A liberal San Francisco supervisor has blamed capitalism for the city’s sprawling homeless issue and said that it’s ‘counterproductive’ to arrest people openly doing drugs in public.
Dean Preston, the Supervisor representing District 5, has also been very open about his support for the ‘defund the police’ movement.
‘I think we have a very, very bloated police budget. All kinds of waste in the police department. I mean, I could cut a hundred million dollars out of the police department,’ he said in a recent clip shared online from the UnHerd documentary.
His district is a part of the Tenderloin District, an area well known for its open-air drug market and homeless population in the city.
San Francisco has faced an exodus of businesses as the downtown deals with drugs and homelessness overrunning the city.
Dean Preston, the District 5 Supervisor for San Francisco, has blamed the homeless epidemic on capitalism and said that there is a ‘bloated police budget’
Exclusive DailyMail.com photos show the homeless filling the streets in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District where vagrants regularly relieve themselves on the sidewalk
Preston went on to blame the country’s economic structure to be a main reason why District 5 is severely affected by homelessness.
‘I think what you’re seeing in the Tenderloin is absolutely the result of capitalism and what happens in capitalism to the people at the bottom rungs,’ Preston said in the interview.
He disagreed with the city’s ‘inconsistent’ approach when it comes to getting rid of homeless encampments and arresting drug users. Preston said the technique ‘has not made our city any safer. It’s actually made it less safe. It increases overdoses.’
His comments come as the homeless population swarmed back to the streets of San Francisco after Governor Gavin Newsom decided to temporarily clean up the city for Chinese President Xi’s visit last month.
Newsom quickly erased the ever-growing homeless encampments and drug activity on the streets in preparation for the APEC Summit as President Joe Biden flew in to meet with his Chinese counterpart.
The city worked around-the-clock to clear out encampments, boost shelter placements and deploy ‘night ambassadors’ to keep vagrants away from the area.
After the six-day event that drew more than 20,000 visitors wrapped up on November 17, special attention to the Tenderloin District ended.
‘The Monday afterwards, the gates were gone and so were all the police,’ architect Rick Garcia, 48, told DailyMail.com.
‘A little bit of residual cleanliness remained but then pretty quickly the mentally disturbed folks, the fent zombies, started making their way back into the neighborhood. And since they’re tolerated, they’d been able to come here unchecked,’ Garcia added.
Governor Gavin Newsom recently cleaned up the city in preparation for Chines President Xi’s visit last month, and after the conference the streets in the Tenderloin District went back to the way they were
X Owner Elon Musk and other San Franciscans said that Preston’s progressive policies have contributed to the ruination of the city, full of open drug-taking, ram-raids and violent crime.
‘Also, Dean Preston needs to be fired. He is arguably the person most responsible for the destruction of San Francisco,’ Musk said in a recent post.
In another post to X, Musk said: ‘Dean Preston should be in prison for what he’s done to San Francisco.’
In response to the CEO’s remarks, Preston replied: ‘It’s a reality check that it’s not a safe or productive place to share my thoughts.’
‘Twitter has been overwhelmed by trolls and disinformation since Musk took over. With the owner of the site calling for me to be jailed, it became clearer it was time to move to a new platform.’
Shopping carts and trash are seen strewn across the sidewalk in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District
California Gov. Gavin Newsom greets Chinese President Xi Jinping last month in San Francisco
A DailyMail.com analysis of cuts faced by key departments in San Francisco reveals the police department must find savings of $18.5 million and public health budgets could lose $26 million
Preston was elected in 2019 as the District 5 Supervisor and according to the Board of Supervisors website, he ‘advocates for fundamental change at the local, state and national levels.’
Preston has previously hit back at Musk’s criticism. In a statement on his website last month, Preston called Musk a ‘billionaire fascist.’
The Tenderloin district is in the heart of San Francisco and near the Asian Art museum. It’s just a few blocks from City Hall. The area also includes part of the Compton Transgender Cultural District.
The homeless population and crime rates have skyrocketed and left a lot of locals to flee the city, along with major retailers.
Robberies are up 14 percent so far this year in the Golden Gate City where mayor London Breed last month demanded cuts of 18 percent from next year’s police budget.
Reported deaths from drug overdoses reached 620 in the first nine months of the year, according to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, up from 540 for the same period in 2020.
The city stands to lose $200 million a year in revenue through its business exodus – which has seen major hotels and retailers flee the city center.
Retail stalwart Old Navy announced it would be shuttering its flagship store in the area last month, becoming the latest chain to exit the city.
Nordstrom also announced it would be closing all of its locations in the city.
In April, Whole Foods announced it was closing all their locations, with Anthropologie and Office Depot having also made the same decisions leading some analysts to predict that the city has entered a ‘doom-loop’ of permanent decline.