By Samantha McGirr
The Public Press
A newly released report ranks San Francisco as the seventh toughest city in the nation in its criminalization of homeless people.
The report, titled "Homes Not Handcuffs," was made available Wednesday by the National Law Center on Homeless and Poverty and the National Coalition for the Homeless. It studied 273 cities and ranked them according to number of anti-homeless laws, strictness of enforcement, and general attitudes toward the homeless. Los Angeles ranked at the top of the list, while Berkeley ranked tenth, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
San Francisco police issue about 10,000 citations each year to homeless individuals for quality-of-life crimes such as blocking sidewalks and drinking in public. About 90 percent of violators fail to appear in court, but those who do often have their fines reduced or cases dismissed because the city does not send prosecutors to the hearings. Recently, however, the city has begun assigning prosecutors to cases to ensure defendants do not get off easily.
A survey conducted in April for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated there were 6,514 homeless people living in San Francisco. Though the number is slightly down from 2007, Jennifer Friedenbach of the Coalition on Homelessness paints a different picture, noting a doubling of the wait list for shelter for homeless families in San Francisco.
Friedenbach cited the cause of chronically high homelessness in the city and across the nation to be “the combination of a continued lack of investment in affordable housing on the federal level and the southward fall of the economy.”
On July 10, Mayor Gavin Newsom vetoed several ordinances that would have made it easier for low-income individuals to maintain housing during the recession, including capping rent increases at 8 percent a year.
As affordable housing becomes scarcer, citizens may find themselves increasingly footing the bill for the city’s tough stance on the homeless, the Bay Guardian reported. In 2007, city taxpayers paid more than $2 million for 15,000 citations issued to homeless people of quality-of-life crimes, most of this money going to police, court, and administrative costs.
