These Researchers Lived Through Homelessness. Now, They’ve Analyzed It. 

by TJ Johnston
Let This Radicalize You

The latest study of unhoused Californians made headlines, even though its findings are already considered common knowledge among people engaged with the issue. However, what was unusual about the research team investigating homelessness in California is that the team are formerly or currently unhoused residents of the Golden State—and similar groups are emerging around the state. 

Call them lived experience boards, lived expertise boards or community advisory boards—bodies with formerly and presently unhoused folk are becoming commonplace in nonprofit organizations and municipal agencies,

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‘You are killing us’: Lives Lost to Involuntary Displacement, aka Sweeps

by Contributing Author
Let This Radicalize You

by Robbie Powelson

Joel died on or around April 20, 2022 in a gutter in San Rafael.

I received the news, like most everyone from our encampment in Sausalito, around noon while about a quarter of our camp attended a court ordered settlement conference with the City of Sausalito.

Joel was 24 years old, with a big goofy grin. The last time I saw him, he was catching a pigeon in the center of the city-operated camp in Sausalito.

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Street Art is Culture: Jaz Cameron’s Gallery  

by Contributing Author

The cover art for this issue is a collage of painted works by Jaz Cameron, a street artist known for operating an open-air art gallery. You may have seen it, scotch taped to the rungs of a metal fence that runs under the freeway on Second Street between Harrison and Bryant streets in South of Market. You can find him there nearly every day, experimenting with his paints and creating something new for passersby to enjoy.

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Honoring Homeless Mothers This Mother’s Day  

by Contributing Author

By Johanna Elattar 

Homelessness is a pressing issue affecting millions of individuals and families around the world. Among those affected by this crisis are homeless mothers who face unique challenges and struggles. Homeless mothers are often left with limited resources, inadequate support and  difficult choices to make for themselves and their children. 

Homeless mothers are often single parents, who have experienced traumatic events—such as domestic violence, job loss or mental illness—that have led to their homelessness.

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Oakland’s Unhoused: Wood Street Commons Refuses to Give Up

by Contributing Author

Story and photos by Yolanda Catzalco

Note from the editor of the People’s Tribune: The Wood Street Commons is what was recently left of a large long-established community of tents, home-made small dwellings, and vehicles, of originally 300 people, the largest of hundreds of encampments in the gentrifying East Bay city of Oakland, California. Under threat of eviction since last year, the Commons had gotten a restraining order against removal, but this was then lifted,

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40 Years of Organizing to End Homelessness

by Contributing Author

by Paul Boden and Western Regional Advocacy Project

Art Hazelwood (WRAP Minister of Culture)

Forty years ago, the federal government slashed affordable housing budgets of the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the United States Department of Agriculture, marking the beginning of the contemporary crisis of homelessness.  It has become political fodder for local politicians to say they will end homelessness “in this city” with complete disregard for the fact that no one city created homelessness,

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Essential Food and Medicine at Work on Wood Street

by Contributing Author

by Areli Hernandez

Until recently more than 4,000 homeless people had been living at a large encampment on Wood Street in West Oakland. That number has been reduced to around 50 by repeated sweeps led by CalTrans, which have displaced many former community members. A neighborhood nonprofit called Essential Food and Medicine, or EFAM, helps encampment residents by distributing healthy foods and medicines. The group’s main aim is to reduce homelessness in the Bay Area. 

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A Preventable Tragedy

by Quiver Watts

Coalition on Homelessness Statement on Officer-involved Double Fatality on May 19, 2022

Rising rents and a lack of stable, affordable housing have pushed many people into homelessness in San Francisco, like they have in cities up and down the West Coast. Living without stable housing is difficult and traumatizing, and it has long-term health consequences for those forced to endure it. With no door to lock and no safe place to rest, unhoused people live without the fundamental stability and safety a home provides.

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Women and Children First … or Every Man for Himself?

by Olivia Glowacki and Tracey Mixon

Don’t Wait Until We Break!

On Wednesday May 4, homeless and formerly homeless moms, children, and individuals converged on San Francisco’s City Hall to deliver one message, loud and clear: “Our mothers need housing.” The action was designed and carried out by unhoused members, mostly moms.  In planning the action, they talked about how being homeless is literally breaking their mental health and came up with the slogan “Don’t Wait Until We Break”

Age-old sayings tell us to save “mothers and children first” in any crisis or catastrophe.

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Love Letter to the Community

by Curtis Bradford

As a person who has lived and worked in the Tenderloin and Central South of Market communities for well over a decade, I have a message for my community about the recent actions of the San Francisco Redistricting Taskforce.

First, to my beloved Tenderloin & Central SoMa family and friends.  I’m sorry.  I’m sorry because I know you trusted me to be a voice for you in this process.  You asked me to fight to secure justice for you and to protect you from harm brought against you by a political and financial elite of this city. 

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