Elected officials routinely work toward solutions that will provide a better quality of life for their constituents. There are  many factors which can restrict their efforts, like lack of resources, opposition from political rivals, or the complexity of the problem itself. What happens when the problem is one of your own allies that claims to share the same ideological values as you but the reality is sometimes the enemy within is the most dangerous. San Francisco’s mayor London Breed finds herself in this situation as she blasts social-justice homeless advocates for getting in the way of the city’s efforts to clean up the homeless crisis in San Francisco. 

Mayor Breed said “these activists are the same people who hand out tents to keep people on the street instead of  working to bringing them indoors, as we are trying to do,” as she deals with a San Francisco homeless population of around 8,000. To make matters worse, according to the latest data from Healthy Streets Operation Center, 54 percent of the homeless population are refusing to accept shelter not because they afraid of where they are going but by the urging of social justice group coalition on homelessness. Their obstructionist strategies go further than coaching the homeless. They have filed a lawsuit which claims that the city violated state and federal laws by clearing encampments and destroying belongings of the homeless without offering shelter. An appeals court judge ruled against them, saying because of widespread refusal it’s not involuntarily homelessness. 

This verdict opens the door for the mass removal of tents and cleaning of streets, but in the face of a court case defeat the coalition doubled down with a list demands such as the city turning over all its vacant housing to the homeless within 30 days and permanent housing for the homeless, which I presume would have to be free housing, since liberal policies have  it virtually impossible for the residents to afford housing on their own.

The social justice warriors and their supporters haven’t even considered that it’s in San Francisco’s best interest to act swiftly because the homeless crisis is going hand in hand with the unchecked drug market that’s ruining lives. Ex-land commissioner Alex Ludlum says "As long as the open-air drug markets continue their daily operations, we will continue to witness the misery of suffering addicts, the withdrawal of pedestrians and office-workers, the ongoing closures of small businesses, and the stagnation of our rich cultural life." 

That’s social justice in a nutshell: a fancy equity-based program where the activist and intellectuals get to choose winners and losers at no cost to themselves, because according to their ideology all issues stem from the government or the system itself so they can light forest fires and the root cause will always the system not considering how they stop progress. 

This is not a problem that San Francisco can afford to sit on, especially with the growing fentanyl crisis that’s claiming the lives of not only men and women, but now children. Mayor Breed has to put the welfare of all residents above social justice politics, since it’s clear that nothing comes before the agenda of activists, not even the suffering of addicts, the withdrawal of business, or a deteriorating cultural life.

Image: Ed Schipul