lights. We stood close to each other, pretending that we weren’t scared, but even so, everything behind us seemed to only inch closer when we didn’t look at it.
I feel bad, now, about being afraid that night — as in, rather than empathetic. But in the moment, yeah, I was fucking scared. I’d spent the last previous two years in New Orleans, having witnessed some seedy shit, and never had I seen anything like this. I was shocked — and to think, I hadn’t even seen any puke/poop yet!
That was to come. About a month later, I was riding my bike down the Embarcadero on my way to work, thoroughly enjoying what was an unusually warm and clear San Francisco morning, when, while I was pedaling, a man walking in my direction, just out of nowhere, mid-stride, started projectile vomiting. He didn’t even bat an eye; he just kept walking, as if he’d only coughed and hadn’t just puked.
Later that day, while Alex was on the bus leaving work, a homeless man sitting in the back of the bus shat himself. “He didn’t clean it up,” Alex told me when she got home, her eyes wide. “He didn’t even seem to notice.”
In the time that’s passed since those days, I’ve learned that, by way of sheer exposure, the things you see become less and less shocking. Indeed, it’s a process. A uniquely San Franciscan process.
But there’s a problem with that. To dismiss this process as necessary based solely on a perception of homeless people as revolting or scary just isn’t right. While the people who linger around upper Market fucked up late at night are scary, a greater percentage of homeless people in San Francisco are not. They’re human. The mother holding her daughter on the side of the street was not scary. I would venture to guess that she was cold and scared, just as I would be if my circumstances were even slightly different, and I found myself homeless. And such a prospect is not inconceivable. In 2013, 29% of the homeless people in San Francisco reported their reason for being homeless as having recently lost a job, and 55% of homeless people said they were homeless because they couldn’t pay rent. If I were to get fired, and if I weren’t be able to pay my rent, and if I didn’t have any family to turn to …
When you start thinking this way, which is hard to avoid, you stop feeling scared and start feeling guilty. Or at least I do. I feel guilty about ignoring the people begging for change, stepping over bodies curled on cardboard boxes. About being scared. About not being more conscious. Like, I owe my privilege to what, exactly? Why didn’t I at least try to help the woman with her daughter on the side of the street? Why didn’t I give her something? Because, you know, she is a person, and I care about other people. Do I not care about homelessness?
Here unfurls the problem with the perception of homelessness as just another thing to get used to. To go full circle in the “process” of getting used to homelessness as it exists in San Francisco, you have to desensitize yourself to every aspect of it, including the personal guilt that accompanies seeing kids sitting on the street when they should be in school. And this, it turns out, is just fucking impossible. I’ve never gotten used to it. It would be easier if the reality of the disease evaded empathy — if the problem presented unambiguous danger or was well encapsulated by the walk Alex and I took down Market Street that night in October — but it doesn’t, and it isn’t. There are many less-than-ideal things about San Francisco, like the way you have to forfeit half of your income to rent or the mold that spreads through your apartment like jungle rot, but I’ve found nothing more difficult than homelessness. The mold pales in comparison.
On one level, then, it’s this two-sided burden, imposed both on the people trying to get out of homelessness and the ones forced to try to pretend it don’t exist, that makes Herb’s opinion of San Francisco as superior to heaven a little ridiculous. Sure, his statement wasn’t meant to be taken literally, but the sentiment ultimately was. I love San Francisco, but to imply that it doesn’t have serious problems is irresponsible.
The City by the Bay is such a beautiful and abundant place, yet it’s home to so much ugliness. The most progressive city in the country is home to such medieval decay. It’s a contradiction that should not be ignored. We should be talking about it more.
