Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on the show today is

Erica Sandberg, a widely published consumer finance reporter based in San Francisco, and she also

covers homelessness, crime, and public order in the Bay Area for City Journal. In her latest article, San Francisco's

substance abuse crisis, Erica reports on the grim state of affairs in the

city's 6th District, in which thousands of homeless addicts shoot up and smoke unmolested,

while the city pushes policies that ignore the real source of the problem.

Erica, thanks very much for joining us. Oh, thank you so much for having me, Brian.

Well, let's discuss this recent piece you've done for us, which got a lot of traffic,

a lot of attention. California now leads the nation and has for some time, I think, in unsheltered homelessness.

I think statewide there's something like 90,000 people

living on the streets.

As you note, more than 8,000 of those homeless individuals

live in San Francisco.

Governor Newsom, Gavin Newsom has launched a program called

Project Room Key to relocate the unsheltered homeless people to hotels and motels that the state is now leasing and turning over to them.

Now, how has that program fared so far? So let's start with that.

Yeah, overall, it's been a disaster. You wouldn't know it if you

talk to the politician and anybody else who's involved in the program, because they're going to say

that it is fabulous. Everything's working out really well, but they don't want you to go down and

take a look at what actually is happening. So there's this massive disconnect.

The crime in and around these hotels and motels is off the charts.

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