Well, if not, you can read about a few of them in this LA Times piece.
It seems a few of them have “matured” and become “property owners” and now these “mature, property owning hippies” are pissed off and the hippies of the 21st Century living on the streets of their neighborhood.
From his second-floor apartment at the counterculture crossing of Haight and Ashbury streets, Arthur Evans watches a new generation of wayward youth invade his free-spirited neighborhood.
The former flower child was among the legions of idealistic wanderers who migrated here during the Vietnam War to “tune in, turn on and drop out.”
But Evans, who has lived at the same address for 34 years, says he has never seen anything like this crowd, who use his flower bed as a bathroom and sell pot outside his window.
They’re known as gutter punks, these homeless kids with dirty dreadlocks and nose rings, lime-green mohawks and orange spray-painted faces, who panhandle with cardboard signs that riff on their lifestyles. “Please Help Us Get Un-Sober,” one reads. Another: “Please Give Us Weed, Beer or Money.”
Sometimes aggressive, they block sidewalks as they strum guitars or bang on bongos. Gangs of them skateboard down the middle of Haight Street. Some throw used hypodermic needles into a nearby pond they call Hep-C Lake.
Evans, 64, says they should get help, clean up or go home.
“I used to be a hippie. I wore beads and grew my hair long,” he said. “But my generation had something these kids do not: a standard of civilized behavior.”
Panhandler Jonah Lawrence, 25, insists it is residents who need civilizing. “They say, ‘Get a job!’ ” he said. “And I say, ‘You got clothes for me? Or a place I can take a shower so I can look for work?’ It’s so bogus to tell me to get a job if I have nothing.”
I have very little sympathy for these residents of the Haight. Their generation saw the widespread emergence of a culture that wanted everything and gave nothing. This new generation draws their inspiration from the one the property owners come from. The unintended consequences of their influence has led directly to this situation.
If the folks in the older generation are going kid themselves, and lie to us in the process of doing so, and say that panhandling wasn’t prevelent in “their” culture, or that junkies weren’t lining the street during “their” time, then screw them. They need to, quite literally, take off their rose colored tea shades and open a history book or two. Bodies in the parks of Haight-Ashbury were a weekly occurance by the early seventies when heroin started killing former pot-heads by the dozens. The panhandling may not have been quite as aggressive, but going a block through the Haight and not seeing someone with a sign asking for money, drugs or food was the exception and not the rule.
Lastly, they could also try and elect someone to the city council who has an idea of what property rights and decency laws are. If they’re tired of their flowerbeds getting used as toilets, then they should try electing officials who will make it illegal to take a shit in public and let officers arrest people for trespassing.
You relax your laws, and you will attract those who like them that way.
Instead, these folks seem to enjoy electing people (or electing people who would appoint officials) such as SF District Attorney Kamala Harris:
Just because you legally possess a gun in the sanctity of your locked home doesn’t mean that we’re not going to walk into that home and check to see if you’re being responsible and safe in the way that you conduct your affairs.
What’ll really be funny is if the city hires these street urchins to do the inspecting.