Marathon Pundit: California Collision: San Francisco and homelessness

Getting an accurate count of the number of homeless in a city is very difficult. Two years ago, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley made the ludicrous claim that there were only 24 homeless people living in the city's Loop. 240 is probably closer to the truth.

San Francisco, per capita, certainly has more homeless people than Chicago.

How did San Francisco handle its homeless problem? In a typical liberal way--by throwing money at it.

Until 2004, San Francisco gave homeless people $320 to $359 in general assistance payments for essentially being homeless. The generous offer attracted homeless people to the City by the Bay, and apocryphal stories appeared that civil servants in communities near San Francisco were buying one-way bus tickets to the peninsula city to get lower their homeless population.

Much of that money was spent by the recipients on (Surprise!), alcohol and drugs.

When running for office, Mayor Gavin Newsom made his Care Not Cash plan a centerpiece of his 2003 platform. Newsom suggested drastically cutting the cash outlays, and beefing up other services for the homeless.

Here's what the San Francisco Chronicle wrote about the program in May, on the fifth anniversary of the start of Cash Not Care:

The $13.2 million annual program is funded entirely by what was once handed out in monthly checks. But in total, the city spends $180 million each year on a raft of homeless programs - by far more than under previous administrations.

Those programs include street outreach workers, bus and train tickets back to people's hometowns, and the one-stop shop for services called Project Homeless Connect. Care Not Cash participants often receive more in city services than their checks cover.

Newsom says he has moved a total of 9,293 homeless people off the streets.

Yet the city's official homeless tally shows a slight rise over the past four years, with January's count showing 6,514 people calling the streets, jails, hospitals or shelters home. Social services, including St. Anthony's, are overwhelmed.

Meanwhile, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce notes that homelessness and panhandling are among the top complaints of city residents. And some estimates state that there are more homeless people than ever in San Francisco.

Although I didn't travel to every corner of San Francisco last month, I did find three centers of homelessness. The "massage parlor" dense Tenderloin District, the adjacent Civic Center, and Haight-Ashbury. For some people, that long-ago hippie Valhalla is a bad trip.

Oh, one more thing: Parts of San Francisco smell bad. So does Manhattan, but since that packed-with-people island doesn't have alleys, and building now would be impossible, the garbage is placed on the sidewalks to be collected. There's not much you can do about it.

But when walking through the Tenderloin, the Civic Center, and to a lesser extent, the Haight, I constantly caught the unmistakable whiff of urine. For those of you who've walked into a college-bar men's room at closing time, you know the smell.

I've never been to New Orleans, but I've heard the French Quarter is cursed with "pee-perfume."

This concludes my San Francisco portion of California Collision. It's time to head to Yosemite.