A Publication of the Coalition on Homelessness
San Francisco voters will vote on more than 20 citywide ballot measures. Some are already getting a lot of media play, such as Proposition V, the proposed “soda tax,” and two anti-homeless measures, Propositions Q and R.
Others have barely registered a blip on the electoral radar, yet nonetheless would determine who gets to remain housed in the City, specifically in affordable housing units—or not, if they are passed.
Those would be Propositions P and U.
Advocates for homeless people in San Francisco are responding to one lawmaker’s ballot proposal to break homeless encampments with 24 hours’ notice with a competing plan from another lawmaker.
Prior to the June 28 Board of Supervisors meeting, Supervisor Aaron Peskin announced he will put his own measure, largely as a counterpoint to one his colleague Mark Farrell placed the week before.
Whereas Farrell’s would empower police to order the removal of encampments — including those with only one tent — with 24 hours’ notice,
In 2015, San Francisco spent $20.6 million enforcing so-called “quality of life” ordinances for more than 60,000 incidents, according to a recent City budgetary analysis. These “quality of life” ordinances, also commonly referred by advocates as “status crimes,” are ordinances that ticket individuals for everyday acts that homeless people are most likely to engage in in public spaces, such as obstructing public spaces by sitting or lying down.
And the level of enforcement is costly with little to show for it,
We all know how the housing crisis has spiraled out of control; affordability is on everyone’s agenda in San Francisco. What we often forget is that there is an intricate web of systems that lead to poverty and homelessness in San Francisco. One of these is the court system and the way it operates. On February 25th, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors’ Public Safety and Neighborhood Services Committee met and discussed the issue of municipal fines and fees,
PERSONAL FOUL: “UNNECESSARY ROUGHNESS” CALLED ON MAYOR LEE
As the San Francisco Bay Area was hosting its second ever Super Bowl, thousands of tourists attended week long festivities in “Super Bowl City” a 10-acre temporary village at the foot of Market Street and the Embarcadero area that was shut down to traffic to accommodate visitors. San Franciscans resented not only the constant traffic jams but also the excessive presence of heavily armed police dressed in riot gear with automatic weapons slung across their shoulders,
Supervisor Scott Wiener sent tempers flaring with an official inquiry addressed to the chief of police, along with the head of Department of Public Works, heads of Mayor’s Office of HOPE, Department of Public Health and Department of Human Services, calling for enforcement of the anti-camping law. He stated “I am writing to officially inquire about the City’s efforts (a) to transition those living in the growing number of tents in our public spaces into housing/shelter,
State Sen. Carol Liu (D – La Cañada-Flintridge) reintroduced the legislation on January 15.
If passed, the act now known as Senate Bill 876, would protect people’s right to rest, sit, sleep, pray, share food in public or lie down unobtrusively without the threat of citation or arrest.
In a statement, Liu said SB 876 is designed to end discrimination against homeless people.
In the same month, a $2 billion state initiative to give out funding to cities for permanent supportive housing was also announced.
Updated: May 20, 2016
During his time as mayor of the City from January 2004 through January 2011, Gavin Newsom promoted his administration as being many things, including progressive in social policies and green in environmental issues. And earlier while an SF Supervisor in 2002, Gavin sponsored his signature “Care not Cash” program as a substitute for welfare, later touting the program as one of his major successes while mayor. But several actions taken during his mayoral administration—and other recent inactions by our now Lieutenant Governor—show him to be neither progressive nor green.
My grandmother liked to tell me her stories of her childhood. It was a world of extended families where women never worked and where her Orthodox Jewish father had one modest income for the family of 13, but nobody ever had a situation when they have nothing to eat. It was the world of poverty without electricity and even without reliable roads for horse coaches where nobody ever was homeless and had no place to sleep.
I would like to start with Libations to all who have come before us and paid with their lives! Who shed blood from whips, rape, chains, dogs, lynch mobs, bullets, fire bombs, drug infestations and incarceration.
From the 1852 Speech of Fredrick Douglass; “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?,” I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.
