Reporter Heather Knight, along with photographer Loren Elliot, offers a largely sympathetic account [gift article] of some of what the city of San Francisco is doing to care for asylum seeking families who turn up in our midst.
They huddled in the cold on a graffiti-covered bench last November, the twin girls dozing in their parents’ laps while the older children buried their heads in their phones.
Most nights, the family of six waited like this outside a San Francisco school gymnasium until it could be converted into a homeless shelter. Once inside, they slept each night on a small patch of the floor, then rose early each morning to secure a spot in one of the three showers shared by 69 people. They had to leave by sunrise so the school gym could be returned to its intended purpose.
Margarita Solito, 36, sometimes wondered if the 3,200-mile journey to San Francisco from El Salvador had been worth it. The family left as international migrants, and now they were migrants of a different sort, moving around their new city all day with nowhere to call home.
A year after arriving in the city, Ms. Solito’s fight for housing would pay off, and her family would be able to put down roots. But their journey shed light on the larger crisis of family homelessness in San Francisco and revealed the daily uncertainty that hundreds of schoolchildren face there. ...
Knight reports that 2403 children in the San Francisco Unified School District, 5 percent of total enrollment, are unhoused!
No wonder teachers and school staff wanted to use what space they could find in their building to shelter the children they serve. Neighborhood meetings averted most fears about using the Buena Vista/Horace Mann campus for this purpose. I live nearby; the nightly shelter residents have not discernibly upset the area.
San Francisco is relatively friendly to this work thanks to the tireless agitation of community and migrant groups.
Today Bay Area Faith in Action rallied outside of the public San Francisco General Hospital in support of another resident of this shelter, Carmen Marquez, who contracted meningitis, spent 6 days in a coma, and then had to have 9 fingers and her lower leg amputated due to the disease.
The City Department of Homelessness wants to send her and her teenage daughter back to a shelter. They say that despite her medical condition, she does not have enough points in the computer system to qualify for more permanent housing.
If wealthy San Francisco remains at all friendly to our poor neighbors, it's because of tireless agitation from organized people in community groups.
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