A Publication of the Coalition on Homelessness
Dec. 15, 2017
by T.J.Johnston
The topic of homelessness is often addressed as an economic, health, or safety issue. But a special investigator from the United Nations came to San Francisco on December 6 to hear from community members with a take not often heard from officials in the U.S.: the human rights of homeless people.
Philip Alston, UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights,
I just love the language used to describe homeless people: Drunk, crazy, helpless, ad nauseum. It’s also shrouded in industry-specific terms like “experiencing substance abuse issues.”
Alphabet soup of acronyms that only a handful of insiders know. My all-time favorite though is “service resistant.” Google the term. There is no definition for it except when applied to the homeless. Common sense leads one to conclude that there is a whole army who resist services.
Raise your hands if you’re in favor of housing homeless people and programs that make it possible.
Now, raise your hands if you support laws imposing bans on sleeping outside or panhandling.
Chances are, in this scenario, you’d see the same set of hands raised favoring both approaches to homelessness. According to a pair of political scientists, that’s not unusual.
Scott Clifford of the University of Houston and Spencer Piston of Boston University studied this phenomenon of dueling impulses by commissioning a public opinion poll.
On any sunny Saturday, hundreds of people fill the Mission’s Dolores Park with their friends, pets, music—and their trash. Current anti-littering laws do little to combat this latter phenomenon, as on most days, police officers in Dolores Park can be seen standing at the top of the hill, surveying the park for violent or egregious misconduct but doing nothing about the wrappers, cigarettes, bags, and other refuse being left by the park’s attendees. While the officers watch along the perimeters,
New York City has seen a lot of action around the intersection of immigrant status and quality of life crimes. San Francisco should look at following their lead.
Mayor Bill DeBlasio, like our Mayor Lee, has made strong statements shield and stand with immigrants. Like San Francisco, New York is a sanctuary city . However, as many have noted, the real way to create a sanctuary is to halt to crackdowns on minor offenses—like lodging in public spaces—that make immigrants the subject of unnecessary arrests and can lead to deportations.
In the Bay Area, accessing housing is a challenge many Americans face. While rents are rapidly rising, wages have stagnated; someone who works one, two, or even three minimum wage jobs in the Bay Area just can’t afford to live here anymore. Now imagine being an undocumented immigrant attempting to access limited, expensive housing and provide for your family. Often times, it can be a debilitating and stressful experience. The current implications of immigration policies in America displace and traumatize immigrants and refugees as well as foster hysteria and xenophobia amongst non-immigrants.
Despite the fact that transgender and gender non-conforming people have recently become more visible in the media and popular culture, the realities for street-based, poor, black and brown and disabled trans women remain the same. Trans people continue to face discrimination from traditional housing, employment and healthcare forcing many trans people into alternative street economies like sex work, drug sales and whatever other work people can find. As a result of being pushed out of these traditional systems,
After chasing off a rat by smacking a stick against my favorite bush and yelling, “Get out of here!” multiple times, I snuggled up in my sleeping bag, pulled my beanie over my eyes, and drifted off to a blissful sleep. Well, blissful until two large figures roused me from my slumber with car headlights shining in my direction, casting their ominous shadows on me. One of them said something, but I couldn’t make it out.
“I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
On January 17, the Coalition On Homelessness, in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the 48th anniversary of the Poor People’s Campaign and Resurrection City, the Coalition On Homelessness, in conjunction with the Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP), along with the Anti-Police Terror Project’s 120 hours of actions to Reclaim MLK Day and other community partners,
Homelessness continues to be a pervasive social contemporary problem within the San Francisco Bay Area. Advocacy organizations and service providers of homeless people seek to implement policies that minimize barriers that homeless families, youth, and adults are facing. In fact, focus groups consisting of members of the homeless population and/or front line service providers in 12 different homeless service providers and advocacy organization took place.. The survey outcomes revealed interesting findings of barriers within the homeless system.
