Kings of the road

Homeless people are a pretty common sight in San Francisco. They call them 'hobos' over here. You seem them hunched in parks, slumped in plazas, or camped on street corners clad in cardboard - taking a breather en route to the Big Rock Candy Mountains/url]. Sometimes they burst into angry catcalls or slurry jeremiads as you pass them on the sidewalks. The slick skyscrapers and glossy shopping malls remain unmoved.
Of course, hobos are an almost inevitable side-effect of the brutal polarities of American society - fantastic wealth cheek-by-jowl with grinding poverty. But I'm sure finding them on every other street corner here also has a lot to do with the weather. If you're going to be a hobo, the balmy Mediterranean-style climate makes California a pretty good place to be one. You still face the same challenges here of course: you still have to make your way and string together enough to eat, but you can also sit on concrete corners without the risk of Arctic winds or sleep underneath the stars and know you won't freeze to death in the small hours of the morning.