For outsiders experiencing it on YouTube, homelessness in San Francisco has a sort of up-close profile — overdoses and open drug deals, vacant and filthy faces, bodies sprawled on dirty concrete or, sometimes, just standing, bent incredibly in half, forehead between knees, in the telltale posture of someone who shot up fentanyl and forgot to sit.
Where I live, across San Francisco Bay in Oakland, the homelessness has also become a favourite subject for YouTube video sleuths. But instead of capturing it at ground level, from the juddering view of a camera held by a pedestrian, or through the window of a car moving along a curb in voyeuristic slowness, these videographers often do their thing while moving at the speed of traffic, panning hungrily along a blighted street, or they send up a drone to gather a vast scene in an aerial sweep. San Francisco homelessness is defined by depressing human detail. Oakland homelessness is captured in aggregate terms, by visual reference to its physical scale.
