Hundreds of unsheltered people living in tent encampments in the blocks surrounding the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco have been forced to leave by city outreach workers and police as part of an attempted “clean up the house” ahead of this week’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation’s annual free trade conference.
The action, which housing advocates allege violated a court injunction, was celebrated by right-wing figures and the tech crowd, who have long been convinced that the city is in terminal decline because of an increase in encampments in the downtown area.
The X account End Wokness wrote that the displacement was proof the “government can easily fix our cities overnight. It just doesn’t want to” (the post received 77,000 likes). “Queer Eye but it’s just Xi visiting troubled US cities then they get a makeover,” joked Packy McCormick, the founder of Not Boring Capital and advisor to Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto VC team. The New York Post celebrated the action, saying that residents had “miraculously disappeared.”
While I agree we should be solving the root problem of homelessness equitably, the headline is misleading as I know many people on the left were also happy to have clean streets for a while.
Live in Bay Area, vote progressive/left, so ready for encampment to be less of a thing - in favor of some better solution like what they have near Oracle Stadium.
I personally think a not insignificant amount of encampment dwellers are just people taking advantage of the situation to steal and get high/drunk all day rather than stay clean and work some crappy job to get by, but even I think these sweeps are stupid and a waste of resources as they just shuffle people to other areas rather than accomplish a single thing.
And there is no mention in the article about who ordered and carried out the sweep.
Who cheers about something is secondary to who actually does it. This article doesn’t address who actually did it.
To solve homelessness would mean to completely upend the entire world’s economy and change to a global socialist structure. Homelessness is baked into our economic system. Capitalism is a zero sum game and if we’re going to celebrate having billionaires, we have to celebrate having people live and die on the street.
Capitalism is wired in such a way that productivity literally produces poverty.