A group of residents in San Francisco have come up with a novel solution to inhibit homeless people from camping on their residential street: placing roughly 25 boulders on the sidewalk.
Clinton Park in the city’s Mission Dolores neighborhood has been plagued by homeless people; one resident told KTVU, “They’ll shoot up and stay overnight. A bunch of my neighbors, we all chipped in a few hundred dollars and I guess this is what they came up with.” Another resident added, “Since the rocks, it has helped,” neighbor Ernesto Jerez told KTVU. “It’s something. We’ve got to do something. I feel like there is nothing being done.”
Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition On Homelessness, argued to KTVU, “There’s actually a name for it. It’s called anti-homeless architecture.”
Fox News noted, “Similar landscaping measures have been implemented in other parts of the city. The California Department of Transportation has put rocks in an open space off Bayshore Boulevard to deter encampments, while the Eureka Valley-Harvey Milk Branch of the San Francisco Public Library – in the same neighborhood – has made design choices that are perceived as anti-homeless, according to KTVU.”
On Wednesday, radio host Mike Slater told Fox & Friends:
We’ve got people taking matters into their own hands is what we have because the governments of California refuse to do anything about this problem. They refused to do anything for decades, and the things that they are doing just make it worse; they make it worse for everyone: business owners, for families, and for homeless people. And so this is the one point, if I may, that I want to get across, especially to our progressive friends: It is not compassionate to let people sleep on the street, it is not compassionate for people who are mentally ill or addicted to spiral darker into their addiction and illness on the street. Critics of this say that it is inhumane to put these boulders out on the street; I say it’s inhumane to let people sleep on the street. We can’t allow this anymore; people need help, and people are taking last resorts; they’re doing anything they can because the government’s not doing anything.
Slater noted: “The government does this too; the Ninth Circuit Court of appeals building in San Francisco has metal spikes and metal bars over flat surfaces. Oakland’s city hall has spikes; this isn’t like an evil citizen thing to do. And these are good people who are doing this; these aren’t ‘evil conservatives’ in San Francisco who are setting these boulders up.”
As The Daily Wire reported last May:
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the city has spent more than $70 million cleaning feces and drug paraphernalia from streets and sidewalks this fiscal year, but it’s nowhere near what is needed to make San Francisco’s streets safe for pedestrians. The city says crews are operating constantly, trying to get the “poop problem” that plagues San Francisco’s streets under control, but even as the city finds new and innovative ways for residents to report and avoid piles of feces on public sidewalks, the poop problem, they say, keeps growing.