Meanwhile, the open-air drug use, encampments, and streets littered with broken glass and trash that this same resident has been reporting to the city for years? Crickets.
Let that sink in. San Francisco's bureaucratic machinery can mobilize fast enough to slap a citation on a building owner for spray paint — something the owner didn't even do — but somehow can't muster the resources to address the rolling humanitarian disaster unfolding on the same block.
The resident took to social media to vent, and the post blew up enough to land a TV news segment. But even that coverage managed to miss the point, zeroing in on the graffiti angle rather than the actual story: a city government that has its enforcement priorities completely backwards.
As the resident put it, it feels like the city is pushing these problems into mixed-income and lower-income neighborhoods rather than tackling the drug crisis at its root. And that's the real scandal here. Wealthier neighborhoods get responsive city services. The Mission gets code enforcement tickets and a shrug.
This isn't a complaint about homelessness existing — it's a complaint about a government that collects enormous tax revenue, passes budget after budget supposedly aimed at these exact problems, and then sends inspectors to hassle property owners about cosmetic violations while the sidewalks outside remain genuinely unsafe.
San Francisco's General Fund budget has ballooned past $16 billion. The city spends more per capita on homelessness services than virtually any municipality in America. And yet residents in the Mission are still begging for basic livability on their own streets.
At some point, the question stops being "do we care enough?" and starts being "where is all this money actually going?" Because the Mission deserves better than a government that tickets the victims and ignores the crisis.


