Elite San Franciscans start GoFundMe drive to stop homeless shelter
Enjoying the benefits of “Green Privilege”
We have chronicled San Francisco’s homelessness problem, which features needle-strewn parks , feces maps, and more drug addicts than high school students.
Well, some residents are planning to use their “Green Privilege” benefits to stop the construction of a neighborhood homeless shelter being offered as a fix to the crisis.
The GoFundMe campaign — called “Safe Embarcadero for All” — was launched earlier this month after Mayor London Breed proposed a 200-bed shelter along the coast of San Francisco Bay, according to Fox News.
“The planned location for Mayor Breed’s #megashelter is home to thousands of families, visited by millions of tourists and at the center of some of San Francisco’s most iconic events – including the San Francisco Marathon, San Francisco Giants stadium and on one of the busiest bicyclist paths in the city,” reads the posting by the opponents.
The drive has raised more than $60,000, more than half its stated $100,000 goal, which will be used to pay attorney Andrew Zacks to represent the “Not in my back yard” residents.
The residents have worked fast, as their attorneys appear to have already started building a case against the proposal.
A lawyer with the San Francisco law firm Zacks, Freedman & Patterson has also sent a public records request to the mayor’s office, seeking “all documents and records” related to the proposed Navigation Center, including how the city would fund its construction and operation.
The Zacks firm is one of several the Safe Embarcadero group has considered hiring, said Neel Lilani, a resident of the Watermark condominium building on Beale Street who helped found the group and set up the GoFundMe web page to collect donations for legal expenses.
Attorney Andrew Zacks said he hopes the group retains his firm and that the pace of the project was “of great concern.” In an effort to open the center quickly, he said, city officials “in their haste may be making some significant legal errors.”
However, a rival group is now crowdfunding a campaign to fight the efforts to stop the shelter, already bringing in $40,000.
Its organizers said their funds would be used to fight the residents who are trying to block the shelter’s construction.
The rival crowdfunding efforts highlight the tensions impacting San Francisco and nearby Silicon Valley, which have seen a huge influx in wealth thanks to the growth of tech companies such as Google and Uber. The surge in personal incomes has pushed up housing prices, forcing some residents out of their homes and creating a homeless crisis.
In this battle, there are no winners. California’s politicians have spent millions of dollars and developed thousands of pages of policy, only for the situation to get increasingly worse.
Katy Grimes, whose beat includes Sacramento, reviewed the problem in her area.
In Sacramento, after already legislating hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for combating homelessness ineffectively, we now tax responsible residents out of more of their hard-earned income, to build tiny homes for people currently living and pooping on the street who will turn these houses into tiny crack houses, as has already happened in Los Angeles. Homelessness is only increasing in California, along with tent cities, used needles, piles of defecation on the streets, and communicable diseases.
The Democrats who control the state have solved nothing, and are spending ridiculous amounts of money doing it. It’s hard not to ask who is getting rich off of some of these dubious programs.
It’s time for big-city Mayors to back down and allow success to happen with the state’s most vulnerable people through proven private and non-profit programs. Money in the hands of politicians is about control, and not results. The State, county and city governments cannot and will not ever achieve any real results with California’s homeless epidemic.
I suspect the warnings won’t be heeded, and I will have a new disease to feature in an upcoming post.
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Comments
200 beds? That’s not even a bandaid. Building a shelter like that will results in overflow homeless flooding the neighborhood trying to get a bed/meals/services. liberals are either incapable of thinking these things through, or they truly don’t care about long term and unintended consequences. If they build it, Eric Cartman has a bus ready to bring in enough homeless to fill it in about 2 trips.
Government solutions always work great, amirite?
Hilarious, isn’t it?
Mocking these corrupt crony-communists is almost as good as running them out office at the ballot box. Indicting them for their corruption is even better. This must be done to get any of the trust the nation has in the justice system.
Hear that, clinton and obama?
Feed the homeless to the hungry, a two fer! Soylent Green is people afterall.
If you subsidize something you get more of it. So far, SF and Ca pols are only failing successfully. Increases their virtue status.
I can think of two effective solutions to this problem.
1) Start busing these people to Mexico, turnabout is fair play.
2) Rent industrial buildings to serve as drug houses. Give these people access to unlimited drugs, offer no advice on dosing. Let them get to their inevitable goal of death much sooner. We have to accept the reality is that some people are self destructive and that we cannot cure them.
First thing a farm kid learns. If you want to get rid of rats, stop feeding them.
Portland officials have decided that the increase in homeless numbers is due to high property prices. Wow. Stupid old me thought it was just people making one bad decision after another. If nothing changes, well, nothing changes.
Mr. Major, 45 years ago, Washington County, bordering on Multnomah County, Oregon (aka Moscow on the Willamette, or little Beirut) bragged that high property taxes kept out the riff-raff. If the libs think Portland prices are too high, try the costs in the burbs, where the liberal silicon forest denizens live.
Not just rats, opossums, racoons, weasels. In general, get rid of varmints, four and two legged.
Ms Leslie, a “new” disease, or just a resurgence of a third-world disease once eradicated from our country? Before you reveal the latest scourge, perhaps you could poll the LI folks for likely (or hilariously unlikely) candidates?
Will this new building be AOC compliant?
With the CA requisite number of solar panels?
Priceless!
I love that you have two groups, both probably liberal voters, raising funds and fighting each other.
I think I’d like to start a go fund me to buy bus tickets for all the homeless in my area and send them to SF. It’d be a hoot to video them getting off the bus, then being led to the nearest welfare office followed by their request for clean needles.
Speaking to an inner city social worker, his answer to this istuation is ‘tough love’ because most of these people are either nuts, addicts, drunks or simple bums. (No, not the democrat leadership…) Allowing them to wreak havoc on the streets is insane for both society and for themselves.
Btw: they do get money from the government, and opportunities to help themselves, but most choose not to.
Enforce vagrancy laws, and the situation will end, save for the worst cases – which have been around for hundreds of years, and alway will be. People with bad habits and bad coping skills need to be pushed into helping themselves.
Kind of like school, no?
The real problem is that the progressive fascists treat the homeless like children who they have to save. They do this to make themselves feel superior to everyone else.
The real solution is:
1) Deduct rent from the homeless benefits when they live in places where it’s illegal. Enforce vagrancy and other laws that will ensure that the homeless will spend a lot of time in jail.
2) Buy land in the Central Valley and build shacks to house the former homeless. They each will have space to grow gardens for food. Charge them rent to maintain and pay for the property.
Ah this is my life!! San Jose, where I live, tried to put one of these near my house, with no local services for the homeless and a mile walk to the nearest bus stop. It was quashed only because the site selected put the tiny houses next to a local creek and our watershed apparently needs more protection from the homeless than local residents. My sympathies to the residents in SF opposed to this – I hope they are successful. Crime and drugs and more homeless will be the result of SF’s plan.
The cost of housing IS awful here. Local apartments start at $2400/mo for a 1 bed/1bath in San Jose – They are considerably more up the peninsula. A couple of years ago a local man and his wife took their lives because of imminent eviction from their apartment. He had been injured and couldn’t work for a few months, the wife’s income wasn’t enough and they fell behind in rent. With no safety net of family or friends and facing homelessness they committed suicide. Very sad. Really upset my little community. No one knew of their desperation.
However, the working people who fall on hard times are not the homeless you see in the tent cities. Those people are on drugs, or are mentally ill and are on drugs. The best you could do for them is put them somewhere where they CAN’T get drugs while addressing the easy availability of obtaining those drugs, and helping the mentally ill take their meds. Like, grow up, take responsibility, pay for your crimes and maybe close that border where the drugs come in? Think that will happen here in Progressive Cali-land?
The rival group that wants the shelter is now 60K above the NIMBY group. Watching the complete destruction of SF is entertaining as hell. There isn’t enough popcorn in the world for this watch party.
This is so Rich – literally.
San Fran Elitists (almost all Democrats?) tell the Homeless to
“Go Fund Yourselves!” So to speak…….
The problem with these blue state liberal progressive programs is that they destroy the area in which they are operational. This causes working liberal progressive residents to leave their homes. If the problems, created by the programs, encompass the entire state [as they do in California] then the liberal progressive wienies move to other states, which they turn blue and the same stupid programs crop up there. Just look at Colorado, Oregon, Washington, New Mexico and even Arizona is going blue. Liberals are a disease and they should be treated like one.
Don’t treat the symptoms: treat the disease!
Don’t treat the “homeless”: treat the liberals!
I hear there is an island in San Francisco Bay that already has living quarters available.
Not to worry. According to California’s newest law, they can just go to the ER, and then before discharge they have to be placed. I would suggest Moonbeam’s living room.
Better:
send them (back) down to Mexico City