Wouldn't Want to Live There

The Chronicle follows middle-class families (they would be upper class in most of the rest of America) trying to make a go of it on a block close to downtown San Francisco:

Isis St is a short walk from City Hall

Those are the people who live on Isis Street, which should be everything that’s good about San Francisco. Funky flats. A group of progressive neighbors, many of whom are artists, writers and other creative types. A walkable neighborhood where you can get to Rainbow Grocery and a host of bars and restaurants in a flash. There are about 30 units of housing on the block, and six kids younger than 5 are growing up there. It should have been the best of San Francisco, but by April, it had become the worst.

The Schoen-Rene's stroll around their neighborhood (Chron photo).

[Ernst] Schoen-Rene’s 2½-year-old son, Laszlo, invented a game called “jumping over the poop.” Another kid across the street collected syringe caps and floated them down the stream of dirty gutter water for fun. People “as high as a kite” hopped Schoen-Rene’s 10-foot fence. He once tried to pick up a pile of cardboard somebody had ditched on the sidewalk to recycle it. But it was much heavier than he expected. There was a person passed out inside.

Homeless campers cooking over open flames on the sidewalk have started fires. They’ve partied and injected drugs on Schoen-Rene’s front steps, one time repeatedly throwing trash at his door, alarming the family inside with the thumping sound.

“There’s the poop and the needles and the rats,” Schoen-Rene said. “Oh, my God, there didn’t used to be rats.”

But the breaking point for him came when neighbors found a black suitcase with wheels on the corner that had clearly been used as a toilet by homeless people.

Mark Farrell, who served as interim mayor until London Breed was elected earlier this month, removed the homeless encampments in April. (It currently is a mystery where the homeless went, since most refused offers of indoor shelter, albeit sleeping on a floor bed.)

It’s far from perfect. On a recent day, he saw a tent on his corner with four people inside “with needles hanging out of their feet.” Police came and whisked them out of the neighborhood, signaling Farrell’s determination to keep the area clear. There’s still human feces on his street sometimes. And rats. And the wait-and-see feeling that the disastrous conditions could reappear at any time.

“Still, it’s amazing to have the street clean,” Schoen-Rene said. “It’s clean. It’s nuts.”

One silver lining of the experience is that Mr. Schoen-Rene can make a $300,000-$500,000 profit on the condo that he bought for $748,000 in 2010. He would have to leave the City to find something affordable, but if and when he does leave, I'll bet he will regret not doing it sooner.