Mental Health and the Homeless
I
n February of this year, a number of strange things happened in San Francisco. For one, the San Francisco 49ers, who no longer play in this city, hosted the Super Bowl, and many thousands of football revelers who had no intention of spending the week near the team’s new suburban stadium turned San Francisco
into Super Bowl Central. The second is the strange sights, sounds, and smells those visitors experienced while in San Francisco. Locals hoping to show off their hometown to outsiders were understandably nervous, lest those visitors experience any of these recently observed happenings in the city: a man shouting in-
coherently at the Powell Street BART station, a man dropping his pants and going to the bathroom on a public sidewalk, another man urinating between two parked cars, or a woman shouting madly at passersby near Union Square. How did our public spaces become “like a mental ward on the streets,” as The New York Times once described Berkeley’s
zipperer strasse homeless (continued on page 3)
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