San Francisco Mayor London Breed has another brilliant idea to deal with the homeless

The streets of San Francisco

San Francisco Mayor London Breed is a woman with ideas. Unfortunately her ideas are generally idiotic. For example, she had the idea that paying the homeless drug using population a hundred dollars a week to stay off drugs was a brilliant idea. Anyone with a brain knows how that would work out for drug users with money in their pockets. 

But it's the taxpayers footing the expense, so what, she worry?

Now her latest stroke of genius is to offer bus tickets to the homeless and hope they "get out of Dodge." She is having city workers and cops who are conducting sweeps to get the homeless out of their tent villages, offer them bus tickets out of town in place of a shelter bed.

This is a cry of desperation by a failing mayor in a failing city.

Don't believe everything you read

“We’re reverting to enforcement,” said Wayman Young, a police officer overseeing the sweep in San Francisco. “Now we don’t have to offer shelter, even though we still do.” They just offer a bribe and hope it works.

There are roughly 3,600 beds for 8,300 homeless folks. Even if they double-up it won't be enough bed. However, only about 350 take up the offer during sweeps this week. 

“Unfortunately, San Francisco does not have enough shelter or housing for every person experiencing homelessness, but we do have some beds available each day to support the work of the outreach teams, and we continue to grow our system,” Emily Cohen, the department’s spokesperson, wrote in an email.

In recent years the number of homeless from out of town has spiked. According to Bloomberg, "[T]he percentage of unhoused people in San Francisco who are from other California counties or different states has increased to 40%, up from 28% in 2019, according to data provided by the mayor’s office."

Breed lost a court case that prevented her from forcing the homeless off the streets. Those federal orders prevented both San Francisco and Los Angeles from clearing encampments and removing the homeless because there weren't enough shelter beds, which never occurred to the Democrat mayors, London Breed and Karen Bass. 

With the city possessing less than half the number of shelter beds that were needed, there was little that city officials were able to do until the Supreme Court decision, Grants Pass v. Johnson made laws preventing outdoor camping easier to enforce.

Woke enough yet?

Rather than looking for the obvious solution to San Francisco's homeless problem, Breed, concerned over the upcoming election, tried strategies other than increasing the number of shelter beds. 

On Thursday, Breed put her substantial weight behind a different approach. She issued an executive directive requiring outreach workers to offer homeless people who aren’t from San Francisco free transportation out of town, maybe to places where they have friends or family who are willing to take them in. 

California Governor Gavin Newsom issued a statewide directive to clear homeless encampments. But Los Angeles County, which is dealing with 75,000 homeless people, has decided to defy the governor's directive and continue to same failed policies. They call it "care first." Others call it "keep your bedbugs out on the streets."

It's clear that these Democrats don't care at all for these Los Angeles County residents who are exposed to the risks posed by this mentally ill population, mostly drug addicts desperate to do whatever they must for their next fix.

Tweet