More SIPs to Close and Shelters Reopen as COVID-19 Variant Intensifies

by TJ Johnston

 As a state of emergency takes effect in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, the City has scheduled to close four more hotels sheltering unhoused people from the coronavirus pandemic in the next two months — even as the omicron variant surges in congregate shelters.

These shelter-in-place (SIP) hotels will shut down by the end of March. The SIPs – the Adante Hotel, Executive Hotel Vintage Court, Nob Hill Inn and Best Western Red Coach Inn – comprise almost 200 rooms among them and spread within a 50-square block area from the Tenderloin to Lower Nob Hill to Union Square. 

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Impact of Polluted Air on SF Unhoused Community Left Uncharted on CalEnviroScreen Map

by Hanisha Harjani

The CalEnviroScreen map is a pollution tracking tool developed to more clearly identify California communities with high environmental burdens and better focus where state and federal funding should go. However, when LaDonna Williams looks at this map, she notices the environmental hazards that the cartographers missed.

“Some of these communities have several exposures,” Williams says. Some are simultaneously situated next to raw sewage plants, refineries and highways. But when this data is translated through the CalEnviroScreen scoring system,

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Let’s Build a City that Values Lives Over Handbags

by Katharine S. Walter

Early in the evening on Friday, Dec. 3, a small group gathered in South of Market, on the corner of Fifth and Folsom streets, to honor Ajmal Amani’s life. The group stood in front of the site where the San Francisco Police Department murdered Amani only days before—inside Amani’s home, a residential hotel.

The danzantes from Oakland’s POOR Magazine led a prayer for Amani. They turned to face the four directions,

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Georgia Marie

by Jason Albertson

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual individuals, alive or dead, is coincidental.

Case counts were down; I told the folks delivering vaccinations that I could help. We set up Mobile Outreach Vaccine Events to find homeless people to vaccinate. We gave people twenty bucks worth of gift cards for vaccinating, and offered flu vaccines, booster shots, Johnson and Johnson one-shot-gets-you-done vaccines, and completion doses for Moderna and Pfizer.

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The Tenderloin Needs Help, Not Harm

by Quiver Watts

An abridged Statement from Coalition on Homelessness in Response to Mayor Breed’s State of Emergency December

Mayor London Breed is exploiting the concerns of a vulnerable community in order to promote a “law and order” agenda meant to benefit political and financial interests. This unjustified, and in some cases, illegal maneuver is cause for alarm. On Tuesday, December 14, after a misleading flood of media hysteria around crime in San Francisco and just days after meeting with a group of residents brought together by the business group Tenderloin Community Benefits District,

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