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The Street Kids of San Francisco
- KMinshew 14y agoThis is actually pretty fascinating - I would have never thought to ask. Thanks!
- rza 14y agoBut in a city that lionizes entrepreneurs who sacrifice everything to create the next big thing, there is something admirable about the street kids’ total embrace of drugs, freedom, and a lifestyle that society scorns. This. In an isolated society of highways and McMansions where it's taboo to converse with random strangers, what the world needs now is not the next big social iPhone app, but a stronger sense of community, which we could learn a thing or two from these 'kids'.
- jumby 14y agoSounds like fun for about 1-2 weeks, and then it would be a sucky life. Gotta have mental stimulation sometime.
- michaelochurch 14y agoWe're a biased set, in that most of us have, at least, the option for mentally stimulating work. As fucked as the software industry is, it's better than most other places. Most of them are choosing one (purportedly, although I think I'm right that neither of us has tried it) brain-dead lifestyle over another one. That's why I get irked when people talk about housewives becoming "braindead" from being outside of the economy. What makes the typical mind-numbing office life superior to a (supposedly) mind-numbing domestic existence?
- jumby 14y agoI don't argue for a mind-numbing office life. I argue that being stoned 24/7 doesn't fit how _I_ would spend my time if I were (f)unemployed _by choice_. I would backpack, ski, travel, hack, learn new trades, build things, etc. Maybe some of that requires money, but not all do.
- rza 14y agoI'm fairly certain there's more to living on the street than sitting around and being stoned 24/7. You're being quite judgmental and haughty toward a lifestyle which you most likely know nothing about.
- jumby 14y agoReally, such as? The article doesn't present many of those and I doubt there are. All I am saying is it sounds boring as hell, stoned or not.
- rza 14y agoBusking, meeting people, concerts, parties, urban exploring. We get it, you like learning and being super-productive, but you don't have to put other people down just to get that point across.
- jumby 14y agopersonally productive, yes. not necessarily producing anything in the traditional sense.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- learc83 14y ago>That's why I get irked when people talk about housewives becoming "braindead" from being outside of the economy. Every housewife I know has some kind of mentally stimulating hobby, and most of them make some amount of income from it (photography, crafts etc...). In fact most of them shouldn't really be called "housewives" any more than male remote programmers should be called "househusbands".
- jquery 14y agoLet's get real, most homemakers are simply indulging their bourgeois fantasies. Not that I blame them, I'd do the same thing if I thought I could get away with it, but I'd probably get served divorce papers.
- hnal943 14y ago...or they are providing their own childcare and managing their household.
- malandrew 14y agoHowever, they don't necessarily need to be that competent to provide their own childcare. It's not like the kid is going to fire the parent is the parenting isn't above average. A stay at home parent caring for kids is as likely to play on reddit while the kid watches tv as interacting with the kid all the time and teaching them information, good values and good habits.
- hnal943 14y agoYour comment ignores my original point which is that homemakers have economic value, but it's still worthy of a response. Obviously children are not in control of who takes care of them, but that would be true whether the parents worked or not; parents decide how their children will be cared for in any case. Also, I'm not sure if you've ever tried to browse reddit and watch a toddler at the same time, but I can say from experience it's not as easy as you might imagine. Children, especially when they are younger than school-age, demand a lot of attention just to keep them safe and healthy let alone educated and civilized.
- peterwwillis 14y agoBooze and drugs helps a lot.
- eli_awry 14y agoThe communities of kids like that that I know make circuses and free schools and are extraordinarily well-read.
- scarmig 14y agoActually, if you planned for this well, I would not be surprised if you ended up with much more mental stimulation than your day job. Have an ereader, download ebooks on everything under the sun. You don't have shit or taxes or property beyond what you carry on you to worry about. Heck, if you saved up $100k or $200k beforehand, you'd probably end up saving/making more money per year than the average American. Mental stimulation wouldn't be the issue. Risk of violence or disease, however...
- lotso 14y agoBeing able to read books, meet new people, and reflect all day, every day seems more mentally stimulating in certain ways than working in the same field for 5, 10, 20, 30 years.
- lilsunnybee 14y agoWhere is the lack of mental stimulation? Conversation and books are free. You have plenty of time to think. I would think working in an office day-in day-out stringing together commands for a computer out of a limited vocabulary would be a lot more boring and non-stimulating.
- danielpal 14y agoThanks Rohin! Your blog is one of my favorite things to read. Quite a change from the normal hacker news articles.
- michaelochurch 14y agoDoes anyone else find this really sad? It's not abject poverty, but it's a loss of talent to the world, and I'm old and honest enough to know that it's the world's fault. I liked one of the signs. "You don't have to fuck people over to survive." That's what our positive-sum technocracy is supposed to represent: a world in which you can focus on getting work done and making society better. That's what it actually is if you have a degree of freedom, autonomy, and comfort that is (alas) very rare. Yet most of these "street kids" face a world of soulless, zero-sum, corporate status-grubbing where they do have to make that choice, and they're making the less approved but perhaps morally nicer one.
- jumby 14y agos/talent/a worker bee/ it's not the world's fault there exists free-will.
- eli_awry 14y agoThere's something in between wasting talent and becoming a worker bee. I was part of a similar community and found it disenchanting because I wanted to make new things. So I left, and now I make a lot of awesome things, and I'm much happier. I can make contributions and put them on the internet to impact people far and wide. These kids create strong, loving communities and that's as much or more than most people contribute to the world, but I personally felt like I was wasting my particular talents. So I left, But it wasn't to become a worker bee. It was to achieve self-actualization on my own terms, which is the same thing these kids are doing for themselves. The perception that embarking on a career that you think will make the world a better place is selling out or becoming a drone is really harmful. Being a professional member of a hippy/punk community or an avowed member of the CrimethInc Ex-Worker's Collective or a Slingshot producer or a freegan is a valid choice, but it is hardly more pure than anything else.
- leed25d 14y agoI would like to know what you can get in the Haight for $1500 / month. Not much I'll bet.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- rms 14y agohttp://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/apa/3610577943.html http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/apa/3610577943.html http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/apa/3601988013.html http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/apa/3601988013.html
- politician 14y agoThe legalization of marijuana will utterly destroy this community. From the article, it sounds like weed facilitates a significant part of the economy as both a trade good and a consumable while LSD is a luxury item and hard drugs are not tolerated. Cheap weed will probably induce a net loss of value (that being the value of knowing how to procure it, and trading that value).
- teebs 14y agoIt's fascinating that these kids are the opposite of the usual drug dealer stereotype. Based on my limited knowledge, drugs (in particular marijuana) trace back to either small individual growers, medical marijuana patients, or a gang or cartel. (As far as I know, LSD is very difficult to produce because of its highly regulated precursors. Only a few people in the world produce LSD, and they probably sell it to gangs to distribute.) Individual growers and patients aren't so bad, but for areas of the country where this is rare, gangs probably supply most of the marijuana. Gangs/cartels are known for having basically the opposite of the values of these "street kids." I wonder if these two demographics often come into contact for business purposes, "Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels"-style. Does anyone have any better, more specific information about the distribution chains for marijuana or LSD? EDIT: clarifying first sentence
- politician 14y agoThe article described the kids working on "weed farms" in exchange for "beer, food, and weed". Maybe they're selling the gleanings? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleaning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleaning
- teebs 14y agoThat makes sense for weed, but they probably have a larger supply chain if they're dealing on a day to day basis. Also, the post mentions "flipping" LSD - they buy it for a lower price and sell it for a higher price. Someone has to sell it to them.
- s_baby 14y ago
- unomateo 14y agoWondering many make the move from GG park to Market Street... Where the homeless are a whole different breed.
- sunyata 14y agoHard drugs, since they can be closer to the tenderloin and mission most likely. Its sad because peace, love & family is not the way things are handled down there and a lot of them dont make it very long once they graduate.
- ry0ohki 14y ago"Our initial hypothesis was that life on Haight Street would be a grim, Dickensian hellhole. Instead, we discovered a world of misunderstood, modern-day nomads, blithely toeing the line between poverty, drug dealing, and hippy nirvana." We had to interview homeless people in DC as part of a college project, and found something similar. I think the common perception is that homeless people are just people like you and I who hit hard times, but almost everyone we talked to was homeless by choice (and some probably had mental illness). Talk to homeless people sometime, it may change your ideas.
- peterwwillis 14y agoThis simplifies the general problem of homelessness, which in reality makes up a large number of people in drastically different situations. Some are families, some are mentally ill, some are sex offenders or felons, some are career homeless, etc. DC's homeless are pretty tame compared to those you'd encounter in Florida, for example. The article was a neat little look into a single park's homeless culture, but it can be really rough if you wander into the wrong park or alley. Or just taking a bus.
- nowarninglabel 14y agoAs someone who has lived in the Haight-Ashbury for 9 years now, I can say this is a well-written and balanced perspective. Although, it glosses over the additional crime (mainly property theft, occasional assault) brought by the street kids. The key thing noted here is that the vast majority of street kids in the Haight are there by choice, up to and including the choice to panhandle to make enough for $18 bags of organic dog food. It's refreshing to read, because I'm tired of the two extremes usually presented, either that the street kids are people to be pitied or trash to be thrown out. The street kids are more just a fixture. Like the trees in Buena Vista, they were not here originally, but they're a fixture now, and they'll be here for quite some time to come.
- acslater00 14y agoThis story reminds me a lot of this old "Hipster Animals" gag. http://hipster-animals.tumblr.com/post/5609675345/raccoon http://hipster-animals.tumblr.com/post/5609675345/raccoon
- eli_awry 14y agoI'm a 23 year old with purple hair, but I'm also a PhD student at a top 10 university for computer science. I've hung out in tons of squats and punk houses, and briefly been a street kid, but I got a 2380 on my SATs. I lived in a non-residential warehouse for months - months when I was taking Physics, Linear Algebra, Computer Science and Sociology 321 - Class and Inequality. I've dug through dozens of dumpsters, and I've hiked hundreds and hundreds of miles on the Appalachian Trail. I've been in jail and won the prize for Best Undergraduate Research at my university. I fell out of touch with the anarchopunkier half of my friends when I got serious about artificial intelligence and computer science - I love these things and they're very important to me, and in the coffeeshops we always talked about how to get rid of tyrants and inequality. I have always believed in technology. OLPC, Ubuntu, Khan Academy, Coursera, solar panels, cell networks - the list goes on. Startup folks and street punks have a lot of similar ideas about what we want, but really different aesthetics. The punks I've known are much more well-read and just as bright as the grad students I spend time with now. On the other hand, they're in denial about capitalism. Both groups have a lot to learn from each other, if only they can look over the other's smarminess/smelliness.
- angersock 14y agoBest parties I've been to were a healthy blend of web folks, hippies, anarchists, engineers, and discordians. I did observe that despite having fairly good classical training and historical knowledge--more than I had, certainly!--there did not seem to be a lot of self-educated people who knew physics and hard-sciences beyond a somewhat populist level. I suggest that this may be due theoretical physics and whatnot requiring a sounder grounding in mathematics than is easy to pick up on your own.
- eli_awry 14y agoI agree - I think it's somewhat cultural. That community has a lot of good ideas, but few fleshed-out solutions, which are harder and require more technical/modeling skills. It's hardly unique to them - education researchers (for instance, as I've been noticing recently) and many administrators are equally quantitatively lacking. Part of it may also be that doing novel critical analysis requires few resources, but doing most novel science is a high-capital endeavor.
- nthitz 14y agoWent for a walk through this area about two weeks ago. As you near the park, lot of dealers pop up. In the park, on every corner of the paths people offered to sell me drugs. Marijuana, LSD, Mushrooms were all offered. I could sense different groups competing for territory in the park. I felt uncomfortable.
- bitcartel 14y agoYou could be describing Dolores Park.
- edmundhuber 14y agoIf you live here, you have to harden yourself against constant harassment for money and offers of drugs, and you have to get used to stepping around garbage and shit in the street. As much as SF should strive to be tolerant, at a certain point it must be recognized that if you don't want to be taken advantage of, as I believe is the case here for "authentic" residents of Haight-Ashbury, i.e. people who pay local taxes and own or rent and have what I would call a more vested interest in the community improving, steps have to be taken to curb the more destructive behaviors. The fact is, we already have disincentives for littering, disturbing the peace, selling drugs, etc, but they don't seem to be working. So I'm not sure what can be done.
- rdouble 14y agoIn 2006-2008 the crusties formed a gauntlet between Cole and Clayton on Haight. They were rude and aggressive and always had at least one rottweiler or pit bull. The locals and tourists could not stand them and the only reason they lasted as long as they did was because they were white. Eventually everyone got too fed up which is why the no sit laws were passed.
- defen 14y agoI vividly recall walking west on Haight to The Alembic in the summer of '07...it felt like something out of Mad Max or a post-apocalyptic zombie movie.
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- angersock 14y agoAnybody remember the article a few days ago with the author complaining about the Google bus and the invasion of tech folks into the Bay Area and how they weren't improving the community? And how a lot of people were like "Hey, well, it's putting wealth into helping San Francisco!". Well, how's this fit into that calculus?
- SilasX 14y agoProbably in the "pearls before swine" sense. Long-time natives just don't appreciate how much the influx of tech folks is improving things, nor how few cities would love to have such a "problem".
- angersock 14y agoEr, would you like to rephrase that? A fast reading would seem to suggest that you are referring to the natives as swine.
- wooster 14y agoIt's a biblical reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearls_before_swine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearls_before_swine
- spiralpolitik 14y agoThats because the long time natives don't view them as improvements. They view them as outsiders coming in and disrupting their communities eventually driving them (the natives) out. The general consensus in most parts of the Bay Area is that people want things to stay the same as it was the day they arrived.
- Apocryphon 14y agoAs a comment on an article about urban expansion put it, "NIMBY liberalism married to Asperger's-induced libertarianism "
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- nollidge 14y agoOFF-TOPIC: is there a good reason the sidebar repositions itself on every windows.scroll instead of just setting position:fixed in the CSS? It's jittery and distracting when scrolling.
- nbroyal 14y agoI don't want to be insensitive, but some of these individuals' behavior smacks of privilege. When I think about the fact that someone whose family "owns a major medevac company" is taking up space at a shelter or panhandling on the street, I get really frustrated. These are resources that should be used by those who are really down on their luck and have no other option, not someone/some group who wants to live out their bohemian fantasy. If I knew I just gave five bucks to someone whose familial net worth trumps mine 100 fold, I'd be irate.
- lutusp 14y ago> When I think about the fact that someone whose family "owns a major medevac company" is taking up space at a shelter or panhandling on the street, I get really frustrated. Just to play the devil's advocate, given a spoiled kid of wealthy parents on the threshold of adulthood, would you prefer he stay in the ivory tower, or experience the raw life of the street, even if only as a lifestyle tourist? As it happens, there is a long tradition among the wealthy (not all the wealthy, but some) of making their kids experience ordinary life in advance of making important decisions about the direction of their own life.
- nbroyal 14y agoI see that as a false dichotomy. There are many other options between staying in the ivory tower and playing homeless.
- lutusp 14y ago> There are many other options between staying in the ivory tower and playing homeless. Yes, there are. But one advantage of "playing homeless" is that you might run into actual homeless people and find out about their lives.
- nbroyal 14y agoI think you could do that just as easily without the lifestyle tourism. Volunteering at a shelter/soup kitchen is something that comes to mind.
- knowaveragejoe 14y ago> In many ways, the street kids seemed to be having a lot more fun than us. This is key.
- dewitt 14y agoLike another commenter on this thread, I've lived in the Haight for the past nine years. And while the article is interesting and informative, it doesn't quite paint a full picture (literally—the pictures aren't representative, that girl is not a typical street kid by a long shot, she hasn't slept a day outside in her life. Think camo and combat boots and pit bulls, not peace signs and hacky sacks) of the underside of the street kid scene. There is also a quite a bit of violence and a lot of negativity to be had, both to each other, and to the community that they're visiting. I see the street kids as guests in our extended home. When everyone is peaceful and respectful I don't really have an issue. But when they are violent, or a health risk (defecation on the sidewalk and on the stoops is a real concern, and it happens all day every day), or harass my family or my neighbors, I do take issue, and believe we need to set and enforce limits for the safety of everyone. As far as it being a lifestyle _choice_ for some. Indeed it is. But not for all. It's a spectrum. Overall it's a good article, but it's not the whole story. Edit: And to the author, try walking around and doing those interviews after dark some night. The perspective would be ... different.
- dewitt 14y agoAnd judging from the other comments, people who have no first-hand exposure to this enviroment are simply eating the article up, believing they have the full story. I'd invite anyone who is prepared to generalize about street kid culture based on this one article alone to spend just one /evening/ walking around Haight and Stanyan. Head into the park a ways. You don't have to go more than 50 yards. I guarantee you take back many of the things you've said on this thread.
- yid 14y agoReading the article, I pretty much had the exact same thoughts. It really seemed like the writer had a particular feel-good story in mind ("hippies still live in the Haight!") and went out there trying to find it. The error in the article is casting the entire scene as the same slice of peace-n-love that is espoused in the story, leaving aside -- as you say -- the things that happen after dark. Serious mental illness, the sexual risks inherent in being homeless, run-ins with gangs, disease and the worsening of any future prospects as the "tree of life" is embraced. I was once similarly enamored with the hippy scene and dated a flower child for quite some time, even visited the commune in Lake county that she grew up in, etc. There is a distinctly darker side of the whole experience whose surface is not even scratched by this article.
- rasengan0 14y agoI too enjoyed the article having volunteered at HAFMC and seeing so many on need. That was decades ago, but I've often wondered when the wandering quest winds down, what became of their experience? The article hints at the Elders but I suspect that is the minority. Would be interesting to see a Up series a la Micheal Apted
- greggman 14y agoSlightly related is this documentary, Skid Row (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0795381/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0795381/), in which a guy goes and lives in Skid Row in Los Angeles for 9 days. It's free to watch on hulu and probably other video sites.
- moxie 14y agoThis article should really be titled "The Street Kids Of Hippy Hill." By going to one place in order to get a feeling for "street kids," they've gotten an extremely myopic view of that scene. The full picture is much more varied. Traveler kids who go to hobo gatherings would never be caught dead at a rainbow gathering. Rainbow family kids don't drink, and alcohol is even forbidden at gatherings (where nothing else is forbidden). Gutter punks live to spange for 40s. Anarcho punks would rather starve than fly a sign. Each has its own music scene, its own values, its own social norms. For this article to suggest that most street kids don't have a political analysis might be true for hippy hill, but isn't true at all for the squatter scene (see 'homes not jails' and 'food not bombs' for instance).
- grinich 14y agoWill you write a blog post about this?
- peterwwillis 14y agoHe has a few here: http://www.thoughtcrime.org/stories.html http://www.thoughtcrime.org/stories.html IMO, learning about the sub-groups of the "street person" culture isn't going to net you much useful knowledge. A lot of the differences between people here are political, ethical or social (anarchists, hippies, gangs). At some point you realize everyone's just living out a script.
- php_on_rails2 14y agoYou call that trash "music"? But seriously. Joking aside, here in the real world, we call squatting "trespassing". These kids just live off the fat of the land. You know what I'm talking about. Fat tourists! I swear to god, the first time I saw one of these kids, my heart opened up to them, along with my stupid wallet. "Need money (f)or weed." Well, fool me once.
- ajju 14y agoGreat post! I lived right next to the park for the better part of a year. I feel like there are two more aspects to the street kids lives that deserve more attention: (1) Their pets: Most of these kids have a dog (or sometimes a cat), love their pets and for the most part seem to treat them well. One night, after finding a dog with a collar roaming alone in the park, I helped her find a temporary home. The next day I saw some really worried street kids posting hand written signs with a photo of the dog and reunited them. It was a sight to behold. Homeless with pets are controversial but at least amongst the street kids, the pets seem to have a net positive effect on them. (2) Mental illness: OP alluded to this, but mentally ill homeless who live in the same area are a huge issue for people who associate them with the street kids. There is no easy fix for this problem and I have always wondered what the street kids think about the mentally ill amongst them and what should be done to help them.
- pm90 14y agoI can't see a community like this surviving if a lot more people join in. The article describes someone refraining from 'panhandling excessively', but if you have more people, there will always be those who think less for the benefit of others
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- gtani 14y agoI would have written a different story. I lived 2 blocks from Haight and Stanyan for a long time and I was connected to street kids by skateboarding and guitar and being someone who talks to anyone (e.g I gave away a lot of Dunlop jazz3 guitar picks). While there may be a few people on the streets willingly (the new arrivals), and some are talented musicians/artists/artisans, the author chose to ignore the violence and the scourge of alcoholism and meth, the ones who have no family or safety net or options. He didn't look in the backpacks and see pepper spray, sawed off baseball bats, golf clubs and rocks (Skateboards are capable weapons also), he didn't see people lose most of their teeth in a year, or the armed guards at Whole Foods, stuff like that. The homeless are in the Haight becuase they wouldn't last long in the Mission, South of Market, Potrero, places like that
- Macsenour 14y agoU sed to work at the Round Table in Albany. It is quiet and not much happens there. At that time the same owner owned my store, and the one in downtown Berkeley. One night I was asked to fill in at the Berkeley store. Tacked on the wall where you give your order is an "86" list. These are the homeless that are asked to leave the instant they appear. All others are allowed to stay as long as they don't disrupt the business. I saw that list and laughed, but 10 minutes later a homeless man stood outside the window and screamed obscenities at me as I worked. He was on the list, so 911 was called. A little while later a "street kid" walked in and asked if we had spare slices. I was about to say no, when the manager said sure, and handed over a slice. When I asked I was told that when they made mistakes, put onions on a pizze that called for no onions, they saved them and handed out slices to those that asked nicely. I guess it all depends on who and how you act.
- ghshephard 14y agoThe one question that I always ask (and instantly makes me unpopular) of the hippie/transient/counter-culture types, is, "Do you realize you would all likely be dead of hunger withing two to three weeks without a massively efficient capitalist system supporting you?" They are able to exist because of people who are willing to work to support them. Even the communes rely on fertilizer, fuels, metals, foodstuffs from 2000+ years of increasingly efficient capitalists economies. Don't get me wrong - I love spending a week to ten days out on the playa, and have never had such a wonder experience of "community" anywhere else - but I never, ever kid myself into believing that such a lifestyle is sustainable. I don't like to use the word, "parasite", but I can't really think of a better word to describe the Haight street pan-handlers/garbage divers. They can't survive without people providing for them.
- thisrod 14y agoWhere I live, the answer might run as follows. For fifty thousand years, the local hippies avoided starvation with a one-hour workday. Now that the place is full to bursting point with slaves of some massively efficient system, they have to work a bit harder. And, unless you can photosynthesize, you're a parasite too.
- corporalagumbo 14y agoPlants are just parasites of the sun man. And even the sun is just a rapist of mass energy.
- westicle 14y agoDon't be an apologist for solar-parasites.
- ghshephard 14y agoThe point that I probably failed to make, is that trying to drop out of the work-for-wages/acquire capital/hire-people/produce goods ecosystem only works as long as you have a lot of people prepared to work-for-wages/acquire capital/hire-people/produce goods who will create the environment that keeps you alive. I would never besmirch the good name of the sun, nor suggest that we don't all depend on it. I think we can all agree that we've greatly benefited from living within the sun's ecosystem.
- spiritplumber 14y agoI picked two up (well they're not kids, they're in their late 20s) and they've been working with me ever since. Can't wait until they move out, but at least they learned some electronics!
- lilsunnybee 14y agoYou sound pretty awesome. Thanks for reaching out.
- asah 14y agohi-- Haight St shop owner and resident (Buyer's Best Friend Wholesale & Mercantile, Haight @ Cole, bbfdirect.com), member of the Haight St Merchants Association, own two other shops around town, happy to answer any questions. Some FAQs: - no, the street kids don't steal or bother us much, but also not especially helpful. They and the shopowners largely keep to themselves. - yeah, the filth is unpleasant and bad for business. - SIT/LIE hasn't been abused much AFAICT-- it's gone into the cops' "tools" for dealing with people who cross the line. Plenty of people sit on the sidewalks still, but now you can get them to move if being polite doesn't work. As with any enforcement tool, I'm sure there's some abuse and I won't defend it. The cops I've met are thoughtful. - we've had to call the cops only a handful of times - not bad for a big city. - cyclical/seasonal business and cost of living are bigger annoyances than the kids. - the Haight Ashbury merchants are as crazy as anybody-- half of them want to kick out the bums, the other half feed them, half want to legalize pot, the other half get more cops. The issues are complex. I second Dewitt's comments btw -- we know each other both from the 'hood and from work.
- dasht 14y agoA lot of people read this and this kind of story and they want to talk about the morality or value systems of these kids, themselves, and so forth. I propose that there is a much more important reading: Youth unemployment is extraordinarily high (effecting minorities even worse than these mostly-white kids, of course). Youth incarceration rate / engagement with the justice system is very high. The numbers of people "dropping out" of legitimate society altogether look to be high and growing. People's personal feelings about all this aside, it pays to notice when society starts to fray so badly as this.
- KillerDIller88 14y agoI was one of those kids. And I can tell you that the article is pretty accurate. I am female, small and skinny. At the time, I was 19 years old and I had given up a one-way ticket to Hawaii, where I was going to transfer to another Dave and Buster's. I decided that even in paradise, I didn't want to work for those assholes anymore. So I packed up about 1/10 of my belongings (what I considered valuable: my violin, some clothes and a ton of beads). When I got to SF, I instantly made friends. I was drawn to the ones who didn't like begging- the buskers and merchants. I slept in the park every night for months. I wandered Haight & Ashbury- at night. Yes, I got robbed by the Fillmore Kids once, but I deserved it for selling on their turf. I never got in any fights, nor did any of the kids I was hanging with. I never even had anything stolen (not that I had anything to steal). The whole point is to be totally detached from society. Looking back, I think it should have been scary, but it wasn't. It was fun. I got to play my violin all day and sing Janice Joplin to the gypsies at night by campfire on Ocean Beach. I met some fascinating characters. One kid had joined a cult. When they refused to let him play jazz piano, he decided that working in a vegan-bakery-sweat-shop run by jesus freaks wasn't for him. He collected rocks and must have been really fucking strong because he had the heaviest pack I have ever held. At least he could be sure that no one would steal that thing! There were a lot of kids with psychosis there, too. One kid wrote poetry all day and occasionally sang to himself. When I asked him what he was saying, he'd say, "a song I wrote for you." Though the sentiment was sweet, he didn't write it. It was 'Tangled Up in Blue' by Bob Dylan. It was ALWAYS 'Tangled Up in Blue'. I thought the comment about "respecting the spot," was interesting, too. We really do that. No one is greedy. If we feel we've made enough cash for beer or cigarettes, we leave. I've even had other kids tell me about a good busking stop they had just left vacant. "Warmed it up for ya." It's easy to see why this lifestyle is so appealing. However, the same cannot be said of why it's a lot less dangerous than most would think. But I lived it and I can tell you, I never felt unsafe in the HAIGHT (I emphasize Haight because I did venture to a soup kitchen near Polk and Geary and that was fucking terrifying). Despite any negative feelings some of the gypsies might have toward the cops, the police generally go easy on the stray kids because they know they keep the real crime out of the tourist area. In the end, I got bored of that life and moved to Austin to pursue music. I'm still a gypsy at heart, but I also care a lot about the real world. These kids don't have any opinions on real events and feel no sense of loyalty to society. They're not dangerous, they're just just freeloaders. Plain and simple.
- littletables 14y agoI became homeless at the cusp of 14, escaping from sleeping with mice on a bare mattress from a Sunset District garage - where my crack-addicted mother (she, a Stanford engineering graduate) put me. I lived on the streets of San Francisco, almost exclusively the Haight until I was 17 1/2. The horrors of my story paled in comparison to the kids I crewed up with in Upper/Lower Haight, and there were a lot of us. There still are. For many years I have done active outreach work to the homeless youth there as well as risk reduction community mediation meetings between homeless kids, their outreach service workers, and local residents (some of these meetings have taken place at The Booksmith). I am currently very successful in the tech arena, despite never having returned to school after having to find a place to live and food to eat when I was halfway through ninth grade; I never graduated and have no formal education. I am a very lucky exception. Why do I tell you this? So you can begin to understand why I have to tell you that if this article is claiming to be about life for, or about, homeless youth in the Haight, the article is so inaccurate it ought to be considered harmful. This article is the biggest lie and mischaracterization of homeless youth in the Haight I have ever read. I'm too astonished at the moment to be outraged.
- return0 14y agoIt was a little weird that the author felt they had to give the definition of 'panhandling'.
- raintrees 14y ago"and have limited options when they get too old for the lifestyle" That's what would sour me. Guess I am showing my age... I like hot showers, clean clothes, and warm beds too much.