A Publication of the Coalition on Homelessness
“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,
One of our dear vendors, Don Jones, passed away on January 30 at the St. Francis Hospital. He will be very much missed and was loved by many, including his Street Sheet customers. We received many calls and Facebook comments about how much Don meant to people.
2014 STREET SHEET VENDOR INTERVIEW
“I’m native to San Francisco but since me and my fiance separated, I landed in the Tenderloin.
After chasing off a rat by smacking a stick against my favorite bush and yelling, “Get out of here!” multiple times, I snuggled up in my sleeping bag, pulled my beanie over my eyes, and drifted off to a blissful sleep. Well, blissful until two large figures roused me from my slumber with car headlights shining in my direction, casting their ominous shadows on me. One of them said something, but I couldn’t make it out.
“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.
