Jared Krickstein, a formerly homeless man, said California’s approach to homelessness has failed and that the current system is a job-finding program for liberal arts graduates.
Krickstein experienced the horrors of San Francisco’s street camps firsthand, having lived there for years as a homeless, drug-addicted man who should have benefited from California’s extremely generous policies for people living on the streets.
By literally spending money from state governments Billions In the fight against homelessness, Krickstein is faced with the question of whether the problem is the people who make the policies or the people who implement them.
“I think there are people who want to help and who are involved with these organizations with good intentions. [but] “This policy is completely broken.” At the same time, Krickstein believes California has built an infrastructure of homeless funding that has created its own economy that benefits from its large population of homeless people.
“What we do is a job-seeking program for liberal arts graduates who have failed to get jobs elsewhere. We’ve supported an entire job market for nonprofits that maintain homelessness. It’s free-range homelessness, and they’re like the shepherds that keep it going.”
“This is pretty bad. It seems he is valuing me as something for sale.”
There’s no path forward for thousands of homeless people to get off the streets. It’s like keeping them homeless while keeping them in comfortable situations, Krickstein explained. Homeless people aren’t necessarily seen as “people,” Krickstein said, but as “job security.” In some ways, he acknowledged, the homeless aren’t even people, explaining that addiction to drugs like fentanyl puts people in a “zombie”-like state.
The new author said that after years of urging from friends, she published her story of living on the streets as a “homeless meth addict.”
It’s a drug addiction comedy!
Krickstein’s book, “Crooked Smile,” has resonated with popular comedians like Matt McCusker, who spoke about the book on his show. Podcasts With Shane Gillis. McCusker wrote a blurb in the back of Krickstein’s book after receiving a copy from him, and Krickstein said the comedian’s response was surprisingly positive.
“Comedians have the mentality of just wanting to lift people’s spirits,” the San Francisco native said when asked why he thinks comedians have responded so positively.
Along with comedian Sam Tallent, McCusker and Gillis joked about the story in the new book, and Krickstein said the “comedic elements” of the story caught the attention of many, even though the book deals with drug use, homelessness and nearly being trafficked.
“You just have to laugh and take it,” he added. He said telling jokes is a way to overcome trauma rather than being haunted by it — the same reason many comedians cite for talking about their darkest experiences.
I was put naked in a suitcase and almost sold.
McCusker spoke of a story in “Crooked Smile” in which the author was beaten by two drug dealers and put into a duffel bag, but Krickstein said that wasn’t true and that it was actually a suitcase.
“I was a homeless drug addict in San Francisco and I ended up in a situation where a female drug dealer suspected that I had stolen her cell phone and sold it to someone.”
“She and her sister were planning to attack me,” he recounted, as he was on his way to his dealer’s house to buy drugs. “I was beaten up by two women, one of them had a very large knife.”
“They told me to get naked and get into the suitcase,” he recalls. “So I did.”
Krickstein said that after realising that things were not going well, the drug dealers implied they planned to kill him and put his body parts in a suitcase.
“They wanted to see if I could fit in there, and I did.”
He managed to escape from the suitcase and was ordered to sit naked in a closet, where a friend of the drug dealer, whom he called his “meth cousin,” arrived moments later.
The female cousin brought in another person with a gun, who made it clear to Krickstein that their goal was no longer to kill him, but to traffic him, likely as a sex slave. Krickstein grinned as he recalled being told to “look sexy” when his photograph was taken. He was also asked his height and weight to be evaluated by potential trafficking customers.
“This is really bad. It’s like he’s valuing me as something to sell,” he recalled thinking.
While Cousin Metz made numerous phone calls to see if anyone was interested in Krickstein, the author imagined that he would likely be sold to a “dungeon” and that the buyer would likely be male, but Krickstein appeared “insane,” high on heroin, and “emaciated,” so no one was actually interested in buying him.
Krickstein pointed out that the drug dealer is only a current dealer because her boyfriend, who always supplied him with drugs, went to prison.
“He was actually in prison, so she took over the operation,” Krickstein said.
The boyfriend called the woman from prison, explaining the consequences of forced confinement and murder, and that she would likely end up in prison if Krickstein was not released.
“His name is T-Bone. Thank you, T-Bone. He convinced Chantal to let me go.”
The ordeal is estimated to have lasted 12 hours, during which the author admits to having been given GHB, a drug commonly used in date rape, and after his release, he lost consciousness in a 7-Eleven before being taken into police custody.
Homelessness Funding
“The method is [governments] “Leveraging this money is ineffective,” Krickstein argued.
Things are being done backwards without consideration of human motivations. The policies are encouraging bad behavior, Krickstein continued, raising the question of whether California’s policymakers either don’t know what they’re doing or are “misappropriating” millions of dollars.
“Fixing the problem requires money, but simply pouring money into a problem that has been exacerbated by poor policies is never going to work,” the author said, adding that he believes the government is encouraging bad, anti-social behaviour through laws that ease penalties for theft and drug use.
The California solution didn’t work, but who did?
“What I’m against is this progressive mentality that basically says, ‘Let’s make this person crazy and let him die slowly on the street.'”
Krickstein said he lives in South Florida, where being homeless is essentially illegal. “I think that’s part of the strategy,” he joked.
“In my opinion, that’s not a very good path to go down. Making rules like that will cause people to move to cities that are more tolerant of homelessness.”
He then points to Houston, Texas, as a place that has made significant reductions in its homeless population, where bringing NGOs together under one banner rather than competing with each other seems to be working, at least on paper.
According to the 2023 report GovernanceThe city once had competing nonprofits that never communicated. Since 2011, Houston’s homeless population has declined by 64%, and is reported to be declining by 17% between 2022 and 2023. That’s a drop from 8,500 to 3,200, of which 2,000 are in shelters as of this publication.
Krickstein said finding a way to house someone or committing them to a psychiatric hospital is now considered a “conservative” view.
“What I’m against is this progressive ideology that basically says, ‘Let this person go crazy and die slowly on the street.’ It just doesn’t make sense to me.”
“That’s how it’s been treated in San Francisco.”
Krickstein said that while illegal immigration in California is not a driving problem, it’s not helping: He said the problem is driving up housing prices, which is helping to keep people off the streets.
“Where I live, rent is between $5,000 and $6,000. I think that’s because there’s an influx of people moving into the city looking for housing.”
He acknowledged that there isn’t much that can be done about it other than actually curbing illegal immigration.
Supporting Hunter Biden
Before the interview ended, Krickstein wanted to offer some advice to his oldest son, Hunter Biden, and his best advice was: “Hunter needs to laugh a little bit.”
“I understand. He has to walk this line and he takes his role very seriously. But he’s the funniest person in this presidency. If he had a sense of humor, people would respect him a lot more.” [his transgressions]People would like him better if he was more humble about selling state secrets for crack.”
“Crooked Smile” is AmazonKrickstein provides the following summary:
“If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to grow up in a home of drug addicts, be adopted at age 12 into an affluent neighborhood, then be a homeless drug addict for 10 years, then get out of there and come up with a plan to actually help thousands of drug addicts who are now homeless get back on their feet, then you might like my new book.”
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