(somber music)
- [Briggs] If you watch enough news, you're on Twitter,
you watch enough of my videos,
you already know San Francisco is in bad shape
and has been for some time.
This didn't just happen in the last few years,
this city's been heading down this track
for many, many years,
like a roller coaster with no breaks, seat belts,
or a teenager running the controls.
It's no secret that the city's biggest problem
is the homeless situation and crime
with cost of living and housing playing a smaller role
than most people would like to tell you.
Today, we're looking at what the (beep)
is wrong with San Francisco.
And we're just looking at the basics.
No fluff, no excuses, no crap.
Here's some facts you need to know before we get rolling.
San Francisco in 2021
was ranked the 19th most dangerous city
and has the 15th highest crime rate in the US.
Those numbers are a little bit of BS,
and I'll explain that later.
The National Coalition for the Homeless
has found that 38% of homeless people are alcohol dependent,
26 are dependent on other harmful chemicals,
oftentimes addiction is a result of homelessness.
The same study found that 38.5%
of the people experiencing homelessness
are suffering from severe mental illness.
Now you're probably wondering why that is over 100%.
A lot of those situations overlap each other.
In the end, different studies find that
between 92 and 96% of homeless fall into these categories.
So how did San Francisco get here?
To answer that, we gotta look back.
The United States took over San Francisco in 1846.
Yeah, we're going way back.
Two years later, it became a place of dreams
when gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill
about 150 miles northeast of the San Francisco Bay.
The bay is why San Francisco became the base
for all these gold miners.
People from around the world were landing
in the city by the bay hoping to strike it rich.
The gold rush was the beginning of the mystique
and mythology this city has carried with it
for over 150 years.
After the gold dried up, the people continued to come.
Different industries popped up
and different scenes lured people to San Francisco.
The beats, the hippies, and in the 1970s,
the city became the center for the gay rights movement
with the emergence of the Castro as a urban gay village.
San Francisco's always been a little bit weird,
so it kind of served as a beacon for the creative types.
That's what weird cities do.
Portland, Austin, they bring in art types
and with the art types come a lot of weird people.
San Francisco has had major events like earthquakes,
fires, a couple political assassinations,
and even an attempted assassination on President Ford, 1975.
The good and the bad help grow the mystique
and mythology of San Francisco.
You could look at any year at any city
and point out some good and some bad,
not just San Francisco.
A few decades ago, San Francisco began on a path
that would make its bad far outweigh the good
more than any other city in the United States.
Well, maybe not Detroit.
Detroit might have been a little bit worse,
but San Francisco is definitely up there.
In the research I've done
for this YouTube channel over the years,
I'm always amazed at the stats and stories of San Francisco.
How can a city with such wealth, history,
and beauty have so many homeless?
Why can't anything be done?
Why does San Francisco suck so bad?
I started thinking about how it reminded me
of a movie I saw when I was a kid,
it was called Soylent Green.
It is a cop thriller about a murder
in New York City many, many years in the future.
The film was made 1973 and that futuristic year was 2022.
Now if you've never seen the movie, let me explain.
This is from Wikipedia.
By the year 2022, effects of overpopulation, pollution,
and apparent climate catastrophe
has caused severe worldwide shortage of food,
water, and housing.
In New York city alone, there are 40 million people
and only the city's elite can afford spacious apartments,
clean water, and natural food.
In the movie, the poor live in squalor,
haul water from communal spigots,
and eat highly processed wafer called Soylent Red,
Soylent Yellow, and in the movie, the latest product,
which is far more flavorful and nutritious,
is called Soylent Green.
Other than the fact in the movie,
they find out Soylent Green is made out of dead people.
San Francisco reminds me a lot of the movie storyline.
- You gotta tell 'em!
Soylent Green is people!
- [Briggs] In a bizarre twist, this isn't from the movie,
one of the most popular lunch items
for tech workers in the bay area right now
is a meal replacement drink called Soylent.
I bought some just to try it out.
It's not that bad.
The vanilla tastes like a tire,
but the chocolate and strawberry are pretty good.
So San Francisco's biggest problem
is the homeless situation.
And with that comes the drugs, the alcohol, and the crime.
Why does this go on more in San Francisco
and really all of California
than just about any other state or any city?
Side note to this, Skid Row in Los Angeles
is far worse than San Francisco,
but it doesn't get nearly the same attention
that the Tenderloin in San Francisco gets.
So way back in the day,
San Francisco had a really high tolerance for drug use.
They had opium dens in the 1840s
when they started finding gold
and they didn't really set an ordinance
to shut them down until 1875.
So they had a good stretch
where you could just go to an opium den,
like you'd walk into your local bar.
And for many years after the 1875 ordinance,
it went underground
and then people just started doing it at home
and that really wasn't enforced.
I'm sure if you look back, you could find out
how they raided different opium dens early 1900s,
but really it wasn't enforced.
Drugs never really went away.
Then in the 1960s,
it blew up with all the hippies that came in.
After that you had one drug epidemic after the other.
Including the opioid crisis, which really put the situation
in San Francisco into overdrive
when it comes to their drugs.
Prior to 2010, let's say, around that area,
there were homeless, just like any major city,
but they were passed out on park benches,
they'd maybe put out a sleeping bag in the parks
and stuff like that at night,
and then get up, move around, whatever.
In 2011, the Occupy Wall Street movement happened.
And it happened in every major city, Seattle, Portland,
San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York,
all of these protestors
just started out camping in the parks.
They set up tents, they made little villages,
and that's how they lived for a few months.
When that was all said and done,
they kinda left the tents behind
and a lot of the homeless people started living in them.
They collected them, stayed in them,
and the occupied movement kind of gave them an idea
and made it seem okay to just pitch a tent on the sidewalk.
It sort of made it acceptable to the general population
to where, okay, I'm living in a tent,
I'm not living in a cardboard box,
like it used to be in the old days.
In a nutshell, the Occupy Wall Street Movement
moved the homeless from under the overpasses
to the sidewalk of every city.
In the beginning, a lot of cities tried to enforce this,
but it became such a thing,
it was kind of hard to enforce.
And eventually, cities like Portland, San Francisco,
Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Diego,
which San Diego wasn't nearly as bad as the rest of 'em,
but it was there, came a game of whack-a-mole.
They'd break down one camp,
and those people just moved the other side of the city
and start their sidewalk village right back up.
As the years went on, it got worse and worse.
And finally the pandemic hit,
and that moved even more people onto the streets.
The encampments got bigger,
the drug use became more noticeable,
every crime imaginable was on the rise.
And here's the thing I told you I'd tell you about later,
most of the crimes are never reported.
I have a good friend, Andy,
who's lived in San Francisco since 1991.
She's a nurse.
Her husband is a cop in the Bay Area.
I talked to them about this.
And her husband said that most of the crime
in those encampments are never reported.
They know they're happening,
but they just don't get reported.
So whatever you hear is going on about those things,
it's far worse, I promise you.
You have stores, Walgreens, whatever,
in and around different parts of San Francisco
where homeless people just walk in,
take what they want off the shelves,
fill up a bag, and just leave.
If you wanna see some horrifying videos,
just go on YouTube and watch that.
The security guards there and the workers will be fired
if they try and stop these people from shoplifting.
They're not even trying to hide it either.
They go in with a bag and just start filling it up,
turn around and walk out.
They don't care who's looking, they just do this.
As you can imagine, if you're a store owner in this area,
you're gonna want some help.
And if you don't get it, you're leaving the city.
A lot of businesses are leaving
a lot of parts of San Francisco as we speak.
So we get to the point where we try and figure out
what the (beep) is wrong with San Francisco.
And this is what it is.
You will get a whole bunch of different fluff
and a whole bunch of different excuses
for different organizations
and different studies will tell you different things.
It's cost of living, lack of affordable housing,
the list goes on with the excuses,
but the reality is policy.
Policy is what's killing San Francisco.
I watched this guy who went around San Francisco
and videotaped the homeless
and asked them questions on his Twitter.
The first question always seemed to be where you're from.
And 75% of the time, they weren't from California,
they were from Oklahoma, they were from Arkansas,
they were from Colorado, wherever.
Texas, a lot of times.
But these people, then he'd say,
why did you come to California?
And they would say, it's easier to be homeless
and on drugs in this city.
And they have different wording for it,
but that's what it broke down to.
They knew they could come to San Francisco
and California in general,
get a paycheck for being homeless,
like welfare paycheck to where they could buy
and they wouldn't be hassled.
They could do their drugs, they could be homeless,
and they wouldn't be harassed by the police,
like you might be in Oklahoma City.
And that's one of the policies
that's bringing in more people, more drug addicts,
more people that will end up on the street.
In a way, the compassionate side of me says that's fine
because a human being, no matter their situation,
can move to where they have the best chances of survival.
I mean, that's how humans are.
We would follow the herds so we could survive off the herds.
We would move out of the mountains
when the winter was coming and basically live in the plains.
So San Francisco and California in general,
their attempt, their policy to help people out
is actually drawing more problems in.
These people need help, not a paycheck.
That's how more and more people are starting to see it.
Letting a mass amount of people live in a way
that's destroying a city and other people's lives
that live in that city, it's not okay.
These people need to get help,
they need to get into shelters.
A lot of 'em won't go into shelters,
because they can't do their drugs in the shelters.
And currently they don't have enough shelters.
They need to build more shelters.
They need to have help these people get
and you need to make it illegal to camp on the sidewalk.
In December of 2021, San Francisco Mayor London Breed
sort of changed the way they've been dealing
with it in the past.
They have a less tolerant approach to the situation.
After talking to my friends, they've seen since then,
since the beginning of this year, 2022,
there has been some progress.
There's a long way to go, but there has been some progress.
And of course, since I brought up someone
that's a politician,
we're gonna have some comments on the comment section
about how it's all just a big ruse and all this other stuff.
No, it's happening.
Sometimes it doesn't matter what's going on,
just the people that are way into their politics,
they're just gonna take a negative stance on everything.
Unless it's someone from their party,
then they're totally on board with what they're doing.
The fact is, as they change their policies
and their stance on the homeless situation
and the crime situation and became less tolerant,
the city's been cleaned up.
Sure, the Tenderloin, the absolute worst place,
the TL as some of 'em call it,
that's always gonna be the Tenderloin.
And they could fix it up a little bit,
but it's always gonna be what it is.
It's the rest of the city is what's looking a lot better.
All right, so that's the end of WTF San Francisco.
Hope you guys enjoyed it.
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subscribe if you haven't.
Everybody have a great day.
Be nice to each other.