A Publication of the Coalition on Homelessness
I would like to start with Libations to all who have come before us and paid with their lives! Who shed blood from whips, rape, chains, dogs, lynch mobs, bullets, fire bombs, drug infestations and incarceration.
From the 1852 Speech of Fredrick Douglass; “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?,” I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.
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.
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;
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!”
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.
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,
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.
By Nicholas Kimura
Throughout the months leading up to the November 3 election, voters were bombarded with advertisements on television, radio, social media, and their mailboxes urging them to vote “NO” on Proposition F, a ballot measure designed to verify and regulate residential vacation rentals. Messages ranged from the ominous, dark warnings that neighbors would turn on each other to the light, mocking ads which dictated how San Francisco should spend the supposed millions of hotel tax dollars from these vacation rentals.
As the homeless and poor residents of the city of San Francisco face a full frontal attack, the homeless youth in the Haight find themselves under a three-month, 24-hour zero tolerance police operation. Haight officials, including Supervisor London Breed and Police Captain John Sanford, were heavily pressured by a group of powerful merchants and neighbors to increase law enforcement and remove the visible presence of homelessness and poverty from Haight Street. They are using a recent tragedy that happened in Golden Gate Park as an opportunity to “crack down.”
“It is a sign of great inner insecurity to be hostile to the unfamiliar.”—Anais Nin, 1949
By Sage
I’ve been to San Francisco twice in my life. The first time I arrived was last year. I was awed, in wonder at this utopian landscape that filled my eyes. I clearly remember the bustling busied bodies, the spark of cables, and the crisp autumn air that felt so fresh in my lungs.
