A Publication of the Coalition on Homelessness
“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.
December 20th, I was in the Phoenix airport waiting on a flight home to Omaha, when I came across an article announcing the murder of a homeless couple in San Francisco’s Mission District. They were shot and killed near an encampment on the corner of 16th and Shotwell streets. The victims, the paper said, were twenty-seven-year-old Lindsay McCollum and fifty-one-year-old Eddie Tate. I recognized Tate’s name. I had met him while photographing inmates at “Old Bruno,” the oldest of San Francisco’s jail faculties.
Mayor Lee recently cut funding for two new Board-funded housing subsidies, affecting 175 households across the city. The funding would have provided critical rental assistance for seniors, families, and people with disabilities.
These funds were backed by the Board of Supervisors and totaled $2.5 million—125 subsidies worth $1.5 million for seniors and the disabled, and another 50 subsidies worth $1 million for families with children.
“We have to invest the resources to keep people in San Francisco,” says Brian Basinger,
It was a varied group of about 100 people with flickering candles who gathered in front of City Hall on December 21, the first night of winter. Several Catholic monks, rabbis, Buddhist teachers, Protestant ministers and Sufi murshids formed a semicircle. Others were social workers, health professionals, spiritual guides, and friends from the streets, with close personal or professional relationships with those who had passed away. United by belief in the sacredness of human life,
Billy Davis has deep roots in San Francisco and the Bay Area. His family lived in the Bayview district on Third Street where his mother’s father was a shipyard worker until they moved over to Palo Alto in 1956, which is where Billy would grow up. Billy has fond memories of Potrero Hill, where he and his family would often spend weekends. He describes San Francisco as a kind of home base and decided to move here permanently from Palo Alto as an adult.
In 1995, a monthly newspaper, Street Spirit, was launched in Oakland to serve the needs of homeless people in the East Bay. Sold on the street by homeless vendors who were allowed to keep all money earned, the paper was funded by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), which paid for office space, printing costs, and the salaries of an editor and vendor coordinator.
The newspaper received strong public support and widespread media praise for its hard‑hitting articles and professional design.
In the pouring rain, City officials started clearing a homeless encampment at 7am on January 10. Named Box City for its wooden boxes that sheltered a community made up of 30 to 40 homeless people, including a tight-knit group of Tagalog speaking Filipinos, the encampment had been around since September of last year and was located along the freeway on 7th street and Irwin.
Some boxes that were cleared by the Department of Public Works had been identified as abandoned by the residents of the encampment;
