For decades, the malfunctioning government of San Francisco has been the source of justified derision, but the latest example of its crazy operations might be one of the most absurd.
Rick Moran reports for PJ Media that this bastion of leftism, this government that’s already running a $651 million deficit, recently saw Mayor London Breed (D) shovel out $16.1 million in cash and other resources to erect 300 tents in three “tent cities” for homeless people.
That’s a lot of taxpayer cash per tent. As Moran reports:
The cost? About $61,000 a year per tent. All told, the cost of the program is $16.1 million. I guess in San Francisco, even the tents are first class.
This is a city that can’t even keep the sidewalks free of human waste.
Moran refers to a piece by Jay Barmann for SFIST, in which Barmann reveals even more about this glorious London Breed boondoggle:
In the six ‘Safe Sleeping Villages’ set up by the city of San Francisco during the pandemic, the cost of maintaining a single tent-camping spot is $5,000 per month, or $61,000 per year — more than it would cost to put each of these people in a market-rate apartment.
Related: This is What Happened to Chipotle’s Menu After the SF Minimum Wage Hike
And it’s not just expensive tents that the taxpayers will be forced to buy. Writes Barmann:
The cost boils down to $190 per tent per night, which includes 24-hour security, bathrooms, maintenance, and three meals per day.
So forget camping - London Breed’s got you covered! She, of course, is the woman who, despite being an avowed advocate for Planned Parenthood and its abortion-loving mentality, last year started a program to actually pay certain kinds of resident minorities to get pregnant. She, of course, is the woman who told people they couldn’t open their businesses or visit with friends because of COVID19, but got caught enjoying an expensive meal at a highbrow “eatery” a mere day after CA Governor Gavin Newsom (D) was caught at the same restaurant.
It seems as if Breed’s two-faced, government-based spending of other peoples’ money might be the wrong answer to the homelessness problem.
As Moran notes:
San Francisco counts about 6,400 people as homeless, although that doesn’t include people living out of their cars, or the thousands who flit from temporary shelters to relative’s residences to friends and neighbors — anywhere they can find a place to lay their body down. Many of these people have jobs that don’t pay them enough to live within 50 miles of San Francisco.
Will Breed’s efforts really help do anything other than expose more of the absurd anti-freedom mindset of the San Fran political class?
One doesn’t solve a housing shortage by erecting tents that cost as much as apartments.
Related: San Francisco Mayor: 'There’s More Feces Than I’ve Ever Seen'
And one doesn’t solve a homelessness problem by overlooking the government policies that made it so bad.
Those policies include onerous “minimum wage” statutes that have seen low-skill jobs become hard to find in the city even as they’ve increased the costs of food and services, bureaucratic blocks of new apartment buildings, left-wing activists demanding that housing developers include more “affordable housing” units in planned construction – causing the developers to scrap the entire project – and Mission District lefties attempting to block builders rebuilding an apartment complex after a fire.
If low-skilled workers can’t get jobs in the city, and competition for living space is limited by government, the result, obviously, is homelessness, and until Breed and her ideological kin wake up to the fact that only freedom and free markets can see supply cater to demand, the city of San Francisco will continue to be a messy sty filled with desperate vagrants.
Doubtless few of the politicians will be supplying their own homes to house those folks. Instead, they will charge the productive people still holding jobs, the folks who might next be out on the streets, because the government makes San Francisco unlivable.