Come join us for an evening of fun, dance, music, and entertainment.
The Coalition on Homelessness has been Fighting for Justice for the Poor and Homeless in San Francisco for 20 years.
Musical performance by Antioquia
Admission is on a sliding scale: $10-25. Free parking available.
Anybody who is homeless in San Francisco and trying to reserve a bed in City-funded shelters is likely to be turned away an average of six times within a month. Chances are they’re just as likely to wait one day as well as over a week to get a bed. And they also believe the shelter system could be improved by fixing the reservation system, improving staff training, and creating more beds.
These were just some of the findings in a study of shelter seekers the Coalition on Homelessness will release this month. The survey of over 200 homeless city residents included in The Runaround also revealed that they had an even-money chance of having favorable or unfavorable experiences finding a haven in the shelter system.
You’ve been hearing it on the radio, and perhaps you vaguely recall voting for the Mental Health Services Act (2004’s Proposition 63), but maybe all the budget mayhem going down in Sacramento makes all this rather confusing. So here’s the skinny: The MHSA is a special tax levied on the wealthiest Californians that provides funding for county-level mental health programs. Proposition 1E would reallocate somewhere between a quarter and a third of the money used for these programs to the state’s “general fund”—that section of the budget which our elected officials can allocate as they like.
Opponents of Proposition 1E make a lot of good points:
It Cuts Services to Those Who Need Them: In a time of social crisis, we need to provide our communities with more support, not less. MHSA funds have provided healthcare for over 200,000 people. This number will necessarily be reduced by Proposition 1E reductions.
The First Cut is the Deepest: There has already been discussion on the state level of moving all MHSA money to the general fund. Given that political will, we need to be careful not to set a bad precedent. If this recession continues, and our politicians continue to value other expenditures over social services, we will most likely see proposals of further cuts to core mental health and other poor people’s services.
It’s Unnecessary: MHSA funds amount to less than a quarter of a percent of the state budget. The potential impacts in other budget sectors of the loss of services could well amount to more than this.
There’s No Accountability: While the MHSA had strict auditing and accountability requirements, Proposition 1E will move hundreds of millions of dollars to a legislature that can spend without any special recession-period restrictions.
None of us benefits from living in a state that can’t balance its books: We need a sane state budget. But we cannot ask our society’s most vulnerable members to bear the burden of our legislators’ profligacy. For this reason, the Coalition on Homelessness and the Street Sheet join with organizations across California in asking you to vote against Proposition 1E, and to thereby save mental health services for the people who this recession is hitting the hardest.
Most arguments made in this article come from the California Council of Community Health Organizations, but factual claims have been checked against existing and proposed law.
We have come a long way since 1886 when police in Chicago’s Haymarket Square fired on people demonstrating in support of striking workers who were demanding eight-hour workdays. Many years have passed, and people around the world still commemorate May 1 as a day on which we celebrate the right of people to work and to do so with basic rights. But what does it mean to celebrate May Day in 2009? What does it mean to celebrate May Day during a deep recession or depression? What does it mean to celebrate May Day when so many people are losing their jobs?
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In the face of the growing numbers of families losing their homes, of having to split up for survival’s sake, and even of some children’s ending up in the hellhole of the Foster Care System, what is our Federal government doing? Unbelievably, what it seems intent on doing is systematically creating obstacles to families trying desperately to find a roof over their heads.
On April 2, the House (HR 1877) and the Senate (S 808) both reintroduced legislation entitled the Homeless Emergency Assistance and Rapid Transition to Housing (HEARTH) Act of 2009. If this bill becomes law, as many people fear, thousands of destitute and poor families will fail to “qualify” for services funded with Federal homeless assistance dollars because they will be deemed not to be homeless enough.
Several months ago Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation and other entities sponsored a Tenderloin visit of a mobile optical clinic to help poor folks get new glasses, etc. The flyer advertising the event said it was to be from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., which encouraged me to break the first law of getting any benefit offered to poor folks—get there early and get whatever it is.
So I thought a noon-ish visit to the van was doable. It wasn’t. What also wasn’t were the facts that only the first 100 people seen would get served, that those people were supposed to return beginning at 2 p.m., and anyone else who wanted to see if there were any “no-shows” (people who didn’t show up for their appointment) could be there then too and maybe get served.
This isn’t the only disconnect between entities with services and folks who need them, but that experience and several others lead me to a bit of ye olde rant and rave.
Terry “Tresa” Chandler stood in the vaulted art gallery. Her tiny 4’11” figure was dwarfed by the colorful painting of a boy walking to school past a rotten tomato splashed against graffiti on a wall, ordering, “Homeless Go Home.” He is protected by four adults as he walks to a school for homeless children. Artist, Nili Yosha, crafted the work after Norman Rockwell’s illustration of guards escorting a small black girl into a newly integrated Little Rock school.
Terry tilted her head, peering at me with a shy, sardonic smile. “When people say this,” she observed, “they are doing it to be mean.”
“It’s good that homeless people get to see [this show] too. Then we can tell you if it’s real or not.”
“The best thing about this show is it makes people think.” Her voice echoed slightly, “I live it. It’s so real. All this is so true.”
This coming fiscal year, the Mayor’s Office is demanding of the Human Services Agency (HSA) and the Department of Public Health (DPH) cuts that will definitely eliminate mental health services for 1,600 San Franciscans, and may eliminate mental healthcare access for over 45% of San Francisco mental health consumers; that will shut down such vital community services as Caduceus Outreach Services (a treatment program, despite its name) and Tenderloin Health’s drop-in center; that will increase rents by a third for HIV+ individuals who hold a rental subsidy. These are devastating changes that will result in destabilization for a great number of San Franciscans, in homelessness for many, and that may cause some deaths. These are changes our communities cannot sustain.
The Obama administration’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (that stimulus package we’ve been hearing so much about), however, offers us one of our very few reasons for hope. Since the middle of the 20th century, the Social Security Act has caused the Federal government to refund states and municipalities a certain portion of all their expenditures on Medicaid, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, In-Home Support Services, foster care, and other basic service expenses through the Federal Medical Assistance Percentage, or FMAP. Through the stimulus package, the quantity refunded to state and local governments through FMAP has increased substantially. We’re only working with estimates, right now, but DPH has been using a number of $27 million for its fiscal year 2009-2010 budgeting purposes, and the Mayor’s Budget Director Nani Coloretti used an estimate that would amount to $18 million for HSA in the same year when speaking to the Board of Supervisors’ Budget and Finance Committee. In terms of these departments’ budgets, the FMAP for DPH would eliminate the need for over a quarter of the department’s cuts. For HSA, the FMAP is over 80% of the department’s mandated cuts.
There shouldn’t be any debate, here: The funds are required to stay within the departments, and it’s the Obama administration’s intent that these funds should be used to save essential services. But through its Budget Director, the Mayor’s Office has indicated that it is very seriously considering another use of the money: The Mayor will move more money away from HSA and DPH, and then fill the new gap he has created with FMAP funds, thus effectively leveraging the FMAP money to fund other City programs than those in the departments which directly serve low- and no-income people. This protects the Mayor from having to deal with solutions he might find politically more distasteful, such as cutting the City’s $10 million PR budget, laying off his City-funded gubernatorial campaign staff, or looking seriously at revenue options.
This is the kind of political shenanigans that can occur when the electorate is not informed of what’s going on in the corridors of power. One of the greatest sources of hope, right now, is that neither the Mayor nor his Budget Director has not yet committed to this course of action. Contacting their offices to let them know what you think of this budgetary shell game may well make a difference. The Mayor’s Office may be reached at 415∙554∙6141. The Mayor’s Office of Policy and Finance, headed by Budget Director Nani Coloretti, may be reached at 415∙554∙6114.
In the first few weeks of its sordid existence, the Tenderloin Poverty Court has seen an average of just over one case per day.
In addition to half a million bucks spent last year on the facility, the Mayor plus a Board minority approved $1.8 million for the Court, with plans to spend another $1.1 million of Department of Public Health funds on the Court’s “services”—really just a referral system for greatly needed voluntary services that are being cut from the same Department of Public Health’s budget.
And these numbers don’t yet include the cost to the Public Defender’s Office, or in the salary of the Mayor’s Homeless Czar, Dariush Kayhan, who has been appearing almost daily in order to testify for the prosecution. What is this, Czar Kayhan?: a plan to inspire homeless Bolsheviks?
