San Francisco's long-running struggle to solve its vexing homeless problem was dealt a setback Monday when Mayor Willie Brown unveiled a new budget that wields the dreaded ax to various mental health and substance abuse programs.
Pressured by the Bay Area's sluggish economy, Brown and his staff have crafted a spending plan that is slightly lower than last year's $5.2 billion budget and includes cuts to the services available to the scores of transients -- many of whom are mentally ill -- that inhabit not only the rougher areas of the Tenderloin and Mission districts, but are also ubiquitous around downtown and other areas vital to the tourist trade.
Brown planned to discuss the budget at a news conference on Tuesday, although his office was busy Monday putting its best face on the proposal that appears about as palatable to San Franciscans as stale sourdough bread and insipid Irish coffee.
"Mayor Brown presented a budget of $4.79 billion ... that eliminates 750 positions and tightens spending in every city department -- but without closing fire stations, health clinics or libraries, or reducing the number of police officers and firefighters on the street," Brown's office said in a press release Monday afternoon.
San Francisco has been squeezed as hard as any city by the ongoing economic downturn that was spawned in the nearby Silicon Valley and hit the urbane and well-heeled Internet entrepreneurs who were drawn to "The City's" charm and glamour.
As a result of falling tax revenues, Brown had to seek $80 million in wage concessions from city employees who had previously been happily watching their salaries grow under Brown's administration.
"Without the incredible cooperation of our fellow city workers, San Francisco would not have been able to avoid the kind of Draconian cuts that other cities are facing," Brown said in the release.
Left in the lurch were the homeless population who were drawn to town by a traditionally compassionate tolerance and a liberal welfare system. At last count, the homeless numbered between 8,000 and 15,000 -- the size of a typical Army division.
The legions have gained a reputation over the past few decades of being as aggressive, surly and addled by drugs, alcohol and schizophrenic unbalances as any street people in the nation.
That checkered reputation was in the national headlines twice in recent months. The first was when the city's business community rallied around a ballot measure that would replace county general assistance checks with coupons good for charity services. The second involved the assault on a visiting psychiatrist attending a convention by a mentally ill transient who was off his anti-psychotic medication.
Although Brown proposes to knock $3 million off the city's hefty $180 million mental health budget, advocates for the homeless fear that anything short of a spending increase could cause the house of cards to collapse.
"They are pulling the bricks out of the system," Jonathan Vernick, executive director of Baker Places, a nonprofit group that runs the city's largest mental health center. "There's no going back from the decisions they're making, because next year will be bad, too."
"It will be awful," he told the San Francisco Chronicle. "There is 30 years of work we're ripping apart here."
Getting the hardcore homeless off the bottle or the crack pipe and into treatment is often easier said than done, but reducing the city's ability to reach out to those who do want to come in from the cold means San Francisco mental health minions will be fighting to keep the status quo afloat at best they can until the region's economy improves.
Brown will have to hope for the best, but if the numbers of roaring drunks and wild-eyed panhandlers starts cutting into the tourist trade, the business community will start pushing for action -- and that will mean stepped-up arrests by the San Francisco Police Department and the increased possibility that someone will get hurt.
San Francisco mayors have always held a high profile in the city and Brown's could grow to legendary status if he can ease the homelessness problem with less money, or he could wind up being dismissed as being just another pol that couldn't save the city by the Bay from deteriorating into a haven for the homeless rather than a Mecca for free-spending tourists and conventioneers.
