Cultivating the Coronavirus in San Francisco

New York City had the subway system. Over the past few months it became a homeless encampment, a petri dish for coronavirus. Add to that the brilliance of Gov. Cuomo, who sent infected patients to nursing homes, thereby making them the epicenter of the virus, and you see how well our most progressive officials are dealing with the current pandemic.

And now we have San Francisco, Nancy Pelosi’s home town, the most radically leftist city in America. What is happening in San Francisco? Are the local authorities cleaning up the homeless encampments that are destroying urban life? Not a chance.

Given the ineptitude, and the unwillingness to violate the constitutional right to treat the streets like open-air toilets, a group of locals is now suing the city. It is trying to force the officials to clean up the city’s filthiest neighborhood.

Apparently, the city government has responded to the pandemic by going soft of homelessness. So, aside from the lack of basic hygiene, these places are rife with drug dealing and other crimes. 

A San Francisco law school, business owners and local residents are suing the city to force it to clean up the Tenderloin neighborhood — alleging an almost 300 percent spike in homeless shanty towns, drug dealing and feces-covered sidewalks have made conditions “insufferable.”

The lawsuit, filed in federal court May 4 by a group of plaintiffs led by the University of California Hastings College of Law, seeks a court order to stop the city from using the neighborhood as a “containment zone” for homeless encampments.

“Open-air drug sales and other criminal activity, plus crowds of drug users and sidewalk-blocking tents, pervade and threaten the health and lives of all of the Tenderloin’s residents,” the lawsuit reads. “What has long been suffered in the Tenderloin has become insufferable.”

A containment zone for the virus. What a terrific idea. Give the virus its own area, to thrive in comfort. Are any other nations in the world allowing this to happen? Is this what Dr. Fauci recommended? Will senators ask Dr. Fauci what he thinks of this during his testimony today?

Here are the numbers from the San Francisco Tenderloin district:

The number of tents and makeshift homeless shelters in the 50-block section that more than 20,000 permanent residents call home has more than doubled from 158 in early March to 391 as of May 1, according to a survey cited in the lawsuit.

A city-issued report, meanwhile, found a 285 percent spike in the number of tents and structures in the neighborhood from January through Wednesday.

Yes, indeed, it’s become a “pandemic containment zone.” It’s too much for the law professors:

“We are suing because our neighborhood has become a pandemic containment zone,” UC Hastings Chancellor David Faigman told CNN. “Tents are blocking streets, tents are blocking doorways, there are needles in the streets, there’s open-air drug dealing.”

Faigman called on Mayor London Breed and the city’s police department to “clear the streets,” where cops have been directed not to remove the tents despite the health risk they pose to residents, the lawsuit claims.

Fear not, Mayor Breed has a plan:

While acknowledging that the Tenderloin has seen a significant increase of homelessness since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Breed released a plan Wednesday to improve conditions there — including providing “safe sleeping alternatives” for those with tents, increased police presence and improved access to hygiene.

“We are committed to ensuring our most vulnerable neighbors are safe and have access to the resources they need to stay healthy during this public health crisis,” Breed said in a statement.

But those moves won’t fix the problem, Faigman said, calling Breed’s plan an “entirely inadequate” response to the situation.

Of course, it’s inadequate. 

The amazing thing is: aside from the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, no one is calling out the mayor for gross mismanagement. Similarly, no one is calling out de Blasio or Cuomo. Not a chance. They blame it on Trump.