On the Scene: Taking Back the Streets

San Francisco

SAN FRANCISCO’S septuagenarian columnist Herb Caen has likened it to a sixteenth-century English law that required public flogging of vagrants; the ACLU has condemned it as a violation of the basic constitutional rights to-freedom of travel and association; members of the clergy have denounced it as a cold and uncaring attempt to sweep a desperate problem away. Yet ordinary citizens seem to like it. Last August Mayor Frank Jordan instituted the Matrix Program, a sort of tough-love approach to the growing problems caused by the homeless in San Francisco. The professionally indignant have been nipping at his heels ever since.

RG

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Robert L. Gaskin

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San Francisco

SAN FRANCISCO’S septuagenarian columnist Herb Caen has likened it to a sixteenth-century English law that required public flogging of vagrants; the ACLU has condemned it as a violation of the basic constitutional rights to-freedom of travel and association; members of the clergy have denounced it as a cold and uncaring attempt to sweep a desperate problem away. Yet ordinary citizens seem to like it. Last August Mayor Frank Jordan instituted the Matrix Program, a sort of tough-love approach to the growing problems caused by the homeless in San Francisco. The professionally indignant have been nipping at his heels ever since.