I am an advocate for healthcare and affordable housing in San Francisco. I work with homeless people.

I read your obituary article column (4/26/07 page 1 of Section B) for Monty “Skateboard” Holmes and I am disgusted by your absence of respect for his life and your personal value judgments that you put in the piece.

Who gave you the right to define this man’s life by writing:

So if you are looking to muster a lot of sympathy, this is an uphill battle. Skateboard was a reckless, homeless drinker who, after any number of close calls, finally got run over. Frankly, he was probably living on borrowed time. So it goes.

I guess you think he deserved it. No sympathy needed. I assume if you were run down by a truck you would somehow deserve sympathy because you are not a disabled double amputee alcoholic street person struggling with “demons.” Why didn’t he have housing if he was disabled? Why didn’t he have the appropriate durable medical equipment required for mobility? Your article focused on his addictive disorder and homeless status as opposed to his disability or lack of relevant placement.

You claim his life is not one “many of us would have chosen.” Is this meant to imply that homeless people choose to live that way?

I guess someone needs to educate you, so I will: Homeless people really don’t choose to live that way. (Okay, studies by the Urban Institute show that some do: 5%!) The cause of homelessness is actually the lack of affordable housing, not personal choice or problems. Ask anyone who works daily with homeless people and they will tell you this. Everybody knows that. Do your research, man. I guess you are struggling with your own demons of accuracy and fact-finding ability.

What do you mean filling this man’s obituary with things like, “Of course we all know the drill in dealing with street people—eyes straight ahead, keep walking and ignore them if they try to talk to you.”

Of course you are wrong when you say that. As a community organizer who works with homeless street people, I don’t know the drill you refer to. I actually talk to people and I happen to know many of them.

Your naked contempt for poor and homeless people is revealed when you say that his memorial was filled with, “pencil scratchings and scrawlings from black markers,” as if they weren’t actually messages written by human beings. There is no love or respect in your article and you should not go around scrawling columns and obituaries for people that you don’t know, and despise.

I urge you to examine your privilege and confront your own biases regarding disadvantaged people in our community. Who gave you the right to put Skateboard and other homeless people down?

The Coalition on Homelessness fully subscribes to the opinions set forth in James Chionsini’s letter.

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WHEN: Tuesday, April 24, 12.00 p.m.
WHERE: 800 Mission Street, in front of Metreon
WHAT: A walk and rally to stand against a proposed poverty court that will waste funds that could be spent on ending homelessness while criminalizing people for being poor.

Erroneously calling them, “community courts,” Mayor Newsom has proposed new poverty courts that would further criminalize poor and homeless Central City residents for activities such as sleeping in public. This new proposed court system would inappropriately route public funds to divert police officers from responding to real crimes in order to act as untrained triage workers for unfunded social services. The walk will start at the Metreon (12:00 p.m.), go up Mission to 7th Street, stop at the Federal Building (12:35), walk through United Nations Plaza to City Hall (12:50), and continue to the Tenderloin Police Station (1:00), and end in a rally at Boedekker Park (1:15). Recent San Francisco Poet Laureate Jack Hirschman and Supervisor Chris Daly will both be featured speakers at the event.

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While violent crime is increasing in San Francisco, the Mayor is proposing to spend additional resources to prosecute homeless people for sleeping outdoors.

Walk with supporters of homeless people’s basic rights on April 24, at noon, starting from the Federal Building at 800 Mission.

If you’ve got a few minutes, check out James Keyes talking a little about homelessness and the new poverty courts on YouTube.

Erroneously named “community courts,” the poverty court being proposed by Mayor Newsom for the Tenderloin aims to limit the due process rights of homeless people. This court would focus on status crimes, i.e. those crimes that are unavoidable for people who are poor and living on the streets. Poverty courts represent a further step towards the permanent criminalization of poor and homeless people, disguised as a more compassionate approach to “quality of life” issues. However, since no amount of punishment will ever succeed in lifting people out of poverty, this court will only deepen the cycle of incarceration and homelessness.

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There’s been a lot of hype around one of the statistics released by the Human Services Agency in the 2007 Homeless Count Report: 31% of homeless people in San Francisco moved here after becoming homeless. (more…)

The 2007 Homeless Count Report (884 Kb PDF), released March 28, shows a 2% increase in San Francisco’s homeless population since the most recent such count in 2005. The proportion of homeless youth has almost doubled, while more than half again as many members of homeless families are living on the streets. Even more striking are the portions of the homeless population not counted.

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Families have been short-changed. The City has provided $700,000 in eviction prevention funds and plans to build 498 units of subsidized housing in 2007. However, only 16% of those units will go to homeless families. With 3,000 homeless families in San Francisco, this plan will aid less than 3% of the total population of families in need, leaving roughly 2,920 families without housing. In addition, as Federal cuts to Section 8 vouchers increase, more and more families are at risk of becoming homeless from evictions.

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In late 2006, San Francisco’s Coalition on Homelessness became concerned by claims from the Mayor’s Office that a large number of shelter beds were unoccupied during a time when homeless people were reporting high shelter turn-away rates.

A December 19, 2006 Mayoral press release cited a Human Services Agency (HSA) report, “that there [were] upwards of 100 vacancies in our shelter system which remain available for any homeless individual needing shelter assistance.”

Under the direction of Jennifer Friedenbach, the Right to a Roof Workgroup sent forms to the three Central City shelter reservation sites: Tenderloin Health, Hospitality House’s Tenderloin Self-Help Center, and a South of Market location at 150 Otis. At the end of two weeks, the shelters returned the forms.

Friedenbach said shelter staff recorded first names of individuals who were refused a bed, their turn-away date, and the reason for the denial of service.

The data from various dates between January 29, 2007 and February 15, 2007, document what Friedenbach describes as, “very high turn-away rates.”

Numbers collected between 11:00 a.m. and 11:00 p.m.daily in this two-week period revealed that on a significant number of cold winter nights, an average of 49.08 homeless people were turned away from shelters that, by day’s end, were apparently full.

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