The Safe Sleeping Village on Fulton St, just in front of City Hall in San Francisco, is a damning indictment of capitalism in one of the USA's most wealthy cities.
The headquarters of Facebook, worth approximately $800 billion, sits opposite from a homeless camp in the scrubland surrounding San Francisco Bay.
Southern California is a major oil producer, and storage facilities and refineries make for uncomfortable bedfellows for working class neighborhoods like these.
Traffic on I-880 in Oakland, CA inches past a homeless encampment during rush hour.
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California.
It's a state with a name synonymous with excess. The "Golden State" is home to the richest companies, the biggest movie stars, the most innovative tech. It has the most people, the widest freeways...even the highest mountain, and the lowest valley.
California is a state which represents the exceptionalism Americans learn from an early age - that this place is different than any other; perhaps divinely ordained, but certainly blessed. If you try hard enough, you can make it. Even the steel wall at the southern border of the state seems like a test designed to weed out the ones who "want it the most"...if you can surmount it, you can reap untold rewards.
Vast freeways carry millions of commuters in and out of the major cities of San Francisco and LA, to and from some of the world's best universities, which supply the world's best industries with employees and innovators. But California also showcases anecdotal evidence to explain the "American Dream". Traffic inches past the homeless in the Bay Area, open-air drug markets exist within blocks of downtown LA, and Silicon Valley's biggest firms share real estate with tent cities. The lesson here is that wealth is jealousy guarded, vastly stratified, and overwhelmingly held at the top. Not all of this can be explained by a lack of ambition or capability by citizens - it is a system which systemically oppresses minorities, women, and the working class. It is a system which does not provide adequate social services or housing, not because of a coherent political philosophy, but because of a clever disinformation campaign on behalf of the moneyed upper class.
California has had a housing crisis for years, immigrant workers have been exploited since the beginning of time, and now tech disruption threatens the very notion of workers' rights. California is too big to be ignored, the world's fifth largest economy (when taken apart from the rest of the USA), and has the ability to be a massive, even revolutionary, change-making entity in economic and political arenas.
It's up to them to do it.
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