San Diego Airbnb’s Dial-a-Cop Homeless Removal Solution

UPDATE--Friday, 9/6 via Voice of San Diego--"  NBC 7 reports the owner has since taken down the flyer and said “he misinterpreted the programs and services DSDP provides.”

I could write a column referencing facts and figures about homeless humans. I could point out how the well-worn reasons used by people lacking empathy about the causes of homelessness and the realities of living life at the bottom are uniformly untrue.

I could reference the ever-growing number of senior citizens--some are older than 75--living on the street. Or that the largest single group in that population are people with disabilities. Or the nearly 4 in 5 people surveyed saying they became unsheltered while living in San Diego.

The Downtown San Diego flyer repeats the falsehood about homeless migrating because of the weather. I believe it's deliberate. Those people know better. They just refuse to accept their responsibility.

I could point out wages for too many jobs in San Diego require extraordinary efforts to secure a place to live. Or that 1 in 3 families in San Diego live with economic insecurity and are just one crisis away from joining the ranks of the homeless.

But I won’t. Those things have all been written and broadcast before, and they do nothing to change the all-too-common perception of homelessness.

If there is a commonality to be found in the banality of the mainstream ethos of this era, it has to be a lack of empathy.

How else could you account for public acceptance of concentration camps? Or the failure of one third of the population to see migrants, refugees, and those fleeing extreme poverty as human beings. Etcetera, etcetera.

In San Diego, efforts to find/build/locate housing are nearly always doomed, mostly because elected officials lack the courage to say no to NIMBYs, (mostly white) privilege, and a Chamber of Commerce unable to see its role in creating the problem. 

What gets done is largely foisted off on neighborhoods heavily populated with folks who fall into the one-crisis-away from being homeless category. 

Now visitors to downtown San Diego have instructions posted in an Airbnb to call a "Homeless Hotline" so "professional personnel" can come "remove and relocate homeless."

Anybody wanna guess who those professional personnel are?

Can you say “San Diego Police Department?” I knew you could. 

They aren’t the real bad guys here, even if they sometimes deserve our scorn for their behavior. They’re following orders. It’s their job to keep the comforted from coping with the riff-raff. In San Diego, going back to the days of the free speech movement that’s what they’ve always done. 

Cops exist in a world where they mostly answer to non-civilian authorities dependent on law enforcement cooperation. And it’s only fair to point out that many of them aren’t getting paid enough to live here comfortably.

Now, “orders” are authorized by corporate entities. Tourist facilities, some of which replaced the cheap hotels which used to be the last resort for seniors and the disabled living on a fixed income, want the “poors” to go away.

And then there is the irony of Airbnb properties, which have taken thousands of housing units off the market, having a service to remove humans priced out of the market.  

https://twitter.com/DorianHargrove/status/1165042125186068480?s=20

In San Diego, we have a problem seeing homeless people as human. The County jail and the Central Library should not be primary facilities for dealing with this problem.

"We" are the solution. Not cops. Not charities. (Though both can play a role.) Look in the mirror. What would you do to help the face you see if they were in trouble?

We can put roofs over people’s heads. All it takes is the will. And politicians not willing to spend $26 million to buy a facility where nobody can live.

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Email me at DougPorter@WordsAndDeedsBlog.com

Lead image via Twitter.