Frisco hoteliers want a homeless-free city

Hoteliers in the Californian city of San Francisco are following in the footsteps of NYC’s former mayor Rudolph Giuliani who swept beggars off the Big Apple through an aggressive campaign that barred tourists from handing them out any alms. “Today, we ride streetcars, drop in on Alcatraz Prison and help drug junkies with their addictions,” reads a billboard that features a couple of tourists with the famed Golden Gate Bridge serving as backdrop.

Like the rest of the billboards being used in this controversial campaign intended to goad visitors into giving no money at all to the countless hobos roaming up and down the city streets, another heading goes like this: “Giving tramps money doesn’t help; it does harm.”

Regardless of being one of the crown jewels of the U.S. tourist industry, the number of vacationers who stroll San Francisco’s steep streets and knolls took a dramatic nosedive on the heels of the 9/11 terrorist attacks without having staged a comeback yet.

The city’s Hotelier Association explained such a downturn in tourism stems from such factors as SARS fear or a melting economy, and he adds another one of his own: the city is teeming with beggars. Even though that assertion is out of the question, nobody seems to have a ballpark figure of the exact number of vagrants. The city hall is reckoning some 7,300 homeless people, though local entities revealed that 94,000 people applied for social services provided for the homeless in the course of last year

The Hotelier Association, an organization gathering the city’s premiere lodging facilities, estimates that tramp epidemic –as it puts it- is shooing its clientele away. As anyone might expect from so liberal a city as San Francisco, the publicity blitz –that also includes leaflets, brochures and the website www.wewantchange.com- has raised a few concerned eyebrows.

For activist Paul Boden, the company’s message is crystal-clear: “Hate the homeless. They spread drugs, diseases and are to blame for the crumbling economy,” he said.

This is not the first time the issue is brought up, though. Last summer, hotelkeepers splayed billboards and stickers all around the city with such biased messages as “I don’t want to sweep people off my doormat,” and “I wonder why beggars continue to be a problem after we spent $200 million last year.”

For Boden, hoteliers are not trying to resolve homelessness, but rather get the problem off their backs altogether. “They think,” he said, “that if tramps vanished from the city, San Francisco would be Disneyland. But this is not close to happening anytime soon.”