Come testify before the Board of Supervisors Budget Committee regarding the closure of Buster’s place.

Thursday June 21st

4:00 Steps of City Hall

Rally along with other poor people’s organizations for a fair budget for all poor communities (People’s Budget)

5:00 Come testify at hearing, Room 250 inside City Hall

Buster’s Place is closing its doors on June 30. The Mayor did not include funding in his budget for this program next year. Homeless people must have a safe place to go that is open 24 hours for non-medical emergencies, basic necessities such as showers and bathrooms, and to connect with housing and homeless services.

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The Mayor’s budget criminalizes poor people, cuts vital services, and eliminates resources for affordable housing!

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The announcement of the City’s new focus on 20 so-called homeless hot spots is yet another instance of electoral-year-motivated initiatives. San Francisco continues to lack a comprehensive plan to address the crisis of affordable housing and services for its poorest residents. While a wave of violent crime rips through our neighborhoods, 32 police officers are diverted from investigating real crimes to work on “quality-of-life” (i.e., crimes of poverty) issues. At the same time that outreach workers spend weeks building relationships with those living on the streets, their work will be now used to direct police officers and DPW staff as first responders for referrals.

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On May 8, hundreds of Tenderloin residents marched through the streets with slogans like “Stop the Violence” and “Community Not Containment”—the latter a reference to the San Francisco Police Department’s method of containing crime to designated blocks. Of course, in the neighborhood, those designated areas are the first few blocks of Turk Street, Jones Street, and Golden Gate, with three homicides, two rapes, and 237 aggravated assaults in the last 90-day period. After a slew of recent killings, a coalition of groups that includes the Safety Network, Tenderloin Housing Clinic, the North of Market Community Benefit District, the Chinatown Community Development Center, the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Center, and residents, decided that it needed to engage in a symbolic act against the violence and crime that overwhelmingly plagues the Tenderloin. With no set platform, but a desire to make the neighborhood a safer place for children, for seniors, for people with disabilities, for all residents, they marched to City Hall, where they joined the Budget for Families Coalition. On the way, they stopped to commemorate the victims of violence, including a 16-year-old, who was shot at Golden Gate and Hyde Street.

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“You’re a thief!” The words came crashing down the staircase and slammed against a poverty scholar at the Roxie Theater. The large man with the wild dreadlocks and warm, buttery voice at the bottom of the stairwell had been sitting two seats over from me in the front row of A Dialogue on the Criminalization of Poverty. Taken aback by the force of these words ringing through the air of the lobby, my eyes traveled up the stairwell to see who could have possibly hurled these word after the event we had just experienced. A young man with a crisp dark shirt, lily clean skin, and indignant down-turned eyes looked down at this gentle giant and took aim: “You are stealing! You have to pay for that!”

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Admit it. Once or twice it’s crossed your mind: Gay guys got green. You think we are living up in some fancy trailer in the Castro. Well honey, it just ain’t true. That’s just another urban myth that you can file alongside the one about the crocodiles in the sewers of New York City and the one about a compassionate conservative in Washington, D.C. According to the Urban Men’s Health Study by Dr. Joseph Catania at UCSF, gay men are twice as likely to live in poverty as the national average.

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As a result of a 2006 proposal from the Families and Immigrants workgroup’s Housing First for Families Campaign, the City is building 4,500 subsidized housing units over the next 10 years. This sounds like great news for the city’s many low-income and homeless families, but in reality only a small fraction of these units are available to these families. Of the 498 units being built this year, only 62 are available to our lowest-income and homeless families. For varying reasons, ranging from income to family size, efforts to house families in San Francisco have come up short. Although a $3 million shallow subsidy was created for the purpose of lowering family rents in San Francisco, few very-low-income and homeless working families qualify for this subsidy.

On Thursday, May 10, the Housing First for Families Campaign held a rally and action in honor of Mother’s Day on the steps of City Hall. The rally was em-cee-ed by Wanda Green, a volunteer at the Coalition on Homelessness, and Alma Jimenez, a volunteer from La Voz Latina at Tenderloin Housing Clinic. Families from all over San Francisco turned up to be informed of the City’s stance on the issue, and to listen to and support the campaign’s next steps. The people were asked to support the campaign’s requests for changes to the existing subsidy that would qualify more homeless and low-income families.

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On May 16, the Coalition On Homelessness hosted a press conference on the steps of City Hall to release the report Shelter Shock: Abuse, Cruelty, and Neglect in San Francisco’s Shelter System (1.3 MB PDF). A large crowd gathered around to support presenters, including Supervisor Tom Ammiano and recent shelter residents Chanel Kennedy and Tomas Picarello. The master of ceremonies was Lisa Gray-Garcia, author of Criminal of Poverty (Street Sheet review) and editor of POOR Magazine.

The report surveys 215 residents of the shelter system who expressed their views about living conditions in those City-funded facilities. The findings cover three major issue areas—barriers to access, abuse and cruelty, and health and hygiene—and makes concrete recommendations for reform. Findings mirror those of other independent and government sources, including the Shelter Monitoring Committee and the Mayor’s Office on Disability.

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San Francisco is once again threatening to adopt an elitist and paternalistic approach to addressing the city’s homeless population. On Thursday, May 24, Mayor Gavin Newsom conducted a walk-through of possible sites for his proposed Community Justice Courts, courts that will further criminalize poor people in this city, despite the administration’s insistence that it is trying to help. It was not surprising, therefore, that Newsom’s press aide blatantly locked representing members of the Coalition on Homelessness out of this overly ceremonious event, only letting me in after protesting censorship of the Street Sheet’s coverage.

The Coalition on Homelessness and Chris Daly, the district supervisor representing the Tenderloin and South of Market areas, are the biggest advocates against these courts. The Mayor’s “special courts,” as he terms them, are to be set up to deal with “quality of life” crimes in the Tenderloin. However, the Coalition proposes that these courts should be termed exactly what they are—poverty courts—because they will primarily target and criminalize the homeless population in the city’s lowest-income sector.

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