The City offers one drop-in service to make up for the housing the economy can’t provide and the beds the shelter system won’t make available: Buster’s Place.

Though Buster’s Place is not a shelter, every night over a hundred people rest under the center’s roof. Many of these people are among the most vulnerable in San Francisco. Without Buster’s Place, the city’s streets could be horrifically damaging.

Unfortunately, a Buster’s-Place-less San Francisco has become a very real prospect. In his 2007-2008 fiscal year budget, the Mayor eradicated funding for Buster’s Place. The Board of Supervisors’ Finance Committee failed to re-include the center in the add-back process.

But there’s still a chance to save Buster’s Place for the 300 homeless people who pass through its doors every day, and the 100 who stay there every night: The budget is not a done deal until passed by the Board next week. The possibility of reintroducing funding for Buster’s Place will be presented before the full Board. With enough popular support, it just might pass. Please contact your supervisor today. (Don’t know your district? Check this map.) It may sound hyperbolic, but you really may be saving lives.

Those working on poor people’s issues in San Francisco saw a few good wins with this budget. In harm reduction, for example, the People’s Budget was able to win $350,000 for Caduceus Outreach Services, which was in danger of shutting its doors, funding for the Homeless Youth Alliance, San Francisco Needle Exchange, Bay Area Addiction Research and Treatment, the Mission Neighborhood Research Center, and Ladies Night Drop-In Services.

Unfortunately, there are also some disastrously detrimental aspects of the budget: No $1 million operating subsidy for affordable housing; an incomplete add-back for SRO Families United ($100,000 out of $200,000); no funding for Buster’s Place; and the Poverty Courts have maintained $500,000, though at least that remains in a reserve until the Mayor can actually present something more substantial than a Potemkin village.

The budget will not be a fait accompli until approved by the Board. Keep your eyes on this space for further developments!

The Mayor’s 2007/2008 budget was devastating for homeless people and service programs in San Francisco. Despite being the largest budget in city history, surpassing $6 billion, it contained massive cuts, and failed to address the most imminent needs facing poor San Franciscans. The housing crisis is one glaring example: The Board of Supervisors passed an emergency housing supplemental for $27 million to address this crisis with a veto-proof majority. The Mayor chose to cut this supplemental and reallocate resources to his own pet projects, doing little more than pumping up his public relations machine. This law-and-order budget—with massive 25% increases to the San Francisco Police salaries—pumps up overtime pay for City bureaucrats, and places a lot of attention on potholes. He asked the Department of Public Health to cut its budget by 3%. They resisted, sending their own budget back to the Mayor without the cuts. The Mayor in turn gutted homeless services by responding with a 4% cut. The budget failed to address critical homeless needs that have been brought to the Mayor’s attention—including housing for homeless families—and it cannibalizes homeless programs by pumping up the Mayor’s PR-based homeless agenda, that simply attempts to use law enforcement and outreach workers to decrease the presence of homeless people on the streets without truly addressing the root causes of homelessness. Here are some of the dark spots in the budget:

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The McKinney-Vento Act’s Education for Homeless Children and Youth (EHCY) program removes barriers to the enrollment, attendance, and success of homeless children and youth in school. The EHCY program was amended by the No Child Left Behind Act, and now requires all school districts to designate a homeless liaison, proactively identify homeless children and youth, and provide transportation to stabilize the educational placements of homeless students. These provisions have greatly strengthened homeless students’ access to and stability in school, and therefore increased their opportunities for academic success.

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“Shifting the Overton Window” is a concept in political theory: The window represents that range of ideas regarded as known and acceptable options before the public, within the broader spectrum of every possible response on an issue that’s being discussed and decided before—and sometimes by—the general populace.

Joe Overton described a method for moving that window, shifting what the public regards as acceptable. The technique is founded upon priming the public with rhetoric supporting ideas that seem even more extreme and less acceptable than previous “fringe” ideas. This causes, by comparison, these previous extreme fringe ideas to seem closer to mainstream, becoming, therefore, more popularly acceptable. So, to make extreme ideas more acceptable, promote ideas that seem even more extreme, which will remain unacceptable, but will make the real target ideas seem acceptable in comparison.

This is a tool that City Hall is using with this year’s budget. (more…)

“The activity of the youth of the nation which has given birth to Haight Ashbury is a small part of a worldwide spiritual awakening… many thousands of young people… will soon arrive in this city. They seek meaning,” the San Francisco Oracle predicted in May of 1967. The prediction soon came true, validating the newspaper’s name. That summer—the Summer of Love—an estimated 100,000 young people flooded Haight Ashbury, seeking peace, love, freedom, and liberation from the traditional values that had come to dominate American culture.

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There’s a story—probably apocryphal, but we’re doing didactics, for the moment, not history—that King George III jotted down in his diary for July 4, 1776 (or, as they say in the United Kingdom, 4 July 1776): Nothing important happened today.

Padre Francisco Palòu’s journal (now we’re doing history) is similarly blank for that date, and, indeed, for most of the month of July. But even where documents are silent, history keeps on happening. While the events that July of 1776 usually call to mind for most USAians were transpiring in Philadelphia, the mission and presidio that would eventually become the city of San Francisco saw their foundation… and with them, the beginnings of the city’s history of forced displacements.

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This year, we commemorate the 20^th Anniversary of the Coalition on Homelessness. Over these two decades, we’ve seen homelessness go from the “inexplicable” surge of the ‘80s to the do-nothing approach of the ‘90s, to the current “chronic homelessness” fad.

No matter the packaging, a few things have remained constant over the years, such as the head-in-the-sand approach to the crisis of affordable housing, and the unbreakable addiction to blaming those who are homeless for being homeless.

Year after year, we have seen the demonization of homeless people through negative stereotypes that promote the idea that every homeless person is a mad, drug-using criminal. From the Matrix program of Mayor Jordan (1992-1996), which used police helicopters equipped with infrared technology to detect and displace homeless people sleeping in the bushes of Golden Gate Park, to Gavin Newsom’s reincarnation as Rudy “Mean Mayor” Giuliani—complete with broken windows theories and special courts to prosecute poor people for the despicable crime of being poor—the one thing that seems to be just as lasting as homelessness is elected officials’ ease in scapegoating homeless people for executive administrations’ failures.

The cartoon above was first published in the Street Sheet in 1999.

San Francisco has seen a steady increase in the numbers of violent crimes over the last few years. A few months into his administration, Mayor Newsom made one of those hyperbolic statements that powerful people make when they have no intention of actually showing any accountability: If I don’t bring the murder rates down, I should be recalled.

Here we are, a few months before the end of his first four years in Room 200 of City Hall, and violent crimes are still a curse on the residents of the poorest districts of San Francisco. Murder, assault, robbery, and rape are part of the daily lives of the residents of the Tenderloin, SoMa, the Mission, the Western Addition, Bayview/Hunter’s Point, Ingleside…

Something had to be done—something drastic. So, Mayor Newsom figured out that we needed to use 32 more full-time police officers to deal with homeless people. A special court—at which one is not allowed to plead “not guilty” and punishment for serial sidewalk-sleepers is swift—is to be forced down the throats of Tenderloin residents.

As the saying on the street goes: Why do cops harass homeless people? Because fighting crime is a really tough job.