Alert: 39 Fell to Close: Has anyone noticed it’s still in use?
The City has plans to shut down McMillan Resource and Drop-In Center at 39 Fell. According to a Department of Public Health official, the target date for closure is September 30. The good news is that the facility will be renovated and turned into a 40-bed medical respite facility. A respite facility serves homeless people who have recently been released from the hospital and need continuing medical care. Homeless people and their allies have been clamoring for the City to better address the needs of homeless people with medical problems through the addition of medical respite beds for years. Just as he recently discovered the existence of homeless families, Mayor Newsom finally noticed that there were sick homeless people without access to medical beds in San Francisco. In the Fall of 2005, he directed City workers from the Department of Public Health to plan the expansion of the respite system, and to add more beds. They chose the already occupied building at 39 Fell.
Currently, 39 Fell serves a number of different functions: It is the only centrally-located 24-hour-a-day resource and drop-in center. The original intention of the facility was to prevent homeless deaths by providing a safe and accessible place at all times. Later in 2003, the sobering center with stabilization beds and medically trained staff was established. Eventually, the Human Services Agency added the CHANGES reservation system without giving 39 Fell any additional money to provide trained staff. Getting a bed through the problem-ridden CHANGES system has become the center’s focus. The philosophy of promoting homeless people’s health and survival has been pitted against “coordinating” people into beds. The environment changed, tensions swelled and complaints about the facility and staff increased. Thus it earned its nickname “39 Hell.”
During the City’s planning of the new respite center, no one addressed the issue of the loss of the resource and the drop-in centers. The process was not transparent or inclusive of 39 Fell line staff. Homeless people who utilized the facility were not consulted. As of the writing of this article, there are still no answers for the people that use 39 Fell. No one at the City Departments is informing the stakeholders or the general public. According to a longtime management staff member at CATS, the non-profit agency that operates the facility, the agency, “has not been given any specific information about the closure,” or about the plans for the relocation of the services.
When the doors are shut on September 30, what will happen to the people lined up outside? Where will the disabled people who stand in line for hours everyday go to use the CHANGES system to get a bed or a mat? What will happen to the senior women who sleep there the majority of the week? What will become of the people who fill the drop-in’s 65 chairs every night? The City continues to fundamentally change homeless people’s lives without communication or plan.
During a recent visit to 39 Fell at 7:30 p.m. on a weekday, a team from the Coalition on Homelessness verbally surveyed the people lining up outside 39 Fell to access shelter beds. When asked if they had heard about the closure, only three out of 26 had heard about the possibility. Of these three, two stated that they had heard it as a rumor. Only one person been directly informed, and that by a service provider at the Tenderloin AIDS Resource Center. Most had identical questions and concerns: As Carolina, a senior and disabled woman standing in line asked, “Where is everyone going to go?” People expressed alarm and dismay at the closure, especially at the proposed closure date. Virgil Marin summed up the collective shock over the lack of communication: “If they close on September 30, when are they planning on telling us? The day before they shut the doors?” Although most expressed approval for the idea of a respite facility, there was a general air of exasperation, and several people resignedly joked about getting a better sleeping bag or finding a ladder to climb on to the roof of the building across the street. “Isn’t this the focal place for getting in anywhere?” questioned a woman who was awaiting a bed because she was escaping an abusive situation.
The facility had no information posted inside about the upcoming closure. The staff on duty at 39 Fell were also unaware; one told us, “We have been kept in the dark about any information about a closure. All we hear is rumors, we haven’t been told anything directly. And the September date is totally a surprise.”
Once again, City policy has guaranteed that any gain for one group of homeless people must come at the expense of another. Sick people will be granted medical respite care while the health of others is jeopardized by the lack of a safe, dry space and diminished access to shelter beds. People who use the drop-in center who have had no other formal connections to service have had the rare access to the medical staff there that can ultimately be life-saving.
Dr. Barry Zevin, a physician with Healthcare for the Homeless who is well acquainted with the respite system and the complexity of homeless people’s health needs, shares concern about the closure.
“Ideally the respite center will provide real gains for sick and homeless people,” said Zevin. “But I can’t picture any scenario where it becomes unnecessary to provide a 24-hour safe place off the street. Shelter itself ultimately is a health issue.”
Over the course of the past two years, the City has closed South Beach Drop-In Center, A Man’s Place Shelter, and, until funding was recovered, St. Boniface. It cut beds at Dolores Street shelters. Women’s World at MSC-South is scheduled to close within two weeks, to reopen at an undisclosed date. 39 Fell is yet another face of a shelter system that is being downsized and restructured with no community process, no comprehensive planning, and no regard for the lives, voices, or realities of homeless people.
39 Fell visitor Ronald Edward Parham: “Help.”
Anabel
