San Francisco is a mecca synonymous with technological innovations, envious urban green spaces — and inhumane rates of homelessness.
The City’s current figures show there are more than 8,300 unhoused individuals in San Francisco, a number calculated during a 2024 count that found 3,969 were sheltered and 4,354 were sheltered. That was an increase of nearly 70% from the same figures published in 2011 at the infancy of SF’s tech boom; the subsequent years afterward saw living expenses, which include housing costs, skyrocket to astronomical levels.
More anecdotal guestimations — estimates that also include those who might be working and living in their vehicles — paint a bleaker picture, with the number of unhoused individuals in San Francisco close to 11,000 people struggling with homelessness.
San Francisco has moved them in (and out) of hotels during the pandemic; pen-like barricades were created to contain tent encampments as COVID-19 cases spiked, dubbed as “safe sleeping sites”; the City failed the homeless entirely when moving them into closed corridors — mirroring spaces found in detention centers — which created conditions that later lead to massive outbreaks of the novel respiratory virus; San Francisco’s recovery arch from the pandemic saw the rise (and state-wide legalization) of inhumane street sweeps, fiscally supported by millions of dollars from California.
Ongoing gentrification, drug addiction, and a growing lack of local housing supply, too, continue to be the largest drivers of homelessness in San Francisco. Though the city continues making small strides in rectifying these issues, the severity of the humanitarian crisis remains largely unchanged.
Given the gravity of these social problems, you would think compassion would be afforded to those contending with a lack of shelter; at the very least, one would expect San Francisco officials to use concise and constructive language when addressing the homeless. Alas, such hasn’t always been the case when dehumanizing texts sent by Mayor Breed and San Francisco Police Chief William “Bill” Scott in 2019 again made rounds on X.
In the wake of her defeat by Mayor-elect Daniel Lurie, the affluent former tech founder who poured an estimated $8 million of his own personal wealth into besting the mayoral campaign by incumbent London Breed, it’s worth remembering how her dehumanizing language against the most vulnerable among us will outlive her run as San Francisco Mayor.
Mind you, it was hardly the first time this trove of appalling texts — which included the Mayor of San Francisco comparing homeless individuals to “zombies” and the still-acting police chief of the city equating them all to “addicts” — grabbed the public’s attention. (Mission Local reported on these exact texts in May of 2020, going into detail on how “sweeps” of homeless people and encampments have been a contentious flashpoint between the mayor’s office and homeless advocates, by and large for their inhumanity.) District 2 Supervisor Catherine Stefani described scenes in the city as an “insane asylum,” one that’s overrun by a “zombie invasion [but] yet they are mentally ill homeless” in a series of emails from 2015.
Self-ascribed moderate candidates during this year’s election cycle for seats on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, most notably those supported by conservative PACs like GrowSF — e.g. contenders Scotty Jacobs and Trevor Chandler, both of whom lost their respective district election bids — decried unhoused individuals as nuances and quality of life barriers to renter and homeowners.
This is also the identical rhetoric around unhoused populations that residents of San Francisco sometimes echo, ostensibly justified by San Francisco officials uttering these very same lines. And therein lies the problem: Our city officials have OK’d this kind of dehumanizing language around San Francisco’s most vulnerable residents by using it without much recourse.
Running around my head with this piece, I picked up a copy of David Smith’s Less Than Human, a 336-page deep-dive into the shadow sides of our humanity… among them how dehumanization is a slow process, rather than a sudden shift in thinking. That undertaking, which is described as a response to conflicting movies between two pirates — case and point: NIMBY supporters vs YIMBY advocates — is one that begins without hurry, building momentum over time. And how it has historically begun with the use of language.
Michelle Maiese, the chair of the philosophy department at Emmanuel College, defines dehumanization as “the psychological process of demonizing the enemy, making them seem less than human and hence not worthy of humane treatment.” Dehumanizing often starts with using language to build an image of a specific type of person that, more or less, strips them of their humanity and portrays them as a focal point for a certain set of problems. (The homeless in San Francisco, for example, are notoriously berated for our filthy, feces-lined streets — never mind the fact that the City has an appallingly few amount of public restrooms open past 10 p.m. at night.)
Exercising morality is a cornerstone of our human existence. Successful dehumanization, however, is predicated on the notion of moral exclusion.
Populations are targeted based on their identity — gender, ideology, skin color, ethnicity, religion, age — are depicted as “less than” or criminal or evil or “crazy” or like “zombies” set inside a city-wide “insane asylum.” The targeted group eventually falls out of the scope of what the greater population deems as “naturally human,” thus removing them from any semblance of moral or ethical codes denoted to humans.
In this scenario, the dehumanized are not wholly human; they exist as something else outside of it — a physical body to expunge our collective frustrations toward what we’ve now prescribed to them.
Dehumanizing always starts with language — the mental imagery is what follows suit. As researcher and TED-talk-extraordinaire Brené Brown so profoundly pointed out: “During the Holocaust, Nazis described Jews as Untermenschen — meaning ‘subhuman’ — describing Jews as disease-carrying rodents. The Hutus who initiated the Rwanda genocide called Tutsis ‘cockroaches.’ Indigenous people are often referred to as savages. Serbs called Bosnians aliens. Slave owners throughout history considered slaves subhuman animals.”
San Francisco officials have referred to the homeless as “zombies”; as “crazies”; as “addicts.” All these descriptors occupy certain corners of a subhuman realm. It’s an eerie (and alarming) parallel to what Brown described above.
We need to hold our elected city officials responsible for what rhetoric they use around the homeless crisis. It wouldn’t behoove, say, Mayor Breed, SF Police Chief Scott, and District Supervisor Stefanie to publically flat-out say: The homeless are not “zombies’’ or “crazies,” these are “humans,” and we will hold ourselves to a higher standard when discussing the homeless in both our professional and personal lives.
In our own circles, too, it’s imperative we collectively shift our own individual dialogue around the unsheltered to reflect the population’s humanity.
Dehumanization is a slow-building process. London Breed’s remarks against the city’s unhoused individuals exist as an uncomfortable allegory that illustrates this methodology. And it’s a storyline that will now extend well past her incumbency as San Francisco Mayor.
