There's a new addition to San Francisco's streets, and he's not there because of a fentanyl crisis, a mental health system failure, or skyrocketing rents. He's there for the clout.
Meet Drew Johnson, a 27-year-old influencer who has decided to live as a self-described "bum in SF" — not out of necessity, but as a content strategy. He says he wants freedom. What he apparently means by that is spending most of his day staring at his phone, which is a kind of freedom, we suppose, in the same way that eating ice cream for dinner is a kind of nutrition.
Let's be clear about what's happening here: San Francisco has roughly 8,000 people experiencing homelessness on any given night. Many of them are dealing with severe mental illness, addiction, or both. The city spends north of $600 million annually trying — and largely failing — to address the crisis. And now someone is voluntarily LARPing the experience for Instagram followers.
The grift is almost impressive in its shamelessness. Johnson gets to romanticize life on the streets while presumably having a safety net that actual homeless San Franciscans would kill for — a phone charger, a bank account to fall back on, and the ability to quit whenever the bit stops being fun.
Here's what makes this particularly grating: the people of San Francisco are taxed to the gills to fund a bloated homelessness-industrial complex that produces questionable results. Residents step over needles and human waste on their morning commutes. Small business owners watch their storefronts get broken into. And this guy rolls in and turns the whole thing into a personal branding exercise.
Homelessness in San Francisco isn't an aesthetic. It's not a vibe. It's a policy catastrophe that ruins real lives. The fact that someone can treat it as a content vertical tells you everything about how deeply unserious our culture has become — and maybe how numb we've all gotten to the suffering happening on our sidewalks every single day.
Drew Johnson doesn't need housing assistance. He needs a reality check.
