No one can say last month lacked for local mainstream media stories spotlighting homelessness. Predictably, a couple of standard corporate media practices are currently driving stories about constructive efforts to alleviate the grim consequences of homelessness out of the dailies’ front pages and the TV newscasts. Most recently this has been the case with homeless families, whose numbers everyone agrees is the fastest growing subset of the national and local homeless populations.

One aforementioned dynamic is the first basic truth everyone learns about how commercial media operates: if it bleeds, it leads (and thereby generates more advertising dollars, Amen). The second is what happens when issues like homelessness are managed through an expensive (and taxpayer financed) overlay of political public relations: message control.

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San Francisco has turned into one the nation’s coldest cities if you are homeless or just poor. People are now being locked out of some of the only decent shelters available.

Dolores Street shelter is one. It’s the only homeless shelter that serves undocumented immigrants and it is in jeopardy of being closed because the city has cut its funding.

Federal Regulations have restricted almost all services for immigrants and they don’t qualify for hardly anything anymore. Dolores Shelter was the only place in the city immigrants reported feeling safe going to when they needed a place to rest.

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The best fertilizer on any farm is the footsteps of the owner.

Confucius

On November 15 the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) announced that as of December 1st, it would stop paying the room costs of more than 150,000 hurricane evacuees still stranded in motel rooms across the country (the next day FEMA announced that officials in Louisiana and Mississippi would have waiver power to extend the deadline for the estimated 53,000 living in motels in those two states until January 7th).

In addition, FEMA announced it would end reimbursements to cities and states that are currently paying hotel costs or leases for evacuees. Any state or locality that underwrites the lease of an evacuee after December 1st—as the City of Houston has notably done—would not be reimbursed. In short, FEMA’s policy makes it clear that all displaced persons must lease an apartment, stay with friends or family, pay for their own rooms, or end up on the streets. According to FEMA, this long-term housing policy announcement is designed to make evacuees more “self-reliant” and to help them “reclaim some normalcy.” Good theory, but there’s no available housing to match. Tragically, there’s precious little “normalcy” in the Gulf South these days.

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A couple of days ago, a woman named Lashaun Harris drowned her three children in San Francisco Bay. Apparently, voices in her head told her to do it. Rumor has it that the DA in this bastion of softheaded liberalism will be pursuing the death penalty, despite the fact that Ms. Harris is schizophrenic.

Rumor also has it that George W. Bush was directed by God to invade Iraq. Thousands upon thousands of children are dead as a result, and one may assume that most of the mothers who survive them, unlike Ms. Harris, aren’t protected from full consciousness of their loss by clinical insanity.

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On Thursday, September 20, 2005, homeless families camped out at City Hall under Mayor Gavin Newsom’s office balcony. Their goal was to hold Newsom to his October 13 promise to focus on housing them “first.” Partly because homelessness is so hard on their children, they wanted to be included in the “Housing First” category along with the “chronically homeless.” They first presented a list of their recommendations to the Mayor the previous month, on August 17, 2005.

Two weeks later, November 3, 2005, recalling their protest, I walked to the Presidio’s Inspiration Point lookout over San Francisco Bay. Treasure Island floated in a cobalt blue mist, Berkeley and Oakland in purple, and Alcatraz in pale yellow. Between wisps of clouds, tinged pink from the setting sun, a silver fingernail of a moon hung in a blue-gray evening sky.

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For a number of years different agencies have worked to build a continuum of care that focuses on providing services in the community at the lowest and least restrictive level of care in order to minimize the use of higher levels of care such as psychiatric emergency services and inpatient hospitalization. Nonertheless, Supervisor Chris Daly and the community have identified a serious gap in the continuum at the level of non-residential 24-hour services. In order to help fill this gap, Supervisor Chris Daly and the community have submitted this proposal to the State of California and the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to build a 24-hour drop-in center.

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Tired and thin, she walked hesitantly down the alleyway. In the weeks since she had been thrown out of the car, Maggie had searched for food and a safe, warm place to give birth…. Barely more than a [child] herself, she found life on the streets to be hard. She had been chased away from the little food she did find by other[s] who claimed it for themselves. And trying to find a place to sleep that was protected from the cold night air was just about impossible.

She found herself alone in the alley behind the diner. Attracted by the smell of food coming from a nearby garbage bag, Maggie clawed through it, devouring the thrown-out food from the kitchen. Her stomach full for the first time in days, she curled up in a crushed cardboard box behind the dumpster and had her first real sleep.

Young, abused, knocked up, then abruptly and brutally abandoned to the harsh realities of life on the streets. It’s a grim depiction of an even grimmer reality.

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I can say, with absolute honesty, that I have not been this impressed with a movie since I was a little kid and saw Star Wars! It’s all San Francisco, it’s got heart for days! The title is “Quality of Life.” Not feelin’ it yet? Allow me to break it down for you.

What we have here is, an independent movie that was made in San Francisco, by people who have actually spent major portions of their lives in San Francisco. The story is set in the very same parts of the City that the movie was filmed in. It all goes down in San Francisco’s historic Mission District, the Bayview, and Bernal Heights. It was edited in the Mission.

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In defense of the San Francisco Police Department, it is only a few Police Officers who have been overly zealous, combative and punitive, in their enforcement of the quality of life laws. It is our belief, though, that one officer abusing his or her position of power is one too many.

It has been reported to the Civil Rights Department, and documented in interviews, that one Police Officer in particular, has been especially verbally and physically abusive in her use of excessive force, created great hardship, and at times been downright mean in her interactions with homeless and poor people.

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