Chappelle Is Right: It’s “Mad Max” on Our City Streets

Dave Chappelle was at San Francisco's Chase Center on Thursday night, reveling in the crowd's adoration and his "cancelled" status. (As he advised on stage, anyone who thinks he's a hater should watch his recent Netflix show from beginning to end.) Chappelle loves the Bay Area -- it's where he perfected his act. But like any visitor to SF, he was blown away by the sight of growing human misery on our streets. "It looks like 'Mad Max,'" he "joked" at the sold-out Chase Center. "What the fuck has been goin' on around here?"

What's been goin' on is detailed in this SF Chronicle editorial and in a recent report by the Southern California chapter of the ACLU. After years of spiking real estate prices and federal retreat from the housing market since the Reagan era, the Golden State is facing a massive homeless crisis. According to the most recent study, more than 160,000 people are homeless on a single night in California.

Instead of treating this as the major public disaster it is, the ACLU report points out, too many communities in California and elsewhere are criminalizing those who have lost their homes. Cities have passed multiple ordinances that punish the victims. As a result, states the ACLU, the unhoused must be legally viewed as a discriminated population, with all the Constitutional protections of any minority group.

But we must go further than that, as I've long argued. We must declare that housing is a human right, just as food, health care and education are. We don't allow people to starve on our streets. Why do we allow people to be deprived of shelter?

As this Chronicle editorial points out, many of our fellow citizens suffer from "denialism" about the unhoused. They tell themselves that the homeless on our streets are from out of state or mentally ill. Not true. The vast majority of the desperate people you see on the streets of San Francisco once had homes in our city. Many of them were evicted by greedy landlords in the past decade after the new tech work force started pouring into the city -- following Mayor Ed Lee's 2011 "Twitter tax break" -- with little new housing to accommodate them.

Market forces and corporatized politics created the homeless crisis. And the only way out of it is massive public intervention in the housing market, to ensure that enough affordable housing is built. As the Chronicle editorial reads: "It will take years to adequately address the housing crisis, even under the most optimistic scenarios. But to end massive homelessness, we need to think in terms of multi-year investments. And, as with the climate crisis, we will need federal assistance to scale up response to the necessary level."

The misery right outside San Francisco’s City Hall