On November 6, 2021, the California petroleum heiress Ivy Getty married the photographer Tobias Engel at San Francisco City Hall. The venue is in the Tenderloin district, and the Tenderloin is at the heart of the city’s drug and homelessness crises. Drug abuse is rife in San Francisco, which the SF Chronicle reported in 2019 has more drug addicts than high school students. According to city statisticians, the 300 block on Tenderloin’s Hyde Street has received more complaints over the last decade about cleanliness than any other: City Journal recently described its sidewalk as a carpet of ‘syringes, excrement, and half-alive bodies.’
Despite (or possibly because of) the density of billionaires in the city, homelessness in San Francisco is also acute and rising. A 2019 study recorded more than 8,000 unhoused individuals, a rise of 17 per cent over the 2017 count — despite officials spending more than $300 million (£220 million) on the issue.
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