Hundreds of unsheltered people living in tent encampments in the blocks surrounding the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco have been forced to leave by city outreach workers and police as part of an attempted “clean up the house” ahead of this week’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation’s annual free trade conference.
The action, which housing advocates allege violated a court injunction, was celebrated by right-wing figures and the tech crowd, who have long been convinced that the city is in terminal decline because of an increase in encampments in the downtown area.
The X account End Wokness wrote that the displacement was proof the “government can easily fix our cities overnight. It just doesn’t want to” (the post received 77,000 likes). “Queer Eye but it’s just Xi visiting troubled US cities then they get a makeover,” joked Packy McCormick, the founder of Not Boring Capital and advisor to Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto VC team. The New York Post celebrated the action, saying that residents had “miraculously disappeared.”
First of all, I was playing off of the parent comment that legality is wholly divorced from morality, a notion that I agree with, rather than commenting on the article.
Second, even though it’s illegal, well, read the article. It seems to me that even the social aid organizations involved were giving a bunch of coy, shitty non-answers to the journalists involved in this story. This is kind of one of those unsettling moments where the institution has lost faith in itself, like when the SCOTUS found the removal of native Americans to be illegal and President Jackson said “Justice Marshall has made his decision, now let him come enforce it” and caused the trail of tears anyway. I doubt we’re going to see any accountability come of this. So, even though it’s illegal on paper, it’s functionally legal; the state is just going to five finger salute the law on this one.