Legal Insurrection:

I noted last week that California Governor Gavin Newsom recently said the state was the “envy of the world.”

A longtime United Nations envoy would disagree. She recently visited the Bay Area and was astonished by what she saw.

When Leilani Farha paid a visit to San Francisco in January, she knew the grim reputation of the city’s homeless encampments. In her four years as the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Adequate Housing, Farha has visited the slums of Mumbai, Delhi, Mexico City, Jarkarta, and Manila. The crisis in San Francisco, she said, is comparable to these conditions. . . . . At one point on her trip, Farha encountered a young man living underneath a highway underpass, cooking quesadillas on a small stove with an open flame. “The last time I had seen someone cooking on the sidewalk like that was in India, with the pavement dwellers there, and here I am in San Francisco in a state with the sixth largest GDP in the world,” said Farha. She asked the man about how he came to be homeless, and found that he had traveled from the Midwest after his mother died and his family broke down. “I think he was in the midst of developing a psychosocial disability from the trauma of being on the streets,” she said.

The situation is about to get rapidly worse. A new study shows that there has been a 17% increase in homelessness in the city over the last two years.