The Street Kids of San Francisco  In San Francisco’s Haight-
Ashbury district, youth homelessness is impossible to overlook.
Spend any time in the neighborhood, and you’ll notice that
hundreds of “street kids” – young homeless in their teens and
twenties toting large backpacks and sleeping bags – call Haight
Street and Golden Gate Park their home.  In this neighborhood,
street kids are a constant presence. They hang out on most
corners, asking for spare change or leftover food, smoking weed,
and occasionally proffering drugs for sale. The area is famous
as the epicenter of the 1960s hippy movement, but the street
kids mix uneasily with today’s gentrified Haight - an area of
$1,500 rents, trendy nightspots, and Google buses whisking
engineers away for the workday. Even in a city known for
homelessness, they stand out as unusually young and numerous.
Encountering San Francisco’s street kids can prompt
uncomfortable reactions: guilt and pity at the sight of their
poverty, unease with their drug dealing, even ne