Twolf: Post-Grant's Pass and Newsom's directive: The narrative of homelessness just changed
Image by Franck Michel
Tom Wolf (twitter/x@twolfrecovery) is one of the Bay Area's most articulate observers of the homelessness crisis--as well as being a recovery advocate and director of West Coast Initiatives for the Foundation For Drug Policy Solutions. He is formerly homeless and in recovery. He says the recent SCOTUS decision as well as Newsom's homelessness directive daylight the flaws in our historic approach to homelessness. From the excellent TheVoiceSF website.
What else does this SCOTUS ruling and subsequent executive order from Governor Newsom tell us? It tells us that our current approach and philosophy of harm reduction, decriminalization, and meeting people where they are but giving them the choice to stay there is failing.
You can cite me data all day long, but your eyes do not lie. And when you look at the financial expenditures, it becomes clear that we’re literally throwing money into a black hole of nonprofits who mostly want to do the right thing but lack oversight, and in many cases have become solely dependent on contracts from state and local government to carry out the difficult task of providing “homeless services.”
In San Francisco alone, there are currently 12 nonprofit organizations whose sole existence is predicated on providing services to the homeless that are under investigation for either wage theft, financial malfeasance, illegal spending, and issuing credit cards to 50 percent of their staff with $10k credit limits and zero accountability on how it is spent.
If you consider this corruption coupled with a permissive ideology that “supports drug users” even unto death (30 people per month are dying of OD in SROs in San Francisco), its almost as if these failures eventually led to the SCOTUS decision.
That said, I don’t blame the Supreme Court. Their job is to interpret the Constitution. Instead, I blame the hubris of many homeless activists who were unwilling to see the truth. California has a drug and mental health crisis among its homeless population and housing alone doesn’t solve that. It takes an entire continuum of care that starts with basic shelter.
The governor has reluctantly agreed. Much to the chagrin of homeless activists. I think it’s time they stopped and looked in the mirror. Because your ideology just took a big hit.
Read the whole thing here.
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