Shelter From The Storm?

By Cat Callaway

City Plans For Some New Shelter Beds in Anticipation of El Niño Rains

The potential impact of the El Niño weather conditions requires preparation to protect property and persons. The homeless, facing the cold, the wet and the flooding head-on, most often with the aid only of a blanket or bedroll, are particularly vulnerable. It is the City of San Francisco that the public has tasked with the allocation of tax dollars to meet this vital need for services.

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Homeward Bound Program Offers Free Bus Ride Home

By Scott Nelson

As part of San Francisco’s efforts to address the homeless situation, the City offers a free bus ride home for homeless or low income persons. The program applies for those who are not from the Bay Area and want to return home or to a city in which they have family or friends willing to take them in.

In order to qualify for the Homeward Bound program, a person must (1) be homeless/low income and living in San Francisco;

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Trans Justice in SF Shelters

By Judith Klintbol & Stine Dieckmann

On Friday, November 20 at 8:30 in the morning, we met at 10th and Mission and marched to the Episcopal Sanctuary homeless shelter to protest transphobia in the shelters and lack of safe housing for transgender people in San Francisco. The action was in honor of the Transgender Day of Remembrance/Resilience. We chanted, “What do want? Justice! When do we want it? Now!” “Trans folk say we hare here to stay!”

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Shelters Must Stop Punishing Domestic Violence Survivors

By Nicholas Kimura

Tucked in against her five-year-old sister, squeezed together between the narrow steel railings of their bunk bed, a young girl sleeps. Below them is an older girl, who neither of the sisters have spoken to much before. She’s often awake later than the sisters, staring at her parents’ phone—posting, tweeting, reading, and diving into all the happenings of the wider world, a space far way from San Francisco and the streets of the Tenderloin—trying her hardest to make the best of her situation.

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War on Drugs: War on Reason

By Vlad K.

Summing up results of years of extensive research all over the world, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime came to the conclusion that, “Treating drug use for non-medical purposes and possession for personal consumption as criminal offences has contributed to public health problems and induced negative consequences for safety, security, and human rights.”

If scholars and politicians worldwide came to a consensus about the ineffectiveness of strict,

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SF City Hall Prepares to Prepare for El Niño

By Kat Calloway

Government forecasters predict a strong El Niño this winter. El Niño is a weather phenomenon characterized by unusually warm ocean temperatures in the Equatorial Pacific. Consequences are increased rainfall across the southern tier of the US and in Peru, strong enough to have caused destructive flooding, and drought in the West Pacific.

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