May 09, 2006
DATELINE SAN FRAN: On homelessness and crack
The pink-loving member of Philly Confidential spent her Saturday morning searching for a tasty breakfast dish in downtown San Francisco. On the way to the Taylor Street Coffee Shop, PC saw a row of homeless people sitting on the sidewalk. They appeared to be smoking crack.
It was 11:30 in the morning. The street was packed with tourists.
Stunned, PC stopped at coffee shop, downed some egg whites (gotta eat healthy, folks), and walked back to the spot to chat with the crack connoisseurs.
The four of them (three men and a woman) were done passing the glass pipe, and were sitting under the noon sun laughing and joking. They hung outside the Fifth Church of Christ, Scientist, on O'Farrell Street near Jones Street, a few blocks away from Nordstrom and Saks Fifth Avenue.
Homelessness is a huge problem in this town. Read this excerpt from an October 2005 USA Today report:
San Francisco counted 8,640 homeless people citywide in 2002. This year, the count was 5,404, a 37% drop. The downtown street-homeless population, a turnoff for tourists, declined 41%. Mayor Gavin Newsom credits efforts to move longtime street dwellers into special housing.
"We have more than 1,000 people who were on the streets housed in dozens of residential hotels, not slumlord hotels," he says. "Rooms have doors, keys, locks, bathtubs and cable hookups. There is a 24-hour case management desk. There are roving behavioral-health teams."
A San Francisco Chronicle 2003 story on the cities' homeless problem quoted a familiar Philadelphia name:
"If you are homeless here, the police may give you a ticket - but before they give you a ticket, they call us and we dispatch a team within 20 minutes," said Sister Mary Scullion, who co-founded and runs the city's premier homeless aid organization, Project HOME. "Because we move fast, we can help the homeless person get into housing or a program right away."
In 1997, Philadelphia had 850 hard-core homeless people on its streets. Today 200 to 400 are living outside, depending on how cold it is - out of a total homeless population of 6,500. The city's overall population is 1.5 million.
Since 2001, San Francisco has had a plan for a street-to-success program for solving all homelessness called the Continuum of Care. But it has remained sidelined by political squabbling because it is so far-reaching and potentially expensive, and no one has projected its costs.
When PC asked the bunch outside the church if they wanted to tell their story to a Philadelphia reporter, only Wilbur Brantley spoke up. He sat on the street with his back leaning against the church's gray wall. His body odor stung the nostrils and his clothes were dirty but were in good shape.
"I am originally from Cochran, Ga., which is 40 miles from Macon, Ga.," Brantley said. "I just ended up in San Francisco. Well, not really.
"I moved to Sacramento, Calif. in 1980 then I met a lady and then we moved here. I worked for MUNI transit for about three years. I helped turn the cable cars around when they left the barn. Then I was unemployed and got a job as a mail clerk in the post office. But that was temporary. Now I just get SSI. They mail the check to me at my address with the post office. You can get that address for free.
"They take care of us here. I get clothes from the Salvation Army, I get food from the soup kitchens, but they don't really give out soup. It is free money out here. They have to give us stuff. Because this is a tourist town ... they don’t want us robbin' the tourists.
"Have you ever been camping? If you can go camping, you can be homeless. You have to stay warm. I keep my things in city storage, but I don't put nothin' worth anything away.
"I got nine kids all across the country and three baby mothers. I got three daughters right around here. But I can't go home. Cause I smoke crack and you can't bring those things home.
"I like crack. But I can't give it up. So I can't go back. Crack cost a lot of money. My family don’t know this world and they don’t want to see it. I tried every drug except heroin. And I have fun. I don’t have money to go on the bus, but I have fun.
"For you people in Philadelphia: don't get homeless in Philly. You will freeze to death. Come out here."
Posted by simone at May 9, 2006 12:44 PMA few comments, yes:
- If you were at O'Farrell and Jones I have to doubt the street was packed with tourists. O'Farrell and Mason or points eastward from there, yes, but I seriously doubt it at O'Farrell and Jones. Mason Street is a pretty sharp dividing line between the Tenderloin to the west and the tourist district to the east, and if you were west of Taylor you were walking into the deep TL and if you are an urban person yourself you can't have failed to notice it.
- When you say "homeless problem" and "homelessness problem" interchangeably, you admit viewing homeless people as *being* the problem, when in fact the problem is the lack of housing for a category of people who have always previously lived indoors in low-rent districts. This is the same kind of thing-contained-for-the-container confusion as the old 1850s cartoonists' convention of representing the issue of slavery with a picture of an African man or child.
- The guy you chatted with said some pretty damning stuff, but you need to look behind what he said. For one thing, you chose to chat with someone who had so little self-respect (and so little sense of self-preservation) as to smoke illegal drugs in public. It is a strange fact that sometimes very poor people who have lost a lot of self-respect say things disparaging to themselves simply because they think it's what more prosperous people want to hear. Contrary to what they tell you in evidence class, a statement disparaging to the speaker is not always more likely to be true.
- You chose to speak with a particular person in a particular place, which doesn't make him typical of San Francisco homeless people generally. A lot of people living homeless in San Francisco don't show it and in fact take pains to keep their employers from finding out because of the stigma attached. You probably passed them in the street and didn't know they were homeless and hence didn't ask them about it. You also probably saw a lot of more visibly poor people pushing recycling carts. I hope you saw how hard they were working to push those carts full of bottles and cans, and I bet none of them asked you for anything, did they?
- The man you talked with told you he was living on SSI. That would be why he mentioned "free money." An SSI recipient gets a cash benefit due to permanent disability. By contrast, it's now extremely difficult to receive a cash benefit under the county's punitive "care not cash" local benefit program, which is for people who are found able to work or whose disability benefit applications are still pending. That program has discouraged thousands of people off of county benefits and now claims their disappearance as an anti-fraud success, when in fact it has simply led to worse desperation on the streets. See, e.g., http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/02/15/MNGTKBB73I1.DTL .
- I don't know this particular guy who spoke to you, but it's often noted among SSI advocates that mentally ill people who are thoroughly eligible for disability benefits tend to save their pride by thinking they are putting one over on the system rather than admit that in fact they really are too mentally ill to hold a job.
- It is, so, possible to freeze to death in San Francisco. We had quite a few wretched rainy nights under 45 degrees this past winter. And there are not enough indoor shelter spaces -- not even floor space -- to go around here. The most respected and used city shelter list is at http://freeprintshop.org/download/shelter_english.pdf . Note the number of waiting lists and "lotteries" described in the admission rules for the shelters. A lottery means you sign up early in the day for a chance at a bed but you don't know if you'll sleep under a roof until about five in the evening. In Philadelphia my guess would be that everyone can get into some kind of indoor space in the winter although crime and ill-treatment within the big shelters would be a problem -- at least that's the pattern for what I know about Boston and Manhattan, which is admitedly less.
So please don't take one man as typical of everyone living homeless in this town, OK?
Thanks,
/Martha Bridegam
San Francisco
P.S. If you seriously want a rounded picture of what it's like to be homeless in San Francisco, go have lunch at the Martin de Porres House of Hospitality food program at 225 Potrero. If you're coming from downtown, start at Market and Tenth, go down Tenth to the freeway, go under the freeway where Tenth turns into Potrero. It's two blocks up the hill on your left. See http://freeprintshop.org/download/eats_english.pdf for details. You've missed the good turkey soup they serve on Thursdays but they always put out a basically nice spread.
Martin's has a very lovely arbor with outdoor dining space and they get a fairly independent-minded clientele from the south and southeastern parts of the city. You don't have to worry about being the only diner with a home and a job either: they're very nice about welcoming all comers. Also, they have big tables, which makes it easy to start a conversation with fellow diners.
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at May 12, 2006 04:12 PMi am happy mostly - though terribly sick at times - the medicine is not a perfect fix - i think some weed would help but caant find any - Kant find any...
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