How SF—and other cities—can level up its anti-homelessness playbook (part 3 of 3)

John Singer Sargent: Camping at Lake O-Hara, 1916. Image in Public Domain

San Francisco homeless advocate JConr Ortega offers up three practical steps for addressing homelessness in and beyond the Golden Gate City: audit nonprofits and withdraw funding from ineffective orgs, impose accountability requirements for social service recipients, and crack down on local drug cartels. Ortega's hard-hitting comments for California Insider (the final Opp Now installment) reads below.

So there are three things I would do in order to solve the problem of San Francisco.

The first one is we have to not only do an audit of the nonprofits in San Francisco, but we have to actually put on the big boy pants and swallow our pride and take all the money away from nonprofits who [aren't] actually proving that their tactics work. That's the first step.

Taking that money and investing it into housing for people who can't afford rent, and treatment for those who are drug addicted, but we also have to ensure that those who are currently living on the streets who are getting benefits are given an option. “We're going to take the benefits away, but we have this other way you can still get your daily necessities. So we're not going to give you $600 a month to be on the streets, but we will give you this place where you'll be clothed, you'll be fed, but you've got to, A, you've got to look for work, [B] you've got to bring yourself up, and [C] you've got to hold yourself accountable. That's how I got myself out of homelessness. I got up, I held myself accountable, and I continued to do that every single day.

The next thing we have to also tackle is drug dealers. We cannot, under any circumstance, allow drug dealers to continue to fester in our streets of San Francisco. And the cartels in our state have been doing a really good job postering up in every city, even cities that no one thought there would even see cartel activity, but we have to start cracking down on cartels. The problem is with our city is we've mistaken compassionate [sic] for tolerance. You can be compassionate, you can care about everyone, but you have to understand, you have to also hold people accountable for the problems, for the situations that happen. So if you're a drug dealer, you're going to get punished for selling drugs. … If you're a drug addict, we will get you treatment. But you've got to go through treatment. You can't just be festering out onto the streets. (55:07–57:18)

Watch the whole thing here.

Related:

• Housing expert says: San Jose--lots of homeless spending, still-soaring homelessness

• Sacramento DA: City's homeless response lenient, inconsistent, a “public safety crisis”

• Report: Strengthened substance abuse services needed to break homelessness cycles

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