Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast.

This is Seth Barron, associate editor of City Journal.

Joining me on the show today is Erica Sandberg. Erica is a widely published consumer finance reporter based in San Francisco,

and she writes for a city journal mostly on homelessness, crime, and other safety issues in her

beloved Bay Area. You can follow her on Twitter at Erica J. Sandberg.

Her latest piece for City Journal, doorway denizens, details how San Francisco's small business owners

are handling a surge of street homelessness

that began after the latest lockdown went into effect in early December, though it's a perennial

and recurring problem. Erica, thanks for joining us.

Thank you so much, Seth. Glad to be here.

So your piece, doorway denizens, provides some vivid details about the

aftermath of California's lockdown. Business owners, I gather, had invested in some new street

furniture, and it's being used in, it's been repurposed, let's say. Can you explain to our listeners what happened?

Absolutely. Yeah, the city's, San Francisco City allowed what was called the Shared Spaces Program,

which was actually quite remarkable. I mean, it was a really amazing example of what the city can do and can do right,

which is to get businesses in action in any way they can, which is to build these parklets,

which essentially kind of these outdoor spaces where people could eat, they could have fitness centers

were using them, and they had exercise bikes, et cetera, out in them. And they were lovely. In fact,

they were turning out to be these incredible attraction where here we were in COVID and everything

was shut down and it was so dark and so bleak and then these parklets

sprung up and business owners spent a fortune to do them. They actually were averaging around

$15,000 out of the out of the pockets of these business owners so that they could bring in revenue.

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