WASTING AWAY AGAIN IN AN OBAMAVILLE: San Francisco provides 100 person tents, dubbed “pop-up homeless shelters” in anticipation of this past Saturday’s heavy rains. “In addition to the pop-up shelters, the Human Services Agency said it had expanded space at the homeless shelter at Pier 80. Members of the San Francisco Department of Health’s Homeless Outreach Team will be conducting outreach to anyone in need of shelter throughout the weekend. ‘They’re very familiar with the city and they will fan out and let people know it will be a rainy weekend,’ health department spokeswoman Rachael Kagan said.”

As Gerard Van der Leun writes, “San Francisco, the nation’s leading open air exhibition of failed social policies never fails to instruct one in the infinite disabilities of social utopianism…Seeing so many driven so low — and this in what still passes as ‘the better neighborhoods’ — you have to wonder what happened to, and what is still happening to, the billions of public funds being compulsively shoved at this problem. Where has the money and time and good intentions all gone?”

In a classic leftwing Fox Butterfield moment SF Weekly noted in 2009, “Despite its spending more money per capita on homelessness than any comparable city, [San Francisco’s] homeless problem is worse than any comparable city’s.”

Related: Michael J. Totten on Portland’s Homeless Challenge.

Portland’s last Republican mayor left office two months before Reagan was inaugurated; San Francisco’s last Republican mayor left office a month before the Beatles landed at JFK.

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