BY JOELLEN COLLINS
San Francisco’s troubles, a reflection of many of our country’s woes, have been thoroughly covered in the press and other publications. A May 21 column in The Washington Post summarized the sadness of the once glorious city. During my recent trip there, one obvious civic problem struck me once again and was even more memorable when I read about the recent financial state of our working community in Idaho.
The issue I kept encountering was that of the omnipresence of the homeless almost everywhere in San Francisco, a city I have loved all of my life. When I bewailed the pathetic lives of those sleeping on public streets, my daughter noted that the city’s wealth is astronomical, not only in the individual worth of many multimillionaires and billionaires, but also in the huge amount of revenue collected by the city. Why can’t this problem be solved? Isn’t there someone, somewhere in that metropolis, who cares enough to spend a fraction of their industry’s money to explore solutions? Where is the brilliant creativity of recent residents?
While my assessment is an obvious simplification and there is not time here to cover even a small part of the reasons for this tragedy, one theme was haunting, and that is that this kind of dysfunction is in great part because many of us simply don’t care. I am opening myself up to all the arguments from people who think the homeless are simply lazy and just won’t work or take care of themselves. But I have come to believe that if there is a way to ignore a problem like this, people will. Driving to one’s multimillion-dollar home in a car with dark windows, perhaps one can ignore those miserable people huddling by garbage cans in a cold, wet rain.
We may not think about those impoverished street dwellers because we don’t have them here, mainly because our comfortable little valley is too cold. I am afraid that a callous attitude, which implies that these homeless choose to live this way, is dangerous not only to our need to face the issues of the unequal and growing disparity of incomes in our country, but because of our souls.
Recently, I read that Blaine County is one of the areas in Idaho most suffering from low income and expensive housing. We all know this, but my fear is that a superficial look at the cause of not only California’s misery, but very importantly at our warped economy here, is fruitless. Catch a few episodes of HGTV’s series “House Hunters” to see what people can buy in other parts of this country for so much less than what they could afford in Blaine County.
We may not have homeless on our streets, but we have many who are not able to live in the communities in which they work; in essence, they are almost “homeless,” at least in what most of us would consider as having to accept distant and often subpar residences to survive.