Homelessness is an ever-present tragedy for the million or so residents of San Francisco — a constant reminder that our social safety net is failing the poorest and most troubled among us.
There are around 6,000 San Franciscans sleeping on the streets at any one time. As a percentage of population, that is roughly in line with most other large American cities. But San Francisco is squeezed into the space of a small town, and the homeless tend to cluster around the shelters and city services that exist in the downtown areas that most workers and tourists visit every day. The outstretched hand, the human form under a sleeping bag in a doorway: they're simply harder to ignore here.
This is apparently quite a shock for the young entitled tech entrepreneurs who pour into the same parts of the city every year and who aren't shy about expressing their revulsion and fear.
The latest poster boy for clueless commentary on the topic is Justin Keller, the twentysomething CEO of a startup called Commando.io, which apparently helps keep servers running (ironically, its own website appears to be out of action itself at time of writing). Keller's post on the topic is almost too easy to ridicule.
Homelessness has been an ongoing problem in San Francisco since the 1980s. But having moved to the city all of three years ago, Keller feels qualified to pronounce it "without a doubt the worst it has ever been." He complains about the fact that a homeless man entered a movie theater on Valentine's Day, upsetting his girlfriend and causing him to run out of the theater — hardly putting him in line for the boyfriend of the year award.
"The wealthy working people have earned their right to live in the city," Keller adds, in the most widely reviled part of the post. "I shouldn’t have to see the pain, struggle, and despair of homeless people to and from my way to work every day. I want my parents when they come visit to have a great experience."
You hear that, homeless people of San Francisco? Better hide your years of physical pain, your struggles with addiction and mental health, your fathomless pit of despair in the face of an uncaring society. A twentysomething tech bro could be walking down the street with his parents at any moment.
In conclusion, Keller wrote approvingly of the fact that the homeless "seem[ed] to up and vanish" during Super Bowl 50 — apparently unaware that the police were simply moving homeless people to an encampment under a freeway overpass, out of the way of tourists, in one of the most shameful stains on Mayor Ed Lee's administration.
Keller was, not surprisingly, subjected to a torrent of online outrage Thursday. What was surprising: he didn't back down, fighting back on Twitter and apologizing only for using one word in his post: "riff-raff."
That puts Keller in stark contrast to his homeless-hating tech bro predecessors. Startup CEO Greg Gopman deleted his Facebook post from 2013 in which he called the city's homeless "degenerates," "hyenas" and "trash." He kept the screenshots, however, and later resurfaced them in a mea culpa post titled "The stupidest thing I ever did."
That same year another founder, Peter Shih, deleted his infamous "10 things I hate about San Francisco" Medium post in favor of a simple "I'm sorry."
There are many reasons to be angry at the successive local and federal governments that have failed to address homelessness appropriately over the last 30 years. There is a lack of political will for the expensive solutions that work: more shelter space, drug treatment programs, mental health services.
As this excellent data-driven Fusion post points out, Utah is the only state to have largely solved its homelessness problem — because it found that putting them in apartments was cheaper than the cost to the city of allowing them to stay on the streets.
There is much to discuss and much to learn. The tech world can contribute: witness Google's support for a mobile shower bus program that helps provide basic human dignity for the long-term homeless.
But too often the solution has been a variation on what Keller is proposing: Out of sight, out of mind. Shunting people you don't like to one side doesn't work, and it never will. There is no magic wand to make the problem disappear.