The reaction, of course, was swift and fearless:

When apprised of the situation, San Francisco's Mayor Edwin Lee told reporters to contact the City's Homeless Outreach Team, but then reporters Matier and Ross contacted them, they found little to "get the homeless off the streets":

Luckily, San Francisco hasn't succumbed to that kind of "righteousness."

Cleanliness Is Next To Godlessness

The reason San Francisco has acquired as reputation as a "mean city" is because in its efforts to "clean up" certain sections (visible to tourists), it has criminalized homelessness. For many, "cleaning up" an area means sweeping up homeless people as much as the detritus of homelessness: people are treated like the trash they leave behind. Such an effort is certainly not Christian ... or humane.

The Fine Line of Compassion- and Getting My Comeuppance

A withered bag lady sat sprawled on a MUNI seat, with her one bandaged leg up on two seats perpendicular to her. When I sat down next to her, she pleaded with me not to touch her foot. I was respectful and managed to sit scrunched up for a while. Her odor, however, made it impossible for me to sit in proximity and I got up out of my seat gingerly.

"Thank you," she said.

I looked upon her as the quintessence of my report and when she seemed to nod off, tried to take her picture with my cell phone.

"Please don't do that! Don't take my picture!"

Chagrined, I said that I wouldn't and lied that I wasn't really going to take one.

"Then why were you pointing your phone at me? You didn't ask me if you could take a picture! You were going to take my picture and post it on the internet with some stupid, humiliating headline! You have no respect! You're just hateful!"

She kept her diatribe up as she exited the car with her plastic bundles.

Even if I had been making a serious documentary - a justification in many people's eyes - I would have felt ashamed. The fine line of compassion is respect for the person needing compassion and I was definitely out of line. Writing about compassion is not necessarily compassionate in itself.

The Solution That Didn't Take Hold

Is there a solution? The problem with homelessness as opposed to other social/community concerns is that's it's so endemic: AIDS was national and SF served as it's focal point of compassion. "Sanctuary Cities" cropped up due to a surge in undocumented immigrants. When Reagan closed all mental institutions he created a base of homelessness that San Francisco never really got over. As the situation increased - with rising unemployment, hostels became full and no one seemed to care.

Gavin Newsom (then supervisor) thought he came up with a solution:

Wikipedia:

Care Not Cash altered city welfare assistance to the approximately 3,000 homeless adults who received about $395 a month to $59 a month plus housing and food. According to the measure, if the services weren't available, the city couldn't reduce a homeless person's aid. The idea behind Care Not Cash was to use the city's savings from cutting the welfare checks -- an estimated $13 million a year -- to set baseline funding for creating affordable housing, expanding shelters, and adding mental health and substance abuse treatment.

The affordable housing, the expansion of shelters and additional services never really materialized, as San Francisco was caught up in the dot com bust and it's resources spent on dealing with skyrocketing unemployment: solutions to homelessness seemed as fruitless and evasive as the solutions to fix SF's ever- problematic transit system (MUNI).

Techies: Demons or Saviours?

Several hundred tech workers, homeless-service providers, politicians and other San Franciscans gathered Wednesday night with a goal of identifying solutions to one of the city's most vexing problems: homelessness.

The town hall was organized by Greg Gopman, the former CEO of tech company AngelHack who made headlines in December 2013 for a Facebook post deriding homeless people as "degenerates," likening them to hyenas and saying they shouldn't be in Mid-Market, where business people work. After being blasted online and in the media, Gopman studied the city's homelessness problem for a year and organized the town hall meeting to share ideas for solving it.

The last four years, San Francisco has seen a sprouting up of impossibly expensive condos (average: $1200-$1500 per square foot) and skyrocketing rentals (a good two-bedroom going for $4000 per month). The average house in tony Pacific Heights is now over $5 million.

Without a doubt, the newly-stationed tech industry is to blame: funded start-ups and large salaries have driven "quality of living" to a very high price. Long-time residents of San Francisco are not thrilled and the tech industry has some image-mending to do, namely in the community-based non -profits.

With a $75 million gift to the San Francisco General Hospital Foundation, the soon-to-be renovated SF hospital and its under-construction new building will be getting the name The Priscilla and Mark Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center. The Facebook CEO and his wife Priscilla Chan, who is currently a pediatric resident at UCSF, previously gave $25 million to the Ebola fight with an October gift to the Centers for Disease Control.

The SF mayor's office has given these new tech companies special tax breaks - with a catch: so many hours of community service.

"The neighborhood isn't welcoming [the tech companies] with open arms," said Dina Hilliard, executive director of the North of Market/Tenderloin Community Benefit District. "It isn't clear if these benefits are going to mitigate the impacts the companies have on the neighborhood. Hopefully these plans are a floor and not a ceiling."

So in this last effort, San Francisco may be depending upon the kindness of strangers: imported compassion, so to speak.

Will it work?

*Note that by 1986, over 60 AIDS-related agencies had sprung up while only Los Angeles [and its Episcopal Diocese] had come to the fore. The rest of the country was much slower to respond.