San Francisco has become a mecca for vagrants. We spend hundreds of millions a year on Jennifer Friedenbach's long discredited schemes and didactic lecture tour, with nothing to show for it but urine, bed bugs, empty liquor bottles and broken car windows. Its time to enforce basic behavior protocols like every other city on the planet. Until we do, every bench will come with a stench.

"Public seating has been removed in tacit surrender to homelessness"

The removal of seats is more like an attack on the homeless.

Bring back the benches so that people can sit and lunch in the park near City Hall.

This is a tough topic. I apologize for being long-winded. I'm absolutely in favor of doing what can be done to help the homeless. Of course, we also need to understand that they are a varied group. Concentrating on those with mental and physical problems, we need to get them off of the streets. I don't favor punitive or harsh treatment, but it is no longer acceptable to have them just out there the clients of their useless advocacy groups. The human waste, strewn garbage, and the associated litter and vandalism is unacceptable in a civilized community. San Franciscans clearly are reaching the end of their tether on on this issue. Those who are homeless because of job losses and economic reversals also need assistance. Moreover, homelessness has to be seen as a regional or statewide responsibility, since any community that is known to be more generous to the homeless will become the region's magnet for them and have to absorb a disproportionate number of them. I don't really know if I have the answers, but anyone who walks throughout the city or takes its public transportation is aware of how disconcerting and difficult it is to have to encounter, more frequently then ever, the homeless, particularly those who are suffering from mental illness. Just flushing them is utterly inappropriate. Speaking for myself, I am willing to pay more to do something effective and humane. Directing one's anger at the homeless is wrong, although I am catching myself more and more often seething at having to deal with some poor, foul-smelling person dragging his stuff on to a bus or smelling urine and feces or picking up garbage from turned over garbage cans (due to their foraging for food). Having to listen to their current, so-called advocates, however, is even more insufferable, since they seem mostly interested in perpetuating the problem so they can run their ineffectual "nonprofits."

From the time of the Haight-Ashbury in the late 60s,rules about over night sleeping in Golden Gate Park found ways to curtail homeless people from taking over city property. I think Supervisor Weiner is right in trying to stop the disorder due to absence or nonrecognition of authority. Harvey Milk Plaza and other locations within the city should be available for political rallies and camping only with permits. The Castro is a well known tourist point of interest, as well as a main transfer spot for thousands via MUNI and a fine shopping area or place to live for both gay and non-gay residents. For too many years 6th Street downtown allowed vagrants to hamper the flow of people doing business or passing through there. Those so called advocates have made a living using city property at the expense of a peaceful solution to the problem.

We've tried pretty much every creative solution we can to getting the chronic drug addicted or mentally ill homeless off the streets.

It seems a more humane policy would be to pass legislation making it far easier to involuntarily detain the mentally ill against their desires if necessary. We can clearly see that the policy of returning the severely mentally ill to the community doesn't work because we lack the supportive structures to encourage them to take their meds and come indoors where they are safe, warm and fed.

For those concerned about the civil rights issues involved I have this question: Which is more compassionate, forcing the severely mentally ill to live in a mental hospital where they are cared for and treated or allowing them the "freedom" to wander the streets, defecate in public, go without shelter and rummage through garbage cans for their meals?

This says nothing about those who are thrown onto the streets because of economic hardship. In most cases social workers will tell you that people under those circumstances will access and use the numerous private and public programs available and will find themselves back into housing in a fairly short amount of time.

It's as if the city---and people like Metcalf, who should know better---has Attention Deficit Disorder and forgets the last ten years in San Francisco. Doesn't anyone remember why Gavin Newsom was elected mayor in 2003? It was all about homelessness and Care Not Cash, which was denounced by the city's left as a war on the homeless. Nevertheless, Newsom and the city persisted in implementing Care Not Cash and other homeless programs, like Homeward Bound and supportive housing.

These policies have had significant success, but the commenters seem to be under the illusion that San Francisco---or any major city in the country---can figure out a permanent solution to homelessness.

SF attracts not only high-end tourists but also low-end substance abusers and the walking wounded of all types. Short of sealing our borders, we can't stop marginal people from entering the city and ending up homeless on our streets and in our parks.

The Great Recession has created still another wave of homeless people leaving the impression that the city is and has done nothing to deal with the problem, which is unfair and untrue.
http://district5diary.blogspot.com/2011/11/homelessness-in-sf-groundhog-day.html

Public benches should not be returned. As has been noted, they will become noxious beds for the homeless just as removing the fencing around the fountain will return it to its use as a homeless toilet.

Union Square was redesigned into a sterile, flat platform for events because the older (and MUCH more attractive) park had become a homeless dormitory. More than a decade onward, the park is, at least, useful to residents and tourists whereas the old one had become disgusting.

One of the design factors that we will have to keep in mind for public venues is that they must NOT be attractive to the homeless. The problem hasn't changed in decades and will not in the future. That's just a fact of life.

Parenthetically, that commentator who described Newsom's "Care Not Cash" as a "success" is sadly mistaken. It was always a disingenuous political gambit supported by social workers (if at all) because it diverted money from the homeless to their own profession. And the public, of course, loved the idea that we would stop giving money to bums. No one expected it to produce anything and it didn't. Like Prop. 63 revenues, the money disappeared into the maw of social welfare organizations, private and public, increasing the professional census and payroll and doing ZIP for the target population. Hence the perseveration of the homeless.

I don't recognize the Union Square described by High Hat. Seems like a huge improvement over the derelict, unwelcoming space that preceded it.

Nor is HH's description of Care Not Cash accurate. CNC stopped handing out monthly lump sums to the homeless, since that policy achieved nothing but enabling them to continue to live on our streets and in our parks. The Controller and the Grand Jury have tracked the success of CNC and other homeless policies:

http://www.sfcontroller.org/ftp/uploadedfiles/controller/reports/CareNotCash_20080430.pdf

http://www.sfsuperiorcourt.org/Modules/ShowDocument.aspx?documentid=1985

The city has in fact used the money that used to go to the homeless for housing for the homeless.

I didn't mention Project Homeless Connect, an innovative approach that has been copied by other cities.

My favorite program is Homeward Bound, which gives the homeless a bus ticket back whence they came and has gotten more than 4,000 homeless off our streets at a minimum cost.
http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/city-s-homeless-programs-touted

Dealing with homelessness by removing park benches is like dealing with child abuse by taking away the child's toys. Neither action is getting at the core of the problem and essentially "blames the victim", with no chance of success at a remedy.

Until we get proper social services and mental health care to assist those who are "homeless" who -- if not burdened with a mental or trauma-based disability before they became homeless, are now-- we will simply be contributing to the problem.

Homelessness isn't just an economic issue, it is a larger, broader issue of how we devalue [or value] human life based on the size of their bank accounts [or lack thereof].

Our entire country has lost it's moral compass and must get it back before our national image becomes permanently tarnished and more or our most vulnerable citizens, veterans and children are lost.

Health care professionals dispense pills as if they were some magic fix for lifelong tragedies and trauma that requires compassion, love, understanding and re-education, not pills. The only ones benefiting from our current health-care system are the pharmaceutical companies that sell the drugs and the Doctors who irresponsibly dispense them, absent any attempt at understanding or dealing with the underlying problems because proper care isn't a "covered benefit" and never will be as long as Health Care continues to be a "BUSINESS".

Don't forget San Francisco is also punishing the disabled because we have no place to sit either. None of my bus stops have seating or kiosks (Sutter and Larkin, Post and Larkin, Post and Polk, Geary and Larkin). Thank goodness my walker has a fold-down seat I can use while waiting for a bus or to sit downtown.

Wait, UN Plaza is 2.6 miles long? Really?

San Francisco is not only over run by homeless, grifters who aren't homeless and many criminals, but also to the most ineffective county government in the country. Somewhere between $300-500 million is spent by SF on Homelessness. Not all of that is SF taxpayer money, some is Federal and grants. Do you think you're getting you're money's worth? Most of the politicians like things just the way they are due to special interests especially in District 6. Can't wait to retire, rent my condo out at the obscene rents that one can get today and get the hell outta here. I'm very grateful for the 28 years I've lived here, but the deterioration is just too much to live with and watch with seemingly no hope for an effective leader to turn it around.

I'm a cynic when it comes to using sidewalks for mini parks as it is, I suspect, a ruse to argue for increases in densification without corresponding proximate traditional park development. It would be simple for the City to declare our sidewalks backfilled as 'mini parks' as suddenly being counted as open and park space to meet PROP M and FAR requirements. You will recall how some projects count unaccessible rooftop 'parks' to allow for increased height. That is what is behind the concept of mini-parks on sidewalks--and I doubt if we will have that discussion, that it will be an administratively "done deal" without discussion.

Homeless congregate because they can, and will continue to congregate because they can. No program or outreach will quickly change this landscape, one that has developed over decades and decades. Homelessness and drug/alcohol abuse is part of our system that we need to deal with at its root.

Therefore I think the observation by Neal Hroshvny or someone in the article that "we need to compromise" is probably the most intelligent approach to a quick solution.

If benches are put back, the homeless will congregate. So the rest of us who would have lunch outdoors must OCCUPY THE BENCHES.

The City of San Francisco is named after Saint Francis of Assisi (born Giovanni Francesco di Bernardone; 1181/1182 – October 3, 1226) was an Italian Catholic friar and preacher. He founded the men's Franciscan Order, the women’s Order of St. Clare, and the lay Third Order of Saint Francis. St. Francis is one of the most venerated religious figures in history.

Francis was the son of a wealthy cloth merchant in Assisi, and he lived the high-spirited life typical of a wealthy young man, even fighting as a soldier for Assisi. While going off to war in 1204, Francis had a vision that directed him back to Assisi, where he lost his taste for his worldly life. On a pilgrimage to Rome, he begged with the beggars at St. Peter's. The experience moved him to live in poverty. Francis returned home, began preaching on the streets, and soon amassed a following. His order was endorsed by Pope Innocent III in 1210. He then founded the Order of Poor Clares, which was an enclosed order for women, as well as the Third Order of Brothers and Sisters of Penance. In 1219, he went to Egypt in an attempt to convert the Sultan. By this point, the Franciscan Order had grown to such an extent that its primitive organizational structure was no longer sufficient. He returned to Italy to organize the order. Once his organization was endorsed by the Pope, he withdrew increasingly from external affairs. In 1223, Francis arranged for the first Christmas manger scene. In 1224, he received the stigmata, making him the first person to bear the wounds of Christ's Passion. He died in 1226 while preaching Psalm 141.

On July 16, 1228, he was pronounced a saint by Pope Gregory IX. He is known as the patron saint of animals, the environment and one of the two patrons of Italy (with Catherine of Siena), and it is customary for Catholic and Anglican churches to hold ceremonies blessing animals on his feast day of 4 October.

Based on some readers comments under the leadership of Ed Lee and his Pacific Heights Mafia uber-rich buddies the new motto and theme song for the City is the Dead Kennedys song "Kill the poor", http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgpa7wEAz7I *** ENJOY

Public amenities have been disappearing for years now and it's frightening how much we are willing to give up because of "homeless" people or druggies. I remember when there were public pay phones for use on every other corner. Then we were told they were taken out of use because drug dealers used them to make connections. So now that every drug dealer has a cell phone? Now we must all have mobiles and pay more. Those who don't have them or can't afford them, have no place to make a call. We used to have working water fountains, public toilets and even public baths (way before my time). But think about how everything is privatized and how little is truly done for the "public good".

“Because San Francisco has been unwilling to deal with homelessness in a serious way, we have instead removed public seating from virtually the entire city,” said Gabriel Metcalf, the executive director of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, an urban policy research group. “It’s such a sad statement and it makes the city that much less livable for everyone.”

This is a ludicrous statement. No city in the world can afford to "deal" with the homeless of the entire country in a serious way. Are homeless problem is not that of born-and-raised San Franciscans. It is thousands of people flocking here from around the state and country. No city can afford to subsidize the problems of the whole nation. Its totally absurd to blame the city on this...