Misery in the Mission

When I see my neighbors who live on the street, I feel moved to repurpose these words of the great moral orator, Frederick Douglass: 

… At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, today, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced. 

Nobody should be "living" like this.

These folks are gathered to score from the dealer, I assume. If you don't yet know, the bent-over posture is common among fentanyl users.

Hell of a place to sleep, but still breathing ... all these folks survive (mostly) within a half-block radius of our home.

As the city tries (and largely fails) to "clean up" other neighborhoods, people migrate. I'm not saying it's easy to intervene when we've allowed the creation of a whole class of under- or un-housed outcasts, but a decent society and polity would find a way.

Not homeless enough for the city with hearts

 

Today families, teachers, children, and friends organized through the activist group Faith in Action rallied outside Cesar Chavez School to highlight how San Francisco city policies are failing students like Samara. 

Samara is a 7-year-old girl with complex medical conditions, who has spent the last 2 years living in homeless shelters with her family. She’s had multiple surgeries over the past month and is getting ready to leave the hospital soon. But according to the City, Samara and her family do not qualify for any housing assistance because a computer says they do not have enough points and therefore they are not “homeless enough”.

 

The families described their predicament. Where are they supposed to go if turned down by a city computer?

... safe, decent homes, and the dignity of our families cannot be determined by points on a computer. 

San Franciscans are urged to call the mayor -- this is no way to run a city that prides itself on its heart.

Testimony. Listen up.

Mission District walls speak.

I think they can turn it down a notch, not be so forceful. 

Then they dig into our pockets and put everything on the ground. Then if they find drugs or anything they take us to jail. We'll get out in a couple of days.

But you know, I think there's better ways to do it. A lot of us don't want to keep getting high. We are looking for help or housing.

I'm home in the City by the Bay where no amount of newcomer gentrification erases the underlying struggles.

People living on the streets are old

I'm a San Franciscan. Unhappily, I'm all too used to living near unhoused people. But this summary still could jar me.

A major study on homelessness in California, released last year by UC San Francisco’s Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative (BHHI), includes two notable findings: 48% of all unhoused single adults in the state are 50 or older and 41% of unhoused older adults became homeless for the first time after age 50.

According to the report:

• “Being single is a risk factor for homelessness.” Of the older adults surveyed, 52% were single and never married; 17% reported being married or partnered. More than a quarter were divorced or separated, and 4% were widowed.

• “More than 80% of older adults entered homelessness from housing: 46% from non-leaseholding arrangements and 35% from leaseholding arrangements. The other 19% entered homelessness from institutions, which included time in jail, prison or healthcare settings.

• Poor health is a common reality among older adults experiencing homelessness. More than two-thirds reported having at least one significant chronic health condition. About a quarter of those surveyed said they’d experienced a time when they couldn’t get healthcare or obtain medication they needed.

• While people of color are overrepresented overall within the state’s unhoused population, older Black adults are particularly overrepresented. The report notes that 31% of older adults experiencing homelessness identified as Black, compared with 6% of all Californians age 50 or older. Older adults who identified as Native American or Indigenous and multiracial were also overrepresented, the survey found.

• The majority of older adults surveyed expressed optimism that “well-timed financial support would have staved off homelessness,” the authors wrote. Many believed that a modest monthly subsidy ($300 to $500), a one-time payment ($5,000 to $10,000) or something akin to a housing voucher would have allowed them to stay in their homes.

We use folks up and spit them out.

What the Biden administration means ...

Jason DeParle writes about poverty for the New York Times. "Poverty" as a broad descriptive explanation for the suffering around us is not as common as it once was. Why 55 years ago, we embarked upon (and lost?) a War on Poverty. But what is the homeless man sleeping on the street but the end result of an economic and political system which leaves its unlucky members without means to live decently, leaves too many in poverty? Why did local community activists organize food deliveries to women locked in with children during the worst of the pandemic, women trapped in poverty? This country has far too much poverty.

Because poverty has been his beat for a long time, DeParle is stunned by the Biden administration's determination to use its powers to fight poverty, through legislation if possible, but also through deft administrative footwork. Here's a tale:

... A few years ago a Republican Congress ordered a revision of the nutritional standards [for SNAP/Food Stamps] and omitted language that had previously required the revisions to be cost-neutral. This change in legislative instructions, seemingly inadvertent, opened the door to increased aid. Accelerating the nutritional review, the Biden administration issued a new Thrifty Food Plan, which caused an average benefit increase of more than 25 percent. About 42 million Americans—one in eight—will now get more money to buy food, and unlike the other pandemic-era expansions, the increase is lasting. 

As the product of complex bureaucratic machinations, the SNAP increase could easily be described as an embodiment of insider-driven change. But when I talked to Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, in August, he didn’t just tout the studies of how quickly the old benefits ran out or the science of apportioning legumes. He talked about the threat that poverty posed to American democracy. “We may have a Constitution and a Declaration of Independence, but if we had 42 million Americans who were going hungry, really hungry, they wouldn’t be happy and there would be political instability,” he said (meaning more instability than already exists). “The safety net is part of how you build a democratic fabric that works. It creates a much more stable and secure country.” Perhaps what he said was obvious, but I don’t recall previously hearing a Cabinet official justifying aid with a reference to democracy’s vulnerability.

Another observation from DeParle:

Even if the safety net shrinks to its pre-pandemic size, and the current statistics become a blip on a chart, it will be a blip to remember. It’s a blip that says high levels of poverty are a political choice, not a fate. ...

That's the choice we are making when we elect even boring Democrats.

EBT is California-speak for Food Stamps/SNAP. You'll find signs like this in every corner store in poor neighborhoods.

There are leaders who can inspire. We just have to look around.

Here in the USofA, we probably feel that inspirational political figures are in short supply. Our system is creaky; even ethically right-thinking pols are forced to trim their visions in the hope of getting anything accomplished. So let's look around a bit.

The United Nations General Assembly meeting -- infelicitously pronounced "UNGA" -- is something we are accustomed to ignore. At the opening of each session, every national political leader who wishes to is allowed to make a speech, thereby reaffirming the body as representative of all the countries of the world. That's 193 states at present, a lot of speeches. Joe Biden gave one -- I doubt you noticed.

But thanks to Adam Tooze, I became aware that the wonderfully named Prime Minister of the island nation of Barbados, Mia Amor Mottley, schooled the assembled dignitaries in what the world really needs -- at least if anyone was listening. 

Here she is -- a little longer than what I usually post, but totally worth hearing.

A few points -- she knows that if the United Nations is to be worth attending, it has to be changed from its post World War II shape to something new:

• How many times will we have a situation where we say the same thing over and over and over, only to have it come to naught? 

• How many more deaths must it take before 1.7 billion vaccines in the possession of the advanced countries of the world will be shared with those who have simply no access to vaccines?

• How much more global temperature rise must there be before we end the burning of fossil fuels? ... We are waiting for global, moral, strategic leadership ...

• How many more crises and natural disasters before we see that all conventions of aid mean that assistance does not reach those who need it most and those who are most vulnerable? It is not because we do not have enough. It is because we do not have the will to distribute that which we have. And it is also because, regrettably, the faceless few do not fear the consequences sufficiently.

• How many times must great needs be met simply by nice words and not have before us the goodwill that is necessary to prevent militarism and nationalism? ... this age simply resembles that of a century ago. ... Our world knows not what it is gambling with. ... this fire will burn us all down. ... This is not science fiction.

• In the words of Robert Nesta Marley, who will get up and stand up for the rights of our people? Who will stand up in the name of all who have died in this awful pandemic? ... Who will stand up not with a little token but with real progress?

• If we can find the will to send people to the moon -- and to solve male baldness, as I've said over and over -- we can solve simple problems like letting our people eat ...

• Why don't we count who stands up in here ... [our people want to know] what is the relevance of an international community that doesn't listen to each other? ... Barbados calls and the people of the world ask, what direction do we want our world to go in? And not leave it to the faceless few who have worked so hard to prevent the prosperity from being shared.

• We need a new UNGA for the peoples of the world ... we have the population and the member states to send the signal of the direction we want the world to go in ... Let us do it in the calm assurance that those who live in great causes never ultimately fail, but we must summon the courage to do it. ... We cannot solve every problem in the world but must solve those in our purview, immediately.

 That's a woman to be reckoned with.

Parents need help

Feminist writer Jessica Valenti highlights the state of anxious confusion that the welcomed start of the school year has brought to people with children too young to be vaccinated.

Parents I know are scrambling to find pediatricians who might give their not-yet-12 year-old the Covid vaccine off-label, now that it’s FDA approved. Others are simply lying to their local CVS about their kid’s age, desperate to see them protected before they walk into a building with hundreds of other students. I don’t blame them, not even a little. 

I’m doing my own ethical dance, trying to sort out what I can do to shield my once severely ill daughter from a virus that we still know so little about—one that is killing children and leaving others with baffling long-term neurological symptoms.

And this is not just about physical health. Parents have seen the mental and emotional toll the pandemic has already taken on our children—quarantine, of course, but also the learning behind plexiglass desk dividers, and the lack of everyday things like sleepovers or stress-free playdates.

The way kids interact with the world around them has completely changed. It’s a loss that’s impossible to measure.

Her sense of being out on her own coping with an affliction which is invisible to people without kids reminds me of the searing insight the filmmaker Vito Russo gave us about living with HIV in the days when that meant only stigma and approaching death.

Living with AIDS is like living through a war which is happening only for those people who happen to be in the trenches.

It's awful to realize that's where many parents find themselves this autumn.

The general obliviousness of childless adults to the struggles of many parents has distressing policy implications. One of the great successes of the early Biden administration has been the monthly $300 federal child tax credit which is drastically reducing poverty for millions. Yes, having children equates with poverty for too many households. We say we value kids -- finally we're helping as a society to pay for them.

But the legislative sausage making which helped enact the $300 payments made the payments a short term effort, extending only to the end of the year. Democrats hope to extend the program in their big budget bill. But this turns out to be a hard sell.

... the public is not yet in sync with Democratic leaders. In a mid-July Morning Consult poll, only 35 percent of voters said the expansion should “definitely” or “probably” be made permanent, with 52 percent saying the opposite. A YouGov poll from around the same time found only 30 percent of voters favored permanent expansion; 46 percent opposed it.

... The perplexing question is: why aren’t the checks themselves breaking through the partisan divide? Why isn’t the credit selling itself?

1. Not everyone gets the checks. About 39 million households are receiving the checks. But America has about 121 million households. ...

2. Even people who get checks believe that other people shouldn’t. ... [Reagan and the GOPers taught us well to sniff around for welfare bums, you know.]

3. The expanded child tax credit was slipped quietly into a crisis package—perhaps too quietly ...

4. Voters support crisis help more than permanent help. 

... Many Democrats saw opportunity in crisis: Seize the pandemic moment, send out near-universal and unconditional checks, and demonstrate that’s the most direct way to eradicate poverty.

But unpleasant though it is to consider, most voters may not aspire to slashing poverty as much as progressive Democrats do, and therefore may not want to spend huge amounts of money to that end.

I'm prepared to believe that a universal child tax credit is probably the simplest means to reduce poverty in our country. We're rich enough to make that choice. Let's hope Dems can push this through  during the legislative battles that will dominate the fall in Congress.

Some states did better than others; all could do more

Click to enlarge.

Matt Yglesias posted this map to show that most states contribute hardly any assistance to families with children living in dire poverty. And it does do that. But it shows something else as well: how political differences between states meant different effects on poor people.

TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families) is the Clinton-era successor program to what used to be called Aid to Families with Dependent Children, more commonly known as welfare. In the 1990s, legislators of both parties decided they could force those lazy ladies raising kids on a pittance of government assistance to work for their benefits. And also that they should limit families' eligibility to collect any help at all after a period as short as two years. Bureaucratic hoop was intertwined with bureaucratic hoop; many women and families just fell out of the system altogether and got nothing. In good economic times, some of these parents caught on in the most precarious of bad jobs; in bad times, they fell out of the labor force. We see some of them living on the streets today.

The sum the federal government gave the states to pay for TANF was set in the 1990s, and as far as I know never increased. It never was generous and is worth far less today. In any case, the welfare "reform" law was written so that, if states wanted to, they could divert TANF cash to their general funds. So what the map really shows is that most states (yes, the usual suspects) did just that, effectively pocketing a federal windfall nominally meant to help poor people.

How much poor women and their kids were hurt by "reform" came to depend on the political balance of forces in each state. The few dark blue states on the map above reacted to welfare "reform" with policies that were more generous to recipients. To some extent, this came about because poor women fought back. In California, for example, organized welfare recipients won the right to count education at community colleges and in technical programs as "work" for the purpose of keeping eligibility. This seems merely sane, but the 1996 law was so punitive toward those needing assistance that it took battles to win.

No wonder, after 25 years of these sorts of policies, we are ready for President Biden's American Families Plan in some form. It's time for this country to give parents and children a hand. 

• • •

It took a few years for a clear picture of the effects of the 1996 welfare law to play out. $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America by social scientists Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer offers a lively description of the subsequent extreme poverty into which many families fell.

Martin Luther King holiday

The Martin Luther King holiday is unsettling. It should be. He tried to change the country at its core, to turn us away from the injustice of race hate and poverty. So we killed him. And we gave him a holiday which calls for "national service." I guess that's better than ignoring the man, but how much better?

My friend Dana has become a racial justice activist late in life. I was reminded of her response to another of our problematic holidays, the one about "bombs bursting in air." Her sentiments seem appropriate to this one too.

... it was the Fourth of July, and we did our usual things — a speaker spoke, we told another horrible story, we said the person’s name. And while I was kneeling, I thought about this song that I loved. A song I loved all my life, but that has never made a whole lot of sense. “America the Beautiful.” 

It was the Fourth of July, we finished saying their name. I walked out into the middle of the road, and I turned and faced everybody, I said, “You all know this song,” and sang “America the Beautiful.” When I was done, I said to them, “I know that I will never be able to, and I don’t think my children will ever be able to, but I can only hope that if they make it to my age, my grandchildren will be able to sing that beautiful song without the same sense of irony with which I just sang it: ‘God shed his grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.’” 

I don’t think so. I mean, it’s a wonderful idea, but it is potential that has been unmet. And that for me is really sad.

That's how I feel on the King holiday. But he didn't give up and neither can we.

Poverty kills

Our unhoused neighbor who had settled in across the street has died. There is no reason to suspect human foul play, just deprivation and possibly her own demons.

She made it as long as she did by projecting a fierce independence; don't mess with me, her whole bearing screamed. So we left her alone. She died alone in her tent.

Mission Local found neighbors who shared memories of Jacqueline ‘Jackie’ Rieber.

"We are building the world that I want to see..."

They are a team. Danell Cross and Melody McCurtis are determined to prevent what America witnessed during Wisconsin's April 7th’s primary election from happening again. ...

Listen up and get inspired.

• Black communities have always had to fight for the right to vote. 
• What we're up against, this time, has snapped us out of numbness.
• All these different things is really holding our folks back from wanting to vote ...
• I just got to keep on getting up and surviving each day.
• We're mobilizing people to vote because we want power. ...
• When I vote I'm voting to keep the officials accountable, not just for me but for the entire community.
• Black folks is real skeptical right now.
• It's a lot of misinformation, and I know it is on purpose.
• My whole job is to outmaneuver the systematic racism in Milwaukee.
• We don't make a lot of  money, but we are building the world that I want to see.
  

She is still gripping and unsettling

Revolution of the Heart: The Dorothy Day Story - Trailer HD from Journey Films on Vimeo.

This documentary aired on Public Broadcasting on Monday. I liked it.

I'm suspicious of hagiography around Dorothy and that particularly applies to the campaign to acknowledge her as a saint. She was awe inspiring and nearly impossible -- the impulse to drown the latter in the former can be overwhelming. The film catches her stubbornness as well as her compassion. The Catholic Worker movement wouldn't have existed without both.

Above all, I recommend this for the visuals, for its smooth integration of old pictures with the narrative of Dorothy's life and work. Most of the photos are black and white images which seem true to the poverty of the Depression era as well as among the homeless men who frequented the Bowery area in the 1960s and '70s. It was a starkly gray scene. There were more women about than these pictures would suggest; I found it interesting that more than one the clips of Dorothy speaking about the work referred to women in need who became part of the community.

From viewing this film, you might think that "the poor" among whom Dorothy found her vocation were all white people. That would not be an entirely true picture. In the Catholic Worker's advocacy mission, the movement stood loyally on the side of civil rights for African Americans; Dorothy identified closely with Clarence Jordan's Koinonia Farm, a bravely integrated communal experiment in Georgia.

Yet these gestures toward the nation's original sin were extrinsic to the life of the Worker in Dorothy's time. Certainly the Lower East Side of New York in Dorothy's later years was still home to plenty of older European immigrants who had not escaped from urban squalor to the suburbs -- though their children might have. And there were always some African Americans among the homeless men the Catholic Worker fed and clothed. But in addition to young white people looking for low rents, the neighborhood was filling with Spanish-speaking newcomer families, mostly Puerto Rican. The various kinds brushed past each other, but interacted little in my time there. Dorothy was aware of racial tensions and did what she always did about conflict: both ignored and prayed.

Who'd have thought there'd now be a Whole Foods on New York's Houston Street?

The film describes Dorothy's piety as "conservative." I wouldn't object to the label, though for people who never lived inside American Catholic culture, I'm not sure it communicates adequately. Her understanding of Christianity was formal, traditional, Tridentine, and hierarchical with the overlay of Catholic immigrants' need to prove to "respectable" Protestant Anglos that they weren't just dumb, dissolute Irish Micks and Polaks. Few American Catholics are like that now. Quite a few Catholics were not like that then, including her contemporaries, Thomas Merton in his later years and the Berrigan brothers -- with whom she often felt out of phase.

Yet Dorothy was also mystical, enfolded in a piety that arose out of stories of heroines and saints. One of the oddments in the film which rang very true to me was Cornel West trying to explain how Dorothy's life was rooted in the mass, in receiving Christ in the Eucharist daily. I wouldn't have turned to Cornel West for that insight, but I'm delighted these moviemakers did.

What I often find lacking when people try to explain the power of Dorothy's life is an appreciation that, even into old age, she was a beautiful woman. (For what I consider a sad example, see the Robert Lentz icon.) Yes, she had a piercing stare that could only be met by steeling ones inner core, but she also emanated both calm amid chaos and delight from her depths. In this film, that Dorothy is there for all to see.

If you have a chance -- and I am sure there will be many -- do see this documentary.

I lived in the New York Catholic Worker community for several years in the early 1970s and among Catholic Workers for the remainder of the decade.

From my clutter to your consideration: found thoughts

I have so many topics I would want to write about but never will have time to research properly. So some Saturdays I've decided I'll post some annotated links.

CalMatters has created a simple checklist evaluating measures that California might take to respond to the fact that our economy is throwing people out of their homes and onto the streets. I wasn't inclined to be sympathetic to such a listicle, but find this thought-provoking and instructive. Take a look.

I often repeat a recurring rant about how we aren't going to combat climate chaos through individual behavioral tweaks. Carbon pollution is society-wide and needs society-wide solutions. Here's an article which documents how individual action --a crackpot, but emotionally comforting, idea -- came to infest late-20th century U.S. environmental consciousness.

And if you want to feel better, read this pitch from an articulate trail running coach about why his athletes and community should be working to save our environmental laws from the Trump administration's giveaways to the polluters.

What's it like to live across from a shelter?

If I wasn't aware that the Buena Vista Horace Mann (BVHM) Stay Over Program (SOP) for homeless families was using the gym across our street every night, I'd have no idea the school was serving as a shelter for students and parents. The shelter program doesn't cause a ripple around here. I notice the woman who delivers meals in the morning when she competes with everyone else for parking, but that's about it.

Teachers heard from children that they wished they could stay at their school overnight; miraculously, both the school district bureaucracy and city politicians got onboard with the idea a year ago. Demand was slow to pick up, but now the program seems to be going well.

The City Controller's office has released an evaluation with some statistics:

A total of 55 families, or 183 individuals, have used the shelter since the program began.

... The current contract runs until June 30 and costs $1.2 million for ongoing operating expenses, according to the controller. That factors out to about $35 per bed a night.

Who is using the space? According to a summary of the Controller's report, the population looks a lot like most of the families I see around the school every day.

...74% of individuals connected through the SOP identified as Latino and at least 32% speak Spanish as their primary language. The Controller’s Office found that the program has provided a culturally responsive service that directly meets the needs of Spanish-speaking families experiencing homelessness or housing instability for the first time.

... The Controller’s Office also found that the services at the SOP include unique features not present in other congregate emergency family shelters. For example, the BVHM shelter provides language services, showers on-site, a secure storage area, and families can reserve space at the shelter for multiple days at a time. The Controller’s Office found that nearly all participating families were assessed at an Access Point, where families can access the system of care and available resources.

Given the number of unhoused people now living in the city, this is a drop in the bucket. But providing for needy kids at a place they already trust seems a major initiative, beyond its small scale.

1000 deaths expected this year

The only reason this doesn't doesn't describe San Francisco is that the city is smaller, both in extent and population.

On average, nearly three homeless people are dying daily in [Los Angeles] county, nearly double the rate of deaths by homicide. Illness, addiction, accidents, suicide and the ravages of being unsheltered are among the primary causes of death.

“We know the research says that people who are what’s called rough sleepers, those who are living on the streets and not in a shelter or a car, are 10 times more likely to die than the regular population,” said Dr. Susan Partovi, citing a study in Boston. Partovi has been administering to homeless people in Los Angeles for years.

The average age of the first 666 homeless people who died in L.A. County as of Aug. 25 was 51, well below the county’s average life expectancy of roughly 80. Homeless people are dying on sidewalks, along riverbeds, and in tents, parks, shelters, vehicles, motels and hospitals.

... The first 666 deaths of the year included 42 homicides and 27 suicides. Males vastly outnumbered females, 83% to 17%, and the victims included 253 white people, 220 Latinos and 168 African Americans.

Substance abuse and heart conditions, sometimes in conjunction, were among the leading causes of death, but no cause had been determined in about 100 of the cases. ...

Steve Lopez

Those are just the statistics. Click the link for the stories. Steve Lopez is one of U.S. journalism's greats. Somehow he's held on and keeps telling truths at the struggling Los Angeles Times. Read him while you can.

Photos from San Francisco streets, taken while Walking San Francisco.

An Epiphany reflection: 1979 and today

Fritz Eichenberg, printmaker extraordinaire for The Catholic Worker newspaper, created this image of foreign potentates bringing gifts of food to the Child who heralds new life for U.N.'s International Year of the Child. That year the refugee crisis struggling for the world's attention and compassion was that of the Vietnamese boat people, 54,000 of whom fled their war devastated country on leaky small boats in just the month of June. Wealthy countries eventually agreed to an Orderly Departure Program enabling refugees to migrate legally to the United States, France, Australia, and Canada.

That was then. And now, according to the International Refuge Committee:

More people have been forced to flee their homes by conflict and crisis than at any time since World War II.

Millions have fled Syria; many more would escape Yemen and war torn countries in the horn of Africa if they could; desertification, warming, and conflict drive people to move in the Sahel; and Central Americans flee their failing states. Today too many refugee children are beyond the help of any visitors.

The body of Syrian refugee 3 year old Aylan Kurdi washed up on a Greek beach in 2015. As of last June, 34,361 people have died trying to cross the Mediterranean to Europe in the last 20 years.

I know no easy answers, but I will refuse to look away.

Christmas eve

A season's greeting purloined from the Des Moines Catholic Worker, the current locus of the more insurgent anarchist branch of that good movement. It's just too appropriate to forego here in the city of Saint Francis where numbers of people living on the streets remind me of what I once thought were unique horrors on the Bowery in New York City in the 1970s. Can we build more inns in the New Year?

Yes on San Francisco's Prop. C

Working in Reno on one little piece of the most important election in recent US history (1858 comes to mind as comparable, but not many others) is likely to prevent me from writing daily blog posts here until after November 6.

San Franciscans have a chance to reduce the frequency of scenes like this. But will we rise to the chance?

Heather Knight writing in the SF Chron offers an insight into the opposition to a small tax on rich businesses to provide better services to people living on our streets:

Campaign finance disclosures show contributions to the No on C campaign from Stripe ($419,999); Visa ($225,000); Paul Graham, an investor in Y-Combinator ($150,000); Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey ($125,000); Lyft ($100,000); brokerage founder Charles Schwab ($100,000); venture capitalist Michael Moritz ($100,000); the Hotel Council ($50,000) and the Committee on Jobs ($30,000).

Yes, in one of the cities with the biggest income inequality gap in the world — where a household has to earn $300,000 a year to buy a median-priced home — CEOs are donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to prevent their companies from paying a small amount to house homeless people.

Not all out tech overlords are so small minded; one of the wonders of this San Francisco moment is that Marc Benioff of Salesforce has put his money behind a more humane vision for the city where his building looms. San Franciscans can show their vision of our future by voting YES on C.

H/t to Erudite Partner for the photo.

Gym at Buena Vista/Horace Mann to be opened to some homeless families

The four women responsible for a pilot program to provide overnight sleeping space for some of the Mission District school's unhoused students and their parents explained the plan at a neighborhood meeting on Monday night. From the left, School Board President Hydra Mendoza, BVHM principal Claudia DeLarios Morán, District 9 Supervisor Hillary Ronen, and Emily Cohen from the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Services.

DeLarios Moran explained that the idea arose when some of the children in need of housing asked if they couldn't just stay at the school. Plenty has happened since then. BVHM teachers and parents discussed the plan and agreed unanimously to ask the District for support. Teachers will not be asked to run the sleeping facility, but expect to see learning gains among their more rested students. The School District had to consider facility demands and liability concerns. Ronen went prospecting for city money, now included in the new budget. The city Department of Homelessness will be putting out a contract for bid by some the city's experienced service non-profits to run the planned overnight sleeping and feeding program for some 60 people.

Some of the 30 or so neighbors on hand complained they weren't cut in on the plan until very late in its evolution, but the majority were glad see our school try something new to support our homeless neighbors. As far as these innovators have discovered, no other public school in the country has decided to use its building to house some of its homeless students. BVHM is pioneering something new here.

"Our City, Our Home"

The other day the San Francisco Chronicle and a boatload of other local media focused their output on our region's substantial unhoused population and the ongoing failure of public policy to much reduce their numbers. I read a lot of the entries linked here and it was discouraging.

In particular, a laudatory profile of the work of San Francisco homelessness chief Jeff Kositsky left me with the feeling that newspaper had buried the lede of its story. About 20 paragraphs in was this:

One reason for the slow pace [of reducing homelessness] is this shocking factoid: Every week, Kositsky’s team gets 50 homeless people off the streets, and every week, 150 more take their place.

On average, that’s 100 people who become homeless in San Francisco and 50 homeless people who arrive here from somewhere else. Some of them are just passing through, and some of them will figure out housing on their own. But many of them won’t.

One hundred residents, our neighbors who live alongside those of us with relatively secure housing, lose their place to live every week. One hundred living, breathing people!

Experienced Chronicle reporter Kevin Fagan assembled some of the numbers in an interesting graphic presentation. One point that stuck out was that when city authorities claim they've gotten some people off the streets, some good sized portion of that reduction has been achieved by giving people one-way bus tickets to somewhere else. Does that help anyone except flacks who have to explain city policy? Maybe, but I'm skeptical

Fagan dares attempt to explain why, at this moment in time, San Franciscans perceive an intolerable crisis.

Weariness: The decades-old problem lends itself to a perception that it has no end in sight, and the exploding opioid epidemic, which has thrust more addicts onto the streets shooting up in public, only adds to the sense of futility.

Tents: The proliferation of tents all over the city, in places where before there were mostly just blankets and tarp lean-tos, has been perhaps the biggest driver. The Occupy protest movement that flared in 2011 and died out in 2012 infused hundreds of tents onto the streets, and kindhearted residents followed by raising donations to buy even more.

Unknown artist. This surprisingly bucolic picture of out tent encampments had been turning up on lamp posts.

Gentrification: As the city’s tech-driven economy exploded, traditional homeless hangouts in places like central SoMa or around the Transbay Terminal were revitalized. Unable to blend in so easily, the homeless migrated elsewhere, causing fresh alarm to those unused to seeing camps.

Panhandlers: As many as 50 percent of them, by some estimates, are formerly homeless people who now live inside but are so dysfunctional they revert to the one moneymaking technique they’ve always known. They look homeless, but they’re not.

After decades of hand-wringing and ineffectual policy initiatives, pretty much everyone agrees that the only true solution for people without housing is to provide housing. This is not a problem caused by the idiosyncrasies or disabilities of homeless individuals. It's not surprising that living on the streets drives some people crazy or encourages self-medication with alcohol and drugs. But if we don't like living alongside tent encampments, we have to move people inside.

The Chron reports that street people and allies have a substantive proposal:

... a proposed November ballot measure called “Our City, Our Home.” It would raise taxes on businesses making more than $50 million a year to bring in $300 million annually to build more housing, boost mental health and substance-abuse programs and create more shelter beds. [Jennifer Friedenbach, director of the Coalition on Homelessness] and other supporters are gathering signatures to qualify it for the ballot.

“It’s going to completely turn around this crisis,” she said. “Big time!"

When city authorities cry poverty at budget time, they need to remember this is a rich city. There's money here; it's time to put more of it to community use. Homeless people and their friends never have a chance to forget they live adjacent to riches.