Holy SMOKES, I’ve read this thing five times and still can’t believe it. This morning, the San Francisco Standard published a piece that encapsulates every aspect of the City by the Bay’s life in perpetual denial.

For a major American city going down in spectacular Sodom and Gomorrah flames, I suppose it’s only fitting that they would write a pity piece bemoaning the supposed mis-treatment and hard times of some of the very denizens who have effected that bitter end.

John and I have tried to keep you all abreast of the grinding implosion. It’s like watching a trainwreck, which turns out to be an apt enough metaphor, as no one is riding their metro trains and that system is on the verge of collapse itself. Why? Predominantly because of the crime/homeless types running amok which have completely stymied what post-COVID business or day traffic would have normally returned by now.

This is half a block from my office, most expensive real estate in the commercial area. Union Square used to be a safe haven for luxury shoppers, the Fifth Avenue of San Francisco. Now gangs of criminals run wild. https://t.co/aRXlg2yuPl

— Harmeet K. Dhillon (@pnjaban) June 15, 2023

The city is a revolting stew of Third World snapshots and danger in every direction.

The human excrement on the sidewalks and streets downtown is so overwhelming, someone at a LOCAL COLLEGE created an interactive poo map, for God’s sake.

I will take a leap of faith and state that the source of the noxious problem isn’t hordes of undisciplined Google executives eating bad sushi.

After reading this article today – which also partially blames society’s move away from carrying cash for the drop in homeless handouts without noting the corresponding rise in bald-faced, daytime robberies as a contributing “no cash” factor –

San Francisco’s Rising Anti-Homeless Sentiment Is Costing Those on the Streets

Virtually everyone in San Francisco has had a stranger ask them for money at one time or another. With some 7,754 people sleeping in sidewalk tents and shelters and underneath overpasses, plus tens of thousands more barely hanging on, the need has arguably never been greater.

But the intensification of San Francisco’s homelessness emergency has coincided with a number of other trends that unhoused people say mean fewer of the once-reliable dollars from passersby and less positive interactions more generally.

…I am left to wonder if San Francisco “journalists” even know where poo comes from – or “feces,” as the author calls it, and she only mentions it once. Of course, that is when a poo pile has been Glad sandwich-wrapped and presented to an “unhoused person” as a truly sick gotcha.

That story comes from the first person she interviews. He’s been on the streets for 9 years, and seems to be the classic down on his luck/can’t catch a break sort of guy you’d expect to be on the streets, “unhoused.” He recycles metal, is proud of what he says he accomplishes, is kind of put out that people have started locking down their bins so he – and others – can’t rifle through them, cleans the street up with his recycling (Where does the mess to clean come from? DON’T ASK), and is sad residents are so damn cranky about the hordes of “unhoused” camping on their literal door stoops.

…At 37, he’s been homeless for the last nine years, some of which were spent as a commercial fisherman in Dutch Harbor, Alaska. It’s dangerous work: He was crushed by a crab pot, and once went overboard and “died in the drink” from hypothermia before his shipmates revived him.

Still, working is a point of pride, theft a source of shame. After stealing a $100 roll of copper wire from a Home Depot in Southern California, Vizgaudis said he hasn’t boosted anything since. These days, he makes much of his living by recycling cans and bottles, collecting roughly 30 pounds of recycling a day. By his reckoning, that amounts to removing 9,000 pounds of waste from city streets every year. So he’s struck by the intensity of anti-homeless sentiment.

…“San Francisco has some of the cruelest people towards the homeless I’ve ever seen. Ever. Period,” he said. “It’s rough. It’s sad. But, you know, I kind of get it—but I kind of don’t, because, like, it doesn’t take much to … to help somebody else.”

People who say the homeless are just local folks who can’t afford the rent are lying. People live on the street because their addiction has led them to stop working, cut off ties to family & friends, and spend their time & money on drugs. And now new data show just 7% are locals. https://t.co/VMhqij40y4

— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) June 16, 2023

In the opening paragraphs, the author, Astrid Kane, bemoans stereotypes: how San Francisco “unhoused” have gone from being known as guitar strumming, tie-dye wearing, acid dropping Timothy Leary clones to screaming, wild-eyed, hatchet wielding, methed-up 20-something criminals or blotto druggies.

Oh, GOSH – and they’re really all so nice!

Then she spends her next interviews on precisely those people.

…Octavio Martinez is an affable guy who mostly barters with other unhoused people for what he needs and says his superpower is his ability to make $5 worth of drugs last longer than anyone else. He’s lived in San Francisco since 1990 and in a small encampment on Florida Street in the Mission for the last two days. These days, people call the cops on him more than in the past, even though he makes an effort not to place his tent on private property.

The poor man is illegal drug thrifty and thoughtful, and people still call the cops on him. Unbelievable!

What shining beacon of civic responsibility is next?

A cute, middle-aged couple who are two weeks removed from their last high who play the guitar for tips. The detox cut into their gig earnings.

…Across the street, Jaime and Rose Rios often spend three or four hours busking at a time, playing Janis Joplin, Metallica and Buju Banton on guitar. On a good day, they pull in $80 to $100—but they hadn’t earned much in the prior two weeks as they worked to get off opiates.

Now, I guess things are still chill in Haight-Ashbury, but not for long. And the regulars who’ve sold drugs on the corner for decades really are irked at the “gentrification” they seem coming. Bad enough hardly anyone carries cash, but now it feels like they just don’t want you on your corner any more, you know?

It’s unsettling, the times a’ changin’ and all.

…“I like to draw people in,” he said. “People used to come in from all over the world to buy drugs from us at this corner, so I built my business on being the one you want to see. This is my mecca. I came here as a pilgrim.”

Calling himself “an old-school traveler, a hobo kid,” Zombie has his name tattooed on his left forearm in the style of a 1930s bridge tag. He and his friends haven’t experienced overt meanness the way Vizgaudis and Martinez have, and the cops leave them alone, but the neighborhood is changing around them, with $100 T-shirts crowding out the thrift shops. They feel actively pushed out.

JUST IN: The number of people who died from accidental drug overdoses in San Francisco rose to 74 in May, marking one of the deadliest months of the local fentanyl crisis since the city began releasing monthly overdose death data in 2020. https://t.co/13TUJX2h8q

— San Francisco Chronicle (@sfchronicle) June 16, 2023

Your friendly, longtime, neighborhood drug dealer feels like he’s being “actively pushed out” and that’s something this reporter – ergo the paper – is sympathetic to?

Let me tell you, the “outreach” crews she talks to are their own bags of worms. I realize it takes a special calling to do that sort of work but.

WOWSAHS

This is the same paper in the same edition on the same day that just ran THIS story.

Ask The Standard: Why Are Illegal Drugs So Cheap in San Francisco?

…“However, drugs are so widely available in the open-air drug market that the price of fentanyl and other drugs can be lower,” he said.

In the Tenderloin, a gram of the highly addictive synthetic opiate fentanyl can go for anywhere from $20 to $40. According to data from the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas program, a gram of fentanyl costs between $40 and $100 in Los Angeles, he said.

That suggests the San Francisco price may be lower. But, again, there’s a caveat: It depends on the drug and the local situation.

“In the Central Valley, we predominantly see a lot of methamphetamines,” Clark said. “So methamphetamine in the Central Valley area is a lot cheaper than methamphetamine in San Francisco.”

WHUT

Miguel Almaguer is a San Francisco based reporter for NBC News. He doesn’t see a problem. It’s “perception.”

In a report for NBC on the closing of San Francisco's Westfield Mall, correspondent Miguel Almaguer claims it's merely the "perception of crime" as the reason the mall is closing. pic.twitter.com/uzg1eoYng7

— Kevin Tober (@KevinTober94) June 14, 2023

I see a problem and I’ll bet you do.

No one in San Francisco has a clue.