The actor Susan Sarandon has shared a video of a street lined with tents and debris to her Twitter account.
The Oscar-winner and campaigner did not make any comment on the video in her tweet. The video, apparently shot in Oakland, appears to have first been shared on TikTok by the user Jeffrey Long.
Sarandon reshared the video from the account of Thomas Wolf, whose account says that he is a recovery advocate in San Francisco.
“This isn’t a shanty town in India,” Mr Wolf wrote in his tweet. “This is Oakland, CA. The crisis of our generation. #homelessness.”
The Bay Area as a whole, including San Francisco and Oakland, have some of the highest housing prices in the country and some of the highest rates of housing insecurity. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, 20,000 people in the city will experience homelessness this year, while more than 2,000 are chronically homeless.
Oakland, which was long a more affordable alternative to San Francisco, has seen housing costs rise dramatically in recent years as well. The Town, as its known, saw its homeless population increase by 24 per cent over the last three years with more than 5,000 people unhoused as of February. There are were more than 9,000 unhoused people in Alameda County as a whole then.
The economic deprivation in the Bay Area stands in stark contrast to the affluance that many people in the region enjoy. The Bay Area has the highest rates of economic inequality in California, with Public Policy Institute of California research finding that the area’s top earners make 12.2 times as money as its lowest earners.
As a whole, California is one of the most economically unequal states in the country. Only the District of Columbia, Missouri, New Mexico, New York and Louisiana have higher rates of inequality than the Golden State, which also has the nation’s highest median rent.
Though the US’s issues with housing insecurity are not limited to California, the state has become one of the faces of the homelessness crisis — particularly among conservatives, who pin the area’s difficulties on the state’s Democratic leadership.
Sarandon, however, is not a conservative. A vocal backer of left-wing candidates including Sen Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Sarandon has frequently clashed with liberals online regarding her politics.
