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.
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.
If you are a woman and happen to exhibit facial hair, a certain height or a noticeable Adam’s apple and you’re looking for a place at a federally funded single-sex or sex-segregated homeless shelter, you may soon be under particular scrutiny by the admissions staff. In other words, discrimination based on gender identity could become legal, especially discrimination that is based on stereotypical gender features – such as the ones listed above. This is according to a new proposal by U.S.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic reached Los Angeles County, more than 66,000 of its residents were experiencing homelessness, and almost 600,000 low-income people were spending 90 per cent of their income on housing. The city ranked near the top of the list of places where renters experienced the highest cost burdens. And the state of California had one of the worst shortages of affordable housing in the country.
Towing practices have always been a particular plague for poor and homeless people, especially in San Francisco – the city with the nation’s highest towing fees, averaging $574 in the current fiscal year. However, when the current shelter-in-place order was issued, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) stopped what advocates call “poverty tows.” Normally, poverty tows occur when vehicles accrue five or more unpaid parking tickets, a vehicle’s registration has been expired for more than six months;
