Blocked sidewalks: how boulders became a flashpoint in San Francisco's homeless crisis

[Judi Lynn]

Vivian Ho
Thu 3 Oct 2019 01.00 EDT Last modified on Thu 3 Oct 2019 01.02 EDT

They appeared seemingly from out of thin air last month: two dozen knee-high boulders, at first glance, unremarkable, placed with remarkable precision along a sidewalk in a quiet alley in San Francisco.

Within days, they became a flashpoint for a city in the midst of a homeless crisis.

Residents of the Clinton Park alley, located to the north of San Francisco’s trendy Mission District neighborhood, funded the rock installation to deter loitering after what they described as a year of flagrant drug-dealing and unpredictable behavior. Housing advocates and other civically minded critics were quick to call the boulders out as anti-homeless architecture.

“Boulders don’t stop people from drug dealing,” said Jennifer Friedenbach, the executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness. “But they do stop people from sleeping.”

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/02/san-francisco-boulder-homeless-crisis

[Meadowoak]

1. Who is responsible when someone trips on one of these boulders

And breaks a leg, the homeowner or the city?

[BigDemVoter]

2. Seriously. What are the homeless supposed to do?

There aren't really any public restrooms they can use if they don't want the shelters (and there are PLENTY of reasons to not want to go there!), and they aren't allowed to sleep in the city parks. . . So many of the homeless have mental health issues. This is totally subjective, but I walked down Market Street just this past Saturday, and I counted at LEAST 22 people who were clearly impaired by some kind of illness, substance abuse disorder (usually both), etc. We can feel however we want to about how they came to this point, but these measures of booting out or blocking the homeless as 'undesirables' is not how we should be treating other human beings.