A Publication of the Coalition on Homelessness
Meanwhile, advocates advise San Francisco on homelessness funding
“The Court of Appeal Decision stands. Proposition C is valid.
WE WONNNNNNNNNNN!!!!!!!!”
That was the announcement I received via Facebook Messenger on Wednesday, September 8 about Prop. C taking effect.
After almost two years, the measure known as “Our City, Our Home” can now live up to the promise of its name, affirming that I’m part of a city committed to housing homeless people and keeping them housed.
Over the past 10 years, San Francisco has gone through a thorough change of scenery, from artist weirdo hub to an odd suburbia parallel timeline. The kind of people that inhabit the city change the landscape and the city seeks to appease these people while maintaining its glory. Where you are on the tier systems of the city will shape how you view what’s working and what’s not. Here’s one person’s living example of moving through the system created to house or hurt San Francisco’s houseless populace.
As I write this, it is Labor Day, and I am struggling to get through this overly hot weekend, especially as a tenant in a 100+ year old building master-leased for formerly homeless folks. Furthermore, as the COVID-19 crisis continues, we are urged to stay at home, but what happens if home is too hot for us?
And speaking of COVID-19, as an activist, I must advocate for supportive housing rights remotely, but this often is complicated by the fact that Zoom meetings being data-intensive,
I scan the City’s COVID-19 Alternative Housing dashboard this morning as I have most mornings since April. “Total Current in SIP Hotels: 2,340” and “Total Current in SIP Congregate: 485” read a few of the metrics, typical of the acronym-filled jargon that fills most City reports. (Translation: “SIP” stands for “shelter in place” and “congregate” is a group setting like a shelter.) My fellow Hotels Not Hospitals organizers and I have struggled to find out what’s really going on in the hotels,
Black, Latinx and unhoused people in California are hit harder with citations for non-traffic infractions compared with their white peers, a legal advocacy group announced in its new report.
And San Francisco hits Black and Latinx people as hard as anywhere.
Those are some of the takeaways in “Cited for Being in Plain Sight: How California Polices Being Black, Brown and Unhoused in Public.” The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area released the report’s findings in a September 30 press conference.
“The Court of Appeal Decision stands. Proposition C is valid.
WE WONNNNNNNNNNN!!!!!!!!”
That was the announcement I received via Facebook Messenger on Wednesday, September 8 about Prop. C taking effect.
After almost two years, the measure known as “Our City, Our Home” can now live up to the promise of its name, affirming that I’m part of a city committed to housing homeless people and keeping them housed.
“Homes not barricades!! Homes not barricades!!”
These are the words chanted by protesters marching through the streets of the Tenderloin. Some were carrying police barricades, while others held signs that read ‘DEFUND SFPD,” “Rent is Theft” and “Black Homes Matter”. Others were equipped with medical supplies and sustenance, and in the back you could hear the Brass Liberation orchestra playing their instruments brightly to the beat of the chants.
Community organizations such as House the Bay,
San Francisco, like many cities, is in a challenging place economically with over 200,000 workers on unemployment, a $1.5 billion deficit due to loss revenue, and exponentially higher needs for city services such as rental assistance, health care, child care and other city essential activities. San Francisco has a very unique budget process, where the legislative branch receives the budget from the much more powerful executive branch and has the opportunity to cut things out of the Mayor’s budget in order to fund other things they deem as higher priorities.
Almost prophetically, Ronnie Goodman made an etching of people marching in the street and carrying a banner that reads “No More Homeless Deaths,” one in a myriad of drawings, paintings and engravings he produced.
After a lifetime of creating art while homeless or incarcerated, on August 7, Ronnie Lamont Goodman was found dead in his tent outside the Redstone Building in San Francisco’s Mission District, where he intermittently stayed and stored his drawings and illustrations.
If your tickets to the Giants game are in sections 126 through 135 at Oracle Park, then you might meet Joanna Shober.
She’s worked in guest services for the Giants the last eight seasons, guiding people to their seats and offering her assistance as needed. In between baseball seasons, she’ll take similar jobs at the Chase and Moscone Centers.
“I help people,” she said succinctly, seated at a lime green table last winter with a Giants ballcap shielding her from the sun and a Fitbit wrapped over her left wrist that she found one day on the street.
