A Publication of the Coalition on Homelessness
I was homeless for 15 years, and most of that time was spent on the streets of Berkeley and Oakland. I spend time thinking about those days now. I think about those moments often. I ask myself, “What is the takeaway? What have I learned from those years sleeping behind bushes?”
I never took a vow of poverty. If I had been able to hold down a job and pay rent and function the way that one is expected to do,
Originally published on thepaltrysum.com
In the middle of the storm it is hard to see the wood for the trees, the wind from the rain or the good from the bad. I lived in that storm for most of my adult life, and it is only in the last week that I have been inside looking out at the storm from a position of relative safety that I have been able to take stock.
Editor’s note — we ran the first part of this piece in March of 2020, with the intention of running Part 2 in April. By April we were temporarily out of print as we grappled with how to continue the Street Sheet program safely while COVID raged in our communities. We’re so happy to be back in print twice a month, and to finally share Tariq’s story with our readers. Here is the full story:
I’m not sure where to begin and end this short tale about my homelessness.
In the winter of 2013, I started working at a small Italian restaurant. It was close to where I lived in the Upstate NY town that I had moved to in 2012. My husband and I had left NYC after Hurricane Sandy destroyed our home and everything in it. I was lucky to escape with just the clothes on my back and my little blind cat, Grumbles. Grumbles was a ginger cat that I had rescued when I found him on a Brooklyn street,
I’m not sure where to begin and end on this short tale about my homelessness. It’s just when you think it’s over the saga continues. So let’s start with when I first left home with no place to go. I was only 13 years old and I told my mama that I was a man, and she replied “get your ass out there and be a man. When yo’ mannish ass get yo’ own place you can do what you want to do.
Thief: The City of SF – DPW, SFPD and Caltrans
Interview with Crystal by the Stolen Belonging team, January 31, 2019, Bayview District, San Francisco.
Crystal: My name is Crystal and I’ve been here since 2002, but I grew up in the North Bay. I’ve been in every district and neighborhood in the city at one point or another.
The sweeps really suck. It’s happened a few times in the last month or two.
Reprint from NextCity/Street Spirit
by Sarah Holder
The decision to leave home wasn’t easy for Greyson. After his mother was deported to Mexico, he’d been almost single-handedly taking care of his two younger sisters and his father, who was addicted to drugs. When he was 15, the family made plans to move from California’s East Bay down to Mexico, too. As a trans person, Greyson was scared. He had heard horror stories of beatings and assaults of LGBTQ people.
As we see there is a total of four Navigation Centers here in San Francisco. There is one in the Mission, another on Market, the third at the Dogpatch, and the last one on Army Street.
So I asked a few people about their opinions about the new Navigation Centers and this is what they say. (Mind you, some of these individuals asked to keep their names anonymous during this interview,
“You know what we call you guys, right?”
I knew immediately that this was heading in a direction that I wanted no parts of. Before I could decide if I wanted to play dead in the backseat, he answered to amuse himself.
“Unicorns.”
I was in an uber. I had spent hours at my friend’s house in Lake View, a small community in San Francisco,
