Past, Present, and Future Tents

Last week's world-has-changed table has an unexpected addition (in red):

World 1.0	World 2.0
Police: uncover your face	Police: cover your face
Take mass transit	Cancel mass transit
Reusable	Single-use
Urban	Suburban
Specialist	Jack-of-all-trades
Supermodels	Computer models
Senators	Governors
Interdependency	Self sufficiency
Medical insurance	Medical supply chain
Moisturizer	Sanitizer
Homeless tents bad	Homeless tents good

The Chronicle explains:[bold added]

18th Ave., SF (Chron photo)

From the Tenderloin to the Castro to the Richmond, the shelter-in-place order has caused an explosion of homeless tents popping up on sidewalks all across San Francisco — and it comes with the blessing of the city.

With the city’s already crowded shelters unable to provide the required social distancing, city officials have decided tents are the next best thing. So for now the tents that the city worked so hard to remove in recent years are back and pretty much untouchable.

“I know of about 600 tents that we have helped give out. But there are probably a lot more that have been given out by community members, small businesses and shelters that have no room,” said Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness.

“Tents are actually part of the Centers for Disease Control recommendations and the recommendations of the Trump administration,” Friedenbach said.

The effect, however, has been like rolling back the clock.

“When we started out working on addressing tent encampments in August 2016, we estimated there were about 1,200 tents citywide,” Jeff Kositsky the city’s Healthy Streets Operations Center manager. “We got it down to under 400. Now, I estimate it is over 750 and rising quickly.”

The City seems to be operating under the same logic that gives free needles to drug addicts. The policy may improve the population's health, but it also subsidizes the bad behavior and does nothing to reduce it.

Afterthought: Christians who wanted to worship together on Easter Sunday should have set up tents on church lawns, since civil authorities apparently bless this method of maintaining social distancing.