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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