The Mean Streets

The fact that one-third of San Francisco's homeless population of about 8,000 suffers from mental illness has spurred calls for free mental health care. A proposed November ballot measure [bold added]

would be a gargantuan undertaking meant to hit at the heart of the city’s homelessness crisis. But with no guaranteed source of funding, public health officials say it could also force the city to more than double its budget for those services.

The City already spends $400 million per year.

In other news about City services, San Francisco refuses to maintain 148 miles of City streets because they're "unaccepted,"

often because they’re on steep hillsides and were never paved or because they’re narrower than regular streets. The city, therefore, has no responsibility for maintaining those stretches. According to the city itself, of course.

The Chronicle runs a good-news story about how volunteers, with the help of charities, fixed up public lands that the City refuses to maintain in Bernal Heights (close to the intersection of Hwys 101 and 280):

Trees were uncared for and overgrown, making it dark and sketchy, even during the daytime. Homeless people set up camp. Drug dealers peddled their wares. Thieves dumped empty Amazon boxes, briefcases and backpacks after swiping their contents. The concrete staircase became broken and unsafe.

“It was disgusting,” explained Vicky Rideout, who lives near the stretch. “Full of weeds. Full of trash. Twenty years’ worth of trash had accumulated here because it was no one’s job to pick it up...It stank. That’s what I remember the most — how much it smelled. There was a lot of human feces, animal feces.”

In 2016

Kudos to the residents of Bernal Heights (Chron photo)

Andre Rothblatt, an architect, designed a gorgeous new staircase with zigzags of colored tile, getting approval from Public Works to redo the staircase and from the Arts Commission for the tile work. The neighbors also secured permission from the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency to close the stairs for repairs.

Yes, even though the city doesn’t want to care for the beleaguered street, it still put the neighbors who stepped up through the bureaucratic wringer.

“The structure of government right now is there are way more people whose job it is to slow you down and stop you than to help you,” Rideout said. “We did encounter challenges and slowdowns and obstacles and ‘No, you can’t cut these trees down’ and ‘You have to turn in these tile plans three times.’

That's San Francisco--it decides whether or not to "accept" street maintenance, a basic function of government in the rest of America--but still insists on controlling volunteers trying to remedy a problem that it won't fix.

Meanwhile, back to the proposal at the beginning of this post,

the city would be required to build a drop-in center, and create a new Office of Coordinated Care

How much of the hundreds of millions of dollars would actually be delivered to the mentally ill homeless population? Will another byzantine bureaucracy be created? Can you tell that these are rhetorical questions?