Tony and Rebecca Spradlin, visiting from Texas with their two teenage daughters, stood at the intersection trying to decide whether to hit the shopping mall or head to the cable-car turntable. They cast a wary eye at the assorted street people congregating nearby.
Suddenly they were approached by Tommy Schindler, a 38-year-old homeless person. His face and clothes were dirty. He smelled of alcohol.
"Can I have some money?" Schindler asked, extending a hand.
The Spradlins collectively stepped aside and hustled off to the cable car.
"I was warned before I left home to ignore them and keep walking," Rebecca commented once she'd placed some distance between her family and this latest disruption of their vacation. "You just have to keep walking," she reminded her girls.
Good advice. While most street people in the area are relatively benign, some can get aggressive. Schindler prides himself on being one of them.
"Sometimes," he told me, "I come to the intersection and there's tourists standing there with a f-- camcorder so you can't get across the street. I just take their camcorders."
Schindler gave me a cold stare. "I'm really not a nice person," he said. "I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired."
According to the San Francisco Convention & Visitors Bureau, tourism is far and away the city's largest industry, representing more than 60,000 jobs and about $6 billion in annual spending, not to mention hundreds of millions more in sales and hotel taxes.
According to just about everyone, homelessness and panhandling are the city's two biggest problems, representing a constant challenge to the business community, civic leaders and 14 million annual visitors.
At Fifth and Market, where the Tenderloin's down and out meet Union Square's eager to spend, the clash of these opposing forces makes itself felt on a daily basis.
An especially profound example of that clash happened in May when a homeless man described by police as having a history of mental illness was arrested for allegedly attacking a psychiatrist attending a convention of shrinks at Moscone Center.
"You've got a lot of good-hearted people visiting San Francisco and living in San Francisco," said Wayne Alexis, supervisor of 14 red-shirted "ambassadors" who regularly patrol the Union Square area on behalf of local merchants. "That's part of the problem."
He gazed up and down Powell Street. "People keep giving them money, they'll keep coming back for more," Alexis said.
His eyes settled on a street person across the way, a disheveled man known as Alan. Alan was standing outside the French Connection clothing store hitting up passers-by for change.
"You're going to have to move," Alexis told him as reasonably as he could.
"I'm not bothering nobody," Alan countered with a menacing edge in his voice. "F-- you."
Alexis has no authority to detain an overly aggressive panhandler. He flagged down a passing cop and asked Officer Larry McDevitt to handle the situation. McDevitt confronted Alan and persuaded him to try his luck elsewhere.
"There's not a lot of cops who'll bring in a guy for panhandling," McDevitt acknowledged afterward -- a fact that's equally well understood among street people, and which makes it tough for the police to do anything more than shift the homeless from corner to corner.
"It's frustrating," McDevitt said. "We get a finger pointed at us for being too harsh with the homeless. Then you get business owners who want us to do more."
In the end, he said, it'll be up to the city's political leaders to do something about the homeless situation. But that's been the case for years, and San Francisco residents and visitors are still awaiting some action.
Inside French Connection, with its endearing "FCUK" sign out front, saleswoman Lene Andersen said she routinely calls upon Alexis and his crew to shoo panhandlers from the door of the shop.
"You can't go 10 steps outside without someone asking you for money," she complained.
In San Francisco, the Board of Supervisors is stuck squabbling over Care Not Cash, Supervisor Gavin Newsom's program to reduce some welfare payments and funnel the money instead into social services. Politics has once again gotten in the way of progress.
In Los Angeles, an initiative called Bring L.A. Home was recently introduced to provide affordable housing, mental health care and treatment for substance abuse.
Scott Holmes and Michelle Smith, looking fit and tanned, were up from L.A. the other day and waiting in line for the cable car near Fifth and Market.
They both said the homeless situation in San Francisco wasn't much different from down south. "You get used to it," Smith said with a shrug.
"Actually," Holmes responded, "they're nicer here than in L.A. They're more inebriated in L.A."
panhandling
Edited to add, that I didn't really see a homeless problem in LA, but then again, it's so spread out, how could you tell?
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