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 No one argues that San Francisco has a homeless problem, and almost no one would argue that something needs to be done about it. But is spending $65,000 on billboards telling not to give people change the answer? Most likely not. Nevertheless, that’s what the San Francisco Hotel Council is doing, with strategically placed ads designed to dissuade tourists and residents from giving in to panhandlers. Below are two examples of the new ads:  A tourist couple saying, "Today we rode a cable car, visited Alcatraz and supported a drug habit."A smiling man in a park saying, "Today I did Tai Chi, donated some change and helped spread STDs." The drug habit I can understand. I've seen homeless people, and probably non-homeless people, smoking crack on the corner of O'Farrell and Jones more times than I can count. But I don't get the reference to STDs. What does donating change have to do with spreading sexually transmitted disease, unless of course, the tourists are experiencing the city’s population of streetwalkers. But that's not giving change, that's paying for a service. So why did the SFHC choose STDs? We attempted to ask that of them, but they cowered when we shone the light of justice and truth upon them. Well, not really, they just didn’t return our calls. Are they implying that homeless people spread disease? That if you give them money, you might as well be giving them herpes? It's not like someone can go out and buy a case of syphilis with the quarter a tourist just handed him or her. Whoo, party! Are they saying that tourists should be handing out condoms instead of quarters? Or maybe in lieu of that pair of dimes laced with pocket lint, visitors should spray the homeless with Nonoxynol-9, that’ll get rid of them pesky little sexually transmitted critters… Or maybe the ads insinuate that the guy who just palmed 17 cents is going to go out and pick up a whore? Jeez, the overhead on being homeless must be outrageous, what with the boozin’, the druggin’ ‘n’ the whorin’. It’s a good thing they don’t have to worry about shelter (there’s that really swank doorway on Montgomery and Sutter) and food (that’s what the boozin’ and druggin’ are for).  Obviously, the SFHC is using hyperbole to get its point across, and few things create a more visceral image than the idea of clap-ridden bum thrusting his hand out for a few sheckels right before “go time.”Why not an ad that states, “Today I ate at La Cumbre, visited SFMOMA and help fill pus into the festering boil of a lazy, shiftless drifter on smack by giving him the change that I decided not to tip my cab driver”? Reports have said that the council based this campaign on the government’s god-awful “If you scraped your bong today, you helped pay for a bunch of Saudi terrorists to tattoo ‘Death to the infidels’ on their ass right before launching jihad” ad spots. And while these may have gained a lot of attention, the concepts they attempted to drive home are clearly misleading and rather beneath contempt. For an organization, even one based on commerce, to use those spots as a model is bad policy, especially in a town as politically progressive as San Francisco. If we as a community can be swayed by such simple sentiment then, ladies and gentlemen, the bums have won.
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