San Francisco has more billionaires per square mile than anywhere in the US. It also has more homeless people. Danny Fortson meets the residents of its tent cities.
Jahmal Hilliard rises every day at 4.15am, straps on his shoes, pushes through the door of the homeless shelter and walks to the first of his two jobs. For the past nine years Hilliard, 43, has worked at the San Francisco Giants baseball stadium, where he makes US$22 ($30) an hour stocking the kitchen. He finishes at 1pm, sleeps for a couple of hours at the shelter, then jumps on the bus across town to start a second eight-hour shift at a restaurant supply company, which pays him US$18 ($25) an hour.
He works as many as 80 hours a week to bring in up to US$1,600 ($2,250). Yet since April, when a disagreement with his sister left him without a home, Hilliard has struggled to find a place to live: he shares a cramped room with his girlfriend and one-year-old daughter at a shelter in the heart of San Francisco's drug-infested Tenderloin district.
"It's night of the living dead out there," he says. "I'm stepping over bodies. People sleeping on the street. People doing drugs." He has a strategy to stay safe on his commute. He keeps a knife in one pocket and a portable speaker in the other, the volume turned way up. "They know I am coming," he explains. "They can hear me. So there are no surprises."
You could be forgiven for thinking that Hilliard was walking the streets of Caracas or Kinshasa, instead of one of the richest cities in the world. But this is San Francisco in 2021, the place with more billionaires, and homeless people, per square mile than anywhere else in America.
Hilliard's goal: to scrimp and save enough so that by his daughter's birthday next month they are out of the shelter and in their own home. It will be tough. A typical two-bedroom apartment in San Francisco goes for about US$3,700 ($5,200) a month, and requires earnings of at least US$39 ($54) an hour to cover rent and bills, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. "I shouldn't be here, but everyone is like this," he says, holding his hand under his chin. "Just trying to keep their heads above water."
Hilliard, a beanie atop his head and cheeks carpeted in salt-and-pepper stubble, is the face of a humanitarian crisis that intensified as the pandemic took hold. Homelessness soared. Tent encampments mushroomed across the Golden State: under flyovers in Los Angeles, car parks in Oakland, on the pavements of San Diego. In the San Francisco Bay Area, which encompasses 7.8 million people, more than 35,000 people were homeless leading into the pandemic — either sleeping on the streets, in cars or temporary shelters. Approximately 70 per cent of them, about 24,500 people, were thought to be "unsheltered". While it's tricky to make international comparisons because of differing definitions of homelessness, that 24,500 contrasts with about 11,000 people "sleeping rough" in London, which has a population of 8.9 million. In San Francisco city itself, which has a population of just 875,000, there were more than 5,000 unsheltered homeless. The pandemic has made things worse.
Just as this crisis has unfolded, so too has an unprecedented economic boom. This is perhaps most acutely on display in the Bay Area, the seat of Facebook, Google, Apple and Netflix, tech empires that have benefited from the pandemic as people stuck at home moved more of their lives online. Those four behemoths alone saw their market value balloon by a combined US$2.8 trillion in 18 months.
The surge created huge windfalls for tens of thousands of share-owning employees, who are churning their newfound wealth into the housing market, pushing prices to new heights. Tech has powered the state to a record US$75 billion budget surplus. Household income has exploded by US$164 billion. If California were a country, it would be the fifth largest economy in the world — and recently it has been growing faster than everywhere apart from China.
However, the bonanza has not been evenly distributed. The cash has funnelled upwards, not down. Today an unremarkable three-bedroom home in the Bay Area can fetch US$2.5 million. The upshot is a state cleaving in two.
Mahnaz Saveri, 46, once lived in her own three-bedroom house. She says she had "a company car, a personal shopper at [the luxury department store] Neiman Marcus, and 349 pairs of shoes". Today she stays in a broken-down motorhome in Oakland, under a vast flyover that carries traffic on to the Bay Bridge and into San Francisco. She has lived here for two years, dodging rats and sexual predators. "It's hard for a single woman to be out here," she says, "and not be compromised one way or another, to not be treated like a commodity, a disposable fancy."
Her old life had unravelled when she fell into a deep depression. She was offered US$8,000 to move out of her house by an investor who wanted to redevelop her building. She took the money, even though it would not be enough to get her into a new place; by then she no longer had a salaried job and was driving for Uber. "My depression was so bad that I let this happen. My psychiatrist had to make house calls because I couldn't even get to the door to walk out."
She is one of at least 150 people who live in this community, a smattering of tents and decrepit camper vans among the carcasses of hundreds of smashed, burnt and stripped vehicles. Residents launched a clean-up of the area themselves. A local craftsman has built a series of small buildings, including a kitchen, a health clinic and a store bursting with donated clothes. But the site is in danger of being bulldozed by Caltrans, the state's transportation authority, which owns much of the land and is concerned that a fire could damage the supports of the motorway. If and when they get pushed off the land, the residents will be forced elsewhere, perhaps to one of Oakland's sanctioned sites for recreational vehicles (RVs), or to find a new spot to pitch a tent.
With brutal irony, one resident might be called to demolish his own home, a graffiti-covered RV not far from Saveri's. Harold Levi, 32, works in a road crew for Caltrans, picking up trash on the side of the motorway and at times clearing homeless encampments. "I know what they are looking for. They're looking for that," he says, pointing to a pile of rubbish stacked high against a flyover support.
Levi was jailed for life at the age of 14 for killing four people. His girlfriend and baby had died in a drive-by shooting and he had retaliated. He was released a year ago after California passed a law making it illegal to try juveniles as adults, but his re-entry into the outside world has been rough. His only option for accommodation was communal housing offered by a non-profit organisation. "I just did years in an institution," he says. "I'm not going to go to a different institution, where I gotta still ask permission to leave to go to the store, to make my bed a certain way."
So he went from 13 years of prison straight to homelessness, sleeping in a tent before a property owner paid him and others US$200 each to leave the area. He ended up saving enough cash for the RV, where he has been for four months. "If this is something that you're not used to, it's hell," he explains. "Just the small details, like what we're just sitting in, you know. It's infested with rats, there's wildlife and gunshots. It's cold."
Across the bay in San Francisco, shootings have risen; burglaries have soared. The pharmacy chain Walgreens has shut 17 stores in recent years because of a rise in brazen robberies. The theft rate at its San Francisco sites is four times the average across the rest of its estate, despite the company spending 35 times more on security guards. Prominent figures such as Elon Musk have noisily left the state for low-tax locations such as Texas and Florida, claiming that California's heavy-handed Covid response, its high taxes, political dysfunction and open-air misery have become simply too much to bear. Musk explained his Texas move thus: "If a team has been winning for too long, they get a little complacent … and then they don't win the championship any more. California has been winning for a long time, and I think they're taking it for granted a little bit."
Indeed, for the first time in its 171 years, California is set to lose a seat in Congress (down to 52) because its population has stagnated at about 40 million while other states have grown. An oft-repeated story last year was of the difficulty in finding a removals truck — because they had all been hired to help people flee the state.
"California has become that chapter of the American dream, with all that is good and bad," says David McCuan, a politics professor at Sonoma State University. "Tax income is flourishing from the Silicon Valley zillionaires, but it is framed by this vexing problem of housing affordability, homelessness and a loss of governance at the local level. In major cities you have places that look like the third world."
Perhaps nowhere is this dysfunction more apparent than at the corner of Hyde and Turk St in San Francisco's Tenderloin.
Ali Muhamed, 50, sees them come into his corner shop, which is called the Hyde-Turk Market. Kids, fresh-faced, innocent and, at first, clean. Then he watches them transform into zombies, dirty and desperate for their next hit of a drug that is cutting a swathe through the city: fentanyl, the opioid that killed Prince and Tom Petty, and which is, according to the Drug Enforcement Agency, up to 50 times more potent than heroin. "You see the youngest people come in, high-schoolers. And then you see them after one month, two months, three months, look like that," he says, gesturing toward a gaggle of addicts milling around the shop door. "It's hard."
In San Francisco more than twice as many people died last year of fentanyl overdoses — 697, or nearly two per day — than died of Covid. The city is on pace to break that record this year. Here, just a few blocks from a towering US federal building and the headquarters of Twitter, the drug is plentiful and cheap.
This part of the city has long been notorious for homelessness and crime, but fentanyl has turned it into an almost indescribable theatre of misery. Dealers work the corners with impunity, flashing giant rolls of bills and doling out fentanyl in rock or powder form. Users shoot up or smoke the drug in broad daylight, betraying no concerns about getting caught.
The city's district attorney is Chesa Boudin, a lawyer whose parents were convicted of murder (they were getaway drivers in a robbery that left two police officers and a security guard dead). He won office in 2019, campaigning on a pledge to empty jails of petty criminals and to decriminalise "quality of life" crimes, including drug use, homelessness and public urination. The Tenderloin is the apotheosis of that policy, the place where the miserable find company.
Dr Anton Nigusse Bland, former head of mental health reform in San Francisco, coined a term for what is on display here: a population afflicted by the "perilous trifecta" of homelessness, untreated mental health issues and drug addiction. At least 4,000 people fall into that category, according to city estimates.
Getting the mentally ill into long-term care is nigh impossible because the city will only admit someone if they have been picked up eight times in a year on a "5150" — a section of the welfare code that allows the psychiatrically disturbed to be detained involuntarily for 72 hours. The result: thousands of people cycling endlessly from the streets to hospitals, jail, shelters and back to the streets.
Washing over them is a tide of lethal opioids that authorities appear virtually powerless to stop. Famously progressive San Francisco is a "sanctuary city", which prohibits it from co-operating with federal authorities seeking to deport illegal migrants, many of whom have been trafficked here and are the core of the city's fentanyl dealer network. (California also passed a sanctuary state law in 2017.) With authorities at loggerheads, an open-air drug market thrives at the heart of a wider illegal economy.
Around the corner from Turk and Hyde is the Civic Centre Plaza, which operates as another market of sorts. This one is in stolen goods. Addicts come to sell their possessions, or what they have taken from friends, family, from Walgreens, to men leaning on their scooters, empty backpacks ready to be filled with loot. "That's a whole other scene over there," an addict who will only identify himself as Fetty Boy explains. "That's how we get the money."
In June police seized 16lb of fentanyl — a drugs cache that could "wipe out" the city population four times over, the police chief said. It was hard to tell whether it made a dent in the booming trade at San Francisco's opioid bazaar.
Lou Hammonds has seen worse. The 49-year-old works at Urban Alchemy, a community service organisation that employs former long-term offenders — which in most cases means people who murdered someone, or tried to, and spent decades in prison for their crimes. The organisation has won several contracts to manage San Francisco's most difficult jobs: keeping public lavatories clean, its subway stations safe and pushing drug dealers off the block.
Hammonds spent 21 years at Pelican Bay, a supermax prison, for shooting a rival gang member nine times, paralysing him from the neck down. Repeated attacks on prison guards landed him in solitary confinement for 12 of those years. I meet him at a WeWork office. He has a cherubic face, shiny bald head, jet-black goatee and a stud in his ear, looking nothing like the violent gang leader that he was for most of his life. My "How ya doing?" is answered with a beaming "Grateful". He offers me some kombucha tea and passes me his phone to help explain his daily experience. A video shows him hunched over a man, administering CPR on the pavement. Another fentanyl overdose.
"He was purple when we got to him. He was dead," Hammonds explains. After a few minutes of chest compressions, mouth-to-mouth and some shots from an inhaler containing Narcan — a powerful treatment used to reverse overdoses — the man coughs back to life and sits up. The man's friend, who had been watching near by, collapses to his knees and hugs his friend's shins, bawling. In three years Hammonds has done this on 209 occasions. "Most of the time it is people who are doing fentanyl for the first time, or who are just out of rehab. Sometimes we can't save them."
Walk through the toughest quarters of the city and you will likely see Urban Alchemy's workers in their signature hi-vis vests and black trousers. Lena Miller, the organisation's founder, says her workforce possesses a set of skills uniquely suited to their jobs. Who better to de-escalate a situation, to handle a threatening person, than someone who spent years inside a prison with some of the most dangerous people on the planet?
"Many of our people have this sense of remorse," Miller says. "Maybe they killed somebody or damaged their community in a serious way. And so here's an opportunity to give back."
Urban Alchemy workers are unarmed but for a radio and, usually, a Narcan inhaler. Outside the Hyde-Turk Market, one of the team introduces himself as "Aladdin" and explains a typical day: "Threats. Violence. Getting knives pulled out on you. Having to help business owners kick people out. Business owners getting vandalised. Naked people. People urinating and defecating in public, nonstop stuff every day."
"It's a pretty good job," he adds pithily.
In 2020 Urban Alchemy workers "reversed" overdoses for more than 600 people. Where its workers go, violence diminishes, the streets are cleaner and people feel safer. But often they will clear a block only for the dealers and tents to file in behind them once again.
While it can feel like a Sisyphean struggle, the pandemic has spurred some change. San Francisco's mayor, a woman named London Breed, was so concerned by the potential for an outbreak of Covid among the homeless that she commandeered a car park in the shadow of City Hall's vast gilded dome for an experiment: a sanctioned tent city. The goal was to replace the jumble of tents on the pavement with a more sanitary and orderly living space.
Today the "safe sleeping village" is home to a grid of 111 rudimentary wooden platforms, each evenly spaced and topped with a tent. It is fenced off from the public, has portable bathrooms, showers, a smartphone charging station and a food service that provides three meals a day to the residents. It has also become a safe injection site of sorts.
"Our practitioners don't tell them, 'You can't do that.' " Hammonds explains. "They say, 'Hey, bro, just let me know [when you are about to smoke or inject]. Let me know, so I can keep an eye on you.' Because we're right there. We know when there's a bad batch of fentanyl."
The city has since set up several such sanctioned sites and requisitioned hotels and motels to house thousands without shelter. Other cities have noticed. Los Angeles, also in the grip of a homelessness crisis, hired Urban Alchemy to establish and run its first two tent villages.
In another place creating a large homeless encampment on the doorstep of government might come off as a protest. Here it is something else: a solution. But much more needs to be done.
Throughout the reporting for this story, a theme that emerged time and again was the dramatic over-representation of people from ethnic minority backgrounds on the streets. Native Americans make up 0.5 per cent of the Bay Area populace but account for 6 per cent of the homeless. Black people make up just 6 per cent of its citizens but 30 per cent of its homeless population — those who live either on the streets or in temporary shelters.
The other common theme is mental illness, particularly depression. In the past half century the federal government got rid of 95 per cent of its public hospital beds for people suffering from mental health problems, leaving care to a patchwork of local government and non-profit organisations. It is a system with many cracks through which to fall.
The juxtaposition of San Francisco's two worlds is difficult to digest. Every day a former convict is, somewhere, pumping the chest of an overdose victim. And virtually every day somewhere else in the city somebody is becoming wildly, suddenly rich. An acquaintance of mine tells the story of her childhood friend, with whom she shares a duplex apartment. Last year this friend started working at Coinbase, a cryptocurrency start-up. After the company floated on the stock market in April at a $100 billion valuation, she became extremely wealthy thanks to the shares she was handed when she was hired. She went from the duplex to a palatial $4.5 million, six-bedroom home with sweeping views of the bay. A friend of mine joined a tech company a few years back as an executive assistant. When it floated months later she received a seven-figure windfall.
Both of these people are smart and capable people, but they are not founders. They are not boldly disrupting industries. They just happened to be cogs in the right machine. Antonio Garcia Martinez, a former Facebook executive who now writes a newsletter on tech and society, says: "Everyone who's been in Silicon Valley has lived this, where there's some dude who joins a random company, goes through the usual start-up BS for two or three years and comes out worth $50 million, and is set, generationally."
It is as if a cosmic lottery is, every day, choosing winners and losers at random — and it shows no signs of slowing. Indeed, despite the lockdowns, soaring death tolls and record unemployment, 2020 was the best year in a decade for technology company stock market floats. Nearly 120 companies, including household names like Airbnb, listed with a combined market value of more than $250 billion, minting thousands more worker-bee millionaires.
Which is why breathless talk of an "exodus" from California, fanned by a handful of techies with large Twitter followings, is overblown. Jennifer Rosdail, a longtime San Francisco estate agent, said that there was a window of "about six weeks" when the property market crashed. Today house prices are booming again as well-to-do workers return from their pandemic-inspired stays in the mountains of Montana or the countryside of France. The median price for a home in the city has soared to $1.9 million — higher than before the pandemic. "If you are selling your house here, there will be someone to buy it," she says. "It was not an exodus. It was a vacation."
Part of the "magic" of California is the sense that anything is possible, a frontier mentality drawing an endless stream of dreamers and schemers angling for their shot at the Silicon Valley lottery. It is America at its best — and its worst, where the other side of exalted individualism is a stunning lack of societal infrastructure. If you stumble, there is no net to catch you. "When you fall here, you fall on your f***in' face," Urban Alchemy's Miller says.
The pandemic has exposed the costs of that bargain like never before. But there is reason for hope. California's record surplus, on top of billions in federal Covid dollars, has created a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The state has more resources to fight social problems than it's had for half a century. Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, has set aside an astonishing $12 billion over the next two years for housing and homelessness services under the state's Covid recovery plan. The scheme includes 42,000 new housing units, as well as mental health and substance abuse programmes, all areas that have been defunded or deferred for decades.
Look past the misery of the Tenderloin, or the encampment under the Bay Bridge in Oakland, and you can see the faint outlines of progress in the construction sites erecting affordable housing developments, in a state government committing ten times more than any previous administration to the issue.
Change can't come too soon for Jahmal Hilliard as he holds down two jobs and tries to escape the homeless shelter. He has kept his eye trained on his daughter's birthday in September. "I don't want her to see this," he says, referring to the grim world right outside the front door. "She sees it, but doesn't understand it. If she was older, though, I'd have to explain." All he wants is a little help and opportunity to make his own way. "Just open the door a bit so that I can walk through it, and after that, you know, I'm all right."
Later he calls to say he has good news: he has finally been accepted on to a subsidised housing programme that he applied to two years ago.
"I don't know if this is God's plan or what," he gushes. With some luck he'll celebrate his daughter's big day under his own roof. He says: "It's gonna be perfect."
Written by: Danny Fortson
© The Times of London