We Have A Choice: Build Affordable Housing Or Live In Hell

Image of street homelessness

San Francisco is a beautiful city, and if you’re able to live here, you’re unbelievably lucky. It’s a pretty privileged place, that’s filled with privileged people who lead privileged lives. The topography is gorgeous, the fog is charming and the light that leaks from windows, situated on the city’s many hillsides look like inanimate tidal waves filled with the electricity of life that makes the City feel alive.

San Francisco is a place with a pulse. It has a heartbeat. Sometimes you can feel it. You’re walking along Mission Street and everything is buzzing. People are moving in every direction and everything feels surreal. At its best, San Francisco can remind you that everyone on earth is actually your neighbor; many times removed. At its worst, it can be a damning example of how hypocrisy can turn a literal Heaven into Hell.

When I see the unhoused, which I often do, they don’t disgust me, they remind me of my childhood.

Hell is a choice, and we need to stop choosing it. I’m not a soapbox liberal who pretends to care for social media clout. Nor am I an anarchist who’s advocating for a war or violent clash I’m not prepared for. Everyone’s a revolutionary until you see your friends die. If people saw real war, I doubt they’d be tweeting war time rhetoric as often as they do. I’m just trying my best to not be a complete and utter hypocrite.

When I see the unhoused, which I often do, they don’t disgust me, they remind me of my childhood. My mother could easily be on the street again if it wasn’t for social safety nets. My family was hit hard by methamphetamine. My uncle Mitchell was nearly murdered in Concord over a drug debt related to the meth trade. They burned his manufactured home in the Sunny Acres Mobile Home park to the ground and tried to blow up his car. After running through the insurance money on trips to New York and Miami like an idiot, he was sleeping in his car and my mom’s couch in Downtown Martinez for nearly a year before renting a room in the Excelsior.

After my parents broke up, I moved out of Oakland and I ended up at a homeless shelter in Concord with my mom. I got a firsthand look into the every day lives of the people that usually sleep on the concrete. They’re less crazy when they’ve had a shower and food to eat. Many of them still did drugs off the premises, but when they saw a pathway to stability, it gave them some motivation to get clean. Most didn’t, but some did.

When you’re poor, life is hard. When you’re poor and don’t have a place to call home, it can easily become insurmountable.

My mom did. After roughly 9 months in the homeless shelter, we were approved for low-income housing in Martinez, California at Emerson Arms Apartments. It wasn’t perfect. At the time, it was the nucleus for central Contra Costa’s meth trade. It may still be, but it’s not as visible. When I visit now, I don’t see 3 or 4 dudes in tank tops and Dickie selling meth anymore. There was a time when offshoots of prison Nazi gangs, and Latinos who were strangely okay with that, controlled the complex. Thankfully those days appear to be over.

Despite the problems at the complex, I saw my mom slowly get better. She began taking classes at Project Second Chance, which is a program for illiterate adults to improve their reading skills. She’s not necessarily literate, but she’s not completely illiterate anymore either. I’m thankful for that. Life in Emerson Arms wasn’t perfect and many of our neighbors did drugs and sold drugs. Every now and then one of my neighbors would get raided and shit would be chaotic. But it provided a roof. When it rained outside, we had refuge. We had a refrigerator to store food, and a stove to cook with. We had a bathroom with a toilet and a shower that allowed us to have a semblance of human dignity, if nothing else.

When you’re poor, life is hard. When you’re poor and don’t have a place to call home, it can easily become insurmountable.

It’s not a city’s job to get people off drugs. However, it is a city’s job to ensure the wellbeing of its citizens to the best of its ability, and San Francisco is not doing that.

I still deal with some resentment from growing up the way I did, but, in all honesty, I’m one of the lucky ones. I got out. I work in tech now and I have status as a local celebrity which has provided me a multitude of privileges I wouldn’t have had otherwise.

I wouldn’t have been able to do any of that without stable housing. I’m not special. I’m fucking lucky.

It’s not a city’s job to get people off drugs. However, it is a city’s job to ensure the wellbeing of its citizens to the best of its ability, and San Francisco is not doing that.

When you provide someone with a home, you provide someone with a sense of self and hope for the future. That hope can lead someone down a path of self improvement. This won’t happen for everyone. Some people will still die of drug overdoses. Some people will trash their apartments. Some people are too far gone. That doesn’t mean they don’t deserve a home.

Everyone deserves a home.

Don’t you want to walk down the street and not have to see used syringes and feces? Aren’t you sick of it? We’re all effected by it. We need to stop pretending we’re above consequences of the world we choose to create.

I know there’s a lot of money in Bay Area real estate. I know that increasing supply could lower the individual value of homes and I understand people want to enrich themselves at whatever the cost because we live in America and America is like that. But that greed and hypocrisy is destroying everything.

If you own a home, be happy you own a home. Stop making it an asset. Decorate your house, be happy and get out of the fucking way.

There are ways to do this effectively. Broke-Ass Stuart wrote an article back in 2019 for the SF Examiner that covered the hypocrisy of San Francisco’s outwardly woke, yet inwardly NIMBY homeowners beautifully. The article illustrated the need for navigation centers to get homeless people the services they need. This would be an ideal first step to get them into housing. We need to build vertically. San Francisco’s identity crisis between wanting to be a national park and a West Coast tech equivalent to Manhattan is stalling progress, especially for the unhoused. San Francisco is not a national park; it’s a major city that has come to symbolize that money can sometimes make things worse. Politicians arguing with wealthy homeowners about where to build housing while people die on the street is immoral.

The city could also purchase private real estate that’s on the market and fast track families into housing. These people could then pay 1/3rd of their income and potentially be given an opportunity to own the home. We already have a BMR program in the city for low income residents, why not expand it to allow for the possibility of formerly homeless homeowners? Wouldn’t that be cool? Sounds a lot better than putting in city hotels temporarily.

At the end of the day, we know what’s right and wrong. We know this is wrong. If collectively, a specific group’s greed is impeding the progress of another, it’s wrong. If you own a home, be happy you own a home. Stop making it an asset. Decorate your house, be happy and get out of the fucking way.

BLM signs and rainbow flags aren’t enough. Policing humor has accomplished nothing but alienate people who would otherwise be allies. The Bay Area’s rhetoric has been divorced from its reality for far too long. We need to live up to the progressive lies we tell. We can’t incarcerate our way out of this. We need to build housing. No amount of blue hair dye, stick and poke tattoos, or empty slogans will ever compare to the safety of four walls and a roof.

If we don’t build housing, our beautiful slice of Heaven will continue to be ugly as Hell.

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