Roaddawgz, an excellent homeless youth publication based in the Tenderloin, but serving the entire City and the Internet, has recently published three articles on what the City’s been doing in Golden Gate Park, and the Chronicle’s coverage thereof. Do yourself a favor and check them out:
What the SF Chronicle left out
Turning key 336
The Coyotes in Needle Park
You are probably already aware of the series of stories on Golden Gate Park that ran on the front pages of the July 24, July 29, and August 2 Chronicles. These stories, written by a columnist rather than a reporter, have all suggested increased police harassment of homeless people in the Park and/or have criticized needle exchange programs—a social service that has helped San Francisco reduce the percentage of new HIV cases due to the use of injection drugs from 16% to 0.5%. Very obviously, when we’re talking about eliminating needle-exchange programs, we’re talking about endangering lives. When we’re talking about “sweeping” homeless people–as though they were trash—we’re creating a social atmosphere in which it’s okay to dehumanize San Francisco’s poorest residents. Dehumanization is a slippery slope, and we’ve seen awful instances of violence, sometimes murder, in other parts of the country. We are asking you, as organizations and individuals that care about core social services, that care about human beings, and that care about social justice, to let the Chronicle know that you do not approve of its abuse of homeless people as an easy target, and that hiding behind the excuse that this is a column, rather than straight journalism, simply does not fly when that column gets the biggest headline on page 1.
Help us keep the media accountable. Write a letter to Editor Phil Bronstein and let him know the Chronicle is promoting the hatred of an entire class of people simply because they are too poor to afford a place to live. Let him know that the community knows that this shock-jock-style hate journalism is a mean-spirited ploy to sell more papers.
July 24: HERE’S THE REAL PROBLEM IN GOLDEN GATE PARK
July 31: Unlikely view from decks of tony homes: homeless campsites
August 2: GOLDEN GATE PARK SWEEP – CAN CITY MAKE IT STICK? ‘MARCH OF JUNKIES’
Phil Bronstein
San Francisco Chronicle
901 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
PBronstein@sfchronicle.com
Also send letter to be published at letters@sfchronicle.com.
A survey conducted by the Coalition on Homelessness reveals that 57% of homeless Golden Gate Park residents responding reported they had never been offered services by the City. Many (44% of those surveyed) had been staying inside the Park for more than three years. When asked where they would go after the Golden Gate Park sweeps, most reported either they would be on the streets in a San Francisco residential neighborhood, or would return to the Park.
Following a column in the Chronicle regarding poor people residing in Golden Gate Park, the Mayor of San Francisco called for a mass displacement effort of Park residents. Golden Gate Park has long been a refuge for those with no place to call home, with probably the largest encampment being after the 1906 earthquake and subsequent fires destroyed thousands of homes in San Francisco.
This is the second such displacement effort in Golden Gate Park in the past year. The Coalition on Homelessness has long been concerned with such efforts, as they don’t achieve anything but the further de-stabilization of park residents. These efforts can also be deadly for homeless people, as the December 1997 death of Clifford Archer indicates. Mr. Archer died as a result of the losing his heart medications in a similar property confiscation effort in Golden Gate Park under the Brown administration. The Coalition instead calls for permanent solutions to homelessness by bringing Federal housing expenditures for poor people back to pre-1978 levels and ensuring access to health care and living wage jobs for all poor people.
According to Juan Prada, Executive Director of the Coalition on Homelessness, “It is not just an ineffective use of resources, but it is also cruel to displace people who simply have nowhere to go.”
Other findings in the Coalition survey indicate that Park residents have been homeless for long periods of time, with 67% homeless for three years or more. In addition, when asked where displaced homeless people would go, the most common response was that individuals would return to the Park (28%). Another 12% reported that they would move to the streets of a San Francisco residential neighborhood. Only 5% of the 56 park residents suveyed stated they received temporary housing, and none reported permanent housing, although several (21%) were on a wait list for some sort of housing or other service.
The cartoon above was published in the front page of the Street Sheet in February of 1993. At the time, it was a call of attention to the fact that a large chunk of the homeless population was made out of veterans of our armed forces, particularly from the US war in Viet Nam.
At this point, there is very little doubt that most of our recent wars were fought to preserve the interests of this country’s corporate elite. There was no just reason to invade Viet Nam, bomb Cambodia and Laos, or bring human chaos to most of Southeast Asia in the ‘60s and ‘70s, just as there’s no real justifiable reason beyond our current mayhem in Southwest Asia.
The Right Wing loves to pay lip service to honoring our veterans, while actively eliminating the funding to the programs that care for them. We sent hundreds of thousands of young people to fight wars and build an empire of global proportions, but when those soldiers made it back home, they found themselves tossed out like thoroughly juiced lemons.
How long before we start seeing panhandlers carrying “Iraq Vet” signs?
But there is an even more disturbing fact about the wars we are forced to fight for the benefit of a few: We spend more money on our defense budget than all the other government agencies and programs combined.
If we bring the troops home now and cut the military budget by half, we will suddenly find ourselves with enough cash to end homelessness, provide free health care for all, and stop worrying about the future of Social Security. And then some.
Right now, however, the reality is that we, as a nation, are choosing to finance an illegal and immoral war over providing for the basic needs of our own homegrown tired, poor, huddled masses. We are killing thousands of people overseas, ignoring suffering at home, and paving the way for a future of even more local suffering. Can we go any lower?
On July 24, the Board of Supervisors approved a record budget for the City and County of San Francisco: a whopping $6.06 billion.
As our readers know, despite the huge amount of money available to the Mayor for this year’s Budget, his proposal focused on a so-called “back-to-basics” approach of increasing funding for police and infrastructure, with very generous allocations to certain pet projects, such as the controversial Poverty Court, which could throw more homeless people in jail while pretending to refer them to services cut by the same Budget.
Atlanta, Georgia—a city known for its progressiveness and superb Southern hospitality—has earned another peach on its tree with the US Social Forum drawing thousands of participants from around the world to congregate and network about social issues affecting people in the United States and internationally.
This month marks the 20th anniversary of the 1987 Stewart B. McKinney Legislative Act, the Federal government’s first and still dominant program to alleviate homelessness in America. Why then, do we still see so many homeless people on our streets? Why are there hundreds of thousands more we do not notice—“invisible homeless”—individuals and families who have lost their homes and had to move in with others, sleep in cars, or bounce from motel to shelter to hotel?
It is City Hall’s police policies that created the problem of San Francisco courts’ caseloads becoming backlogged by an abundance of bullshit prosecutions brought by cops against poor and homeless people for all the little things that aren’t even against the law—merely against some rule somewhere—if you can’t find your way indoors before doing these things.
When Michael Moore—a filmmaker and former Eagle Scout, who went to seminary to become a priest—solicited health care stories from his e-mail list, he got a flood of responses. He reported in a PBS interview, “I put out a call for people to send me their health care horror stories. I got over 25,000. It was appalling to sit there for literally months and read what they had to go through.”
The massive health care industry is 15% of our gross national product. “I am tilting at a pretty big windmill here,” said Moore, “but we have to do something about this because it’s criminal that we let 47 million of our citizens go uncovered, uninsured, and we allow the profit motive to be involved in a hospital or doctor’s decision-making process.”
I was not spared Moore’s agony by my tiny interviewee group of four San Franciscans—two housed but at risk of homelessness and two unhoused—who shared their health care stories.
This story also appears at POOR Magazine.
According to one Webster’s dictionary, journalism is defined as “The collecting, writing, editing and publishing of news in periodicals.” At POOR Magazine, we practice Webster’s kind of journalism, but we take it a step further. Actually we just flip corporate media right on its head. At POOR, we practice “I” journalism. The “I” is the life experience that the individual brings to each article. The words of our unique experiences with poverty, gentrification, racism, sexism, classism, and displacement breathe life and hope onto blank pages.
Recently, the John Stewart Company—a developer of public housing in San Francisco—demanded a retraction of statements that appeared in the May 16, 2007 San Francisco Bay View article “Selling of the City.” In the article, several current and former tenants of John Stewart properties tell their stories about the slumlord-style conditions they have had to endure. They recite a litany of violations of human rights experienced first hand. Their words come directly from experience, not from spin-doctors or well-groomed and rehearsed “experts.” By demanding the retraction of the statements made in the article, John Stewart is saying these people’s experiences don’t matter. John Stewart is saying the experiences of these people are false. John Stewart is calling them liars.