Sequoia Capital Chairman Michael Moritz and angel investor Ron Conway have donated to San Francisco's Proposition Q: if passed, "the city would give residents of tent encampments 24 hours' notice to relocate to a shelter or accept a bus ticket out of town."
Other San Francisco ballot initiatives propose to build houses for homeless people, which is literally the only proven way to fight homelessness.
Moritz, Conway and the rest of the ethnic cleansing squad are operating on the theory that people are homeless because they choose not to find a place to live, not because there is nowhere they can live. In San Francisco, only 13% of households have the $269,000+ annual income (triple the median income) necessary to afford the median-priced home — a fact linked to the city's dysfunctional income segregation through city planning, massive cuts to HUD, Airbnb shenanigans, property speculation, and the incredible wealth-disparity in technology's capital city.
"The problem is visible, in your face, and it has an impact on the quality of life," says Jeff Kositsky, who in May was named the first director of San Francisco's new homeless department. There, he oversees a $220 million budget and 110 workers.A steep reduction in spending on affordable housing by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, dating to 1979, exacerbated a minor problem, according to the Western Regional Advocacy Project, a non-profit coalition of Western community organizations dealing with homelessness. The problem has since deepened amid income inequality, racial inequity and mental illness in cities across the U.S., Kositsky says.
Such disparity is magnified in the San Francisco Bay Area, where tech has created hundreds of billions of dollars in wealth in the Bay Area — and a yawning gap between the digital-haves and everyone else.
Silicon Valley's flourishing tech companies have largely been bystanders on the issues. Google and Twitter are among the few companies to donate money and resources.
Silicon Valley's acute homeless problem is on the ballot
[Jon Swartz/USA Today]
