A picture of Humpty Dumpty teetering at the edge of the Stock Market on the cover of the New Yorker, a voice waking me with news that our economy is hitting lows unseen since the Great Depression, the Daily Show spoofing men jumping from buildings on Wall Street as they did on Black Friday nearly eighty years ago—all of these things mark for the public that the United States is running into hard times. However, for the poor and the homeless in our country, these hard times have long been apparent. It does not require analyzing stock values to clearly see that many Americans have been, and continue to be, excluded from the U.S. economy.

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Tonight, Coalition Executive Director Jennifer Friedenbach will be recognized alongside Barbara Garcia of the Department of Public Health, and the Women’s Community Clinic in the 2008 TenderChamp Awards, as part of a benefit for Central City Hospitality House.

The Funniest Celebrity in the Bay Area Contest will begin at 7 p.m. tonight at the Great American Music Hall at 859 O’Farrell Street. Among the contestants are Renel Brooks-Moon of 98.1 KISS FM, Rachel Gordon and Phil Matier of the Chronicle, Michael Krasney of KQED FM, MC Hammer, Liam Mayclem of CBS 5, and Ronn Owens of KGO AM 810. Supervisor Tom Ammiano and former Mayor Willie Brown are special guests. Proceeds will go to support the amazing work that Hospitality House does.

General admission is $150. Non-profit admission is $100.

Last night, on San Francisco’’s freezing streets, blond, fresh-faced Shaun Fausz rested aching knees after trudging the piers all day seeking work on boats.

52-year-old Robert, a witty, intelligent African-American, lay under open sky.

Disarmingly intelligent Shalako Brooks curled on hard concrete fighting insomnia with only vodka to help him sleep. He can’’t return home. A crack addict lit his single-room occupancy hotel room on fire. At 8:00 a.m., he had to use the Department of Public Health bathroom “when people were shooting up and passed out in toilets.”

Wheelchair-bound elders waited for dawn sitting in the frigid dark. Women walked all night evading predators.

These and 160 other unhoused men and women were victims of a cruel April Fool’’s joke. The safe haven refuge where they sat all night in chairs was locked and dark.

At midnight March 31, Mayor Gavin Newsom closed for good Buster’s Place, San Francisco’’s only 24-hour non-medical drop-in center.

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Friends:

As you know by now, Buster’s Place closed yesterday at 5:00. We went there to witness the closure and what we found was quite distressing.

Background

Buster’s Place, which served approximately 150 people a day and 700 people annually, appeared on the Mayor’s mid-year budget cuts. Over 90 individuals stayed at the center each night, sitting in chairs. As many who use the center are disabled, and have nowhere else to go, this put them in grave risk.

The City responded only part way, by opening up 150 Otis (but a day too late as it was closed last night when people were put out of Buster’s Place), which cannot stay open year round has only 40 chairs and will serve only men, and must close down every nine months. It is set to close in June. The City offered up another center called Oshun for women, but it was already at capacity.

Appeals to the Mayor for mercy went unanswered.

Last Night 5:00, March 31

At least 20 people were filed out the door. Four of them were in wheelchairs. Many were elderly. Not one that we talked to had anywhere to go.

There was no one from the City. Not one person—no homeless czar, no HOT, no DPH—to assist them.

Many filed over to 150 Otis to try their chances at a bed in the CHANGES system for the night.

The shelter had not opened yet.

There were TV cameras everywhere.

One woman we talked to was in a wheelchair and looked to be in her early 90s. She was rolling slowly away, and said she had somewhere to go. When we asked her where, she clearly had no idea and was very confused. She had nowhere to go, and we did not see her in line at 150 Otis, where, her being female, they would not have given her a number to hold her place in line anyway.

Another couple had a woman in a wheelchair and her husband to care for her. Of course with the loss of Buster’s there is nowhere for them to be accomodated. She needs his care, and they cannot split up. No couples are housed in our shelters, and a room was never forth coming.

These are just a couple examples, and there are dozens more.

Once people had numbers, they were allowed to return to Buster’s to wait for a few more hours as they could not wait at 150 Otis.

We called DPH, and they were going to send HOT team out, but we have little faith that many were placed anywhere for more then one night.

The Struggle Is Not Over

We have a court case on Wednesday that may help. We still have a budget process to bring back 24-hour low-threshold health/hygiene-based drop-in to the city, but already we can say based on last night, the personal impact on human beings was devastating.

After two years of hard work by the Coalition on Homelessness and its allies, the Board of Supervisors voted nine to two to pass groundbreaking legislation creating standards in the shelter system. The legislation, sponsored by Supervisor Tom Ammiano and co-sponsored by Supervisors Mirkarimi, Peskin, and Sandoval requires, among other things, that shelters maintain their facilities, ensure that there are clean sheets, towels and blankets, supply nutritious food for the residents, and provide training for staff.

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In mid-March, Shaun Fausz, 25, blond and fresh-faced, left his aunt’s house in Pasco, Washington. Walking to Portland, Oregon, he spent the last of his money on Amtrak fare to San Francisco seeking work on ships. He stumbled onto St. Anthony’s. Directed to Buster’s Place, he showered and slept all night in a chair. Shaun sat talking to me among 100 or so homeless people, mostly men, quietly conversing or dozing at Buster’s Place Drop-In Center at 211 13^th Street.

“I work on boats. Before Pasco, I lived in New Mexico. There is nothing but desert,” he said wryly. “They had no need for a deck hand.”

Shaun discovered here that to work he needed a merchant mariner’s document—a Z-card—which costs much more than he has.

Though his knees were sore from walking, he already had three job interviews. “Once I get that Z-card, I’ll be making all kinds of money again.”

Hearing that the Mayor’s proposed budget cuts will close Buster’s Place on March 31, Shaun observed without this safe haven, “I would probably be sleeping on the streets and end up with that $79 fine I can’t afford. It would put me deeper in debt and make me homeless longer.”

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On Thursday, March 6, homeless families and their supporters gathered on the steps of San Francisco’s City Hall, to mark the week of International Women’s Day and to demand expansion of City-funded rental subsidies as well as a lifting of the arbitrary time limit that had been placed on them.

Last year, the City of San Francisco made a commitment to support homeless families with a subsidy program that would help them move out of shelters, garages, and crowded and dangerous single-room occupancy (SRO) hotels into longer-tem and livable family housing. However, when the program was put into place, changes were made from the original plan as written by its advocates, resulting in rules that made it difficult or impossible for families to hold on to their new housing, and which made others ineligible.

Under the new rules, the subsidies would only be for a year, or extended to two years. Many needy families didn’t qualify because their income was too low! Others were disqualified because they couldn’t demonstrate the ability to raise their income by $6,000 within two years.

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Government reports confirm that half of the working poor, elderly, and people with disabilities who lived in New Orleans before Katrina have not returned. Because of critical shortages in low-cost housing, few now expect tens of thousands of poor and working people to ever be able to return home.

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Being homeless causes stress, yo. It fucks with your body. It fucks with your mind. It means living in a world where no family, no community, no city is willing to help you when you need them most. It’s trying to figure out how to make it to work or the service office 100% of the time when the MUNI don’t run on time 70%. It’s trying to figure out how to get some food in your stomach without a kitchen, when you can’t stand one more free cookie or bag of chips. It’s trying to figure out how to stay healthy when you can’t even stay warm or clean or get medical care. It’s trying to figure out how to get a roof over your head when minimum wage pays $1,200 a month but rent is $1,100 a month for a studio. It’s trying to figure out why even though you’re doing everything you can to survive under conditions that are straight deadly, people look at you like you’re weak. Like you’re disgusting. Like your pitiful or like you’re dangerous. Like you’re a criminal.

And why is that folks? Well, the newspapers and the movies sure do a great job of teaching folks that homelessness is a personal problem. Folks that are homeless brought it upon our lazy, dirty, crazy, unethical selves and, for whatever reason we are homeless, we probably deserve it. Further, we will never learn that we are disgusting and wrong if the privileged folks don’t teach us the error of our ways. According to them, the only way homeless folks will become housed is if society punishes us.

So mindless tools like Chuck Nevius and the Chronicle print articles about how we’re filthy animals for sleeping in the park. They can print articles about how panhandlers should be expected to get shot by the SFPD. The Chronicle can print articles about how children from communities of color should not be seen together because they are gang members. The Chronicle tells San Franciscans that homeless people are sick, dirty, and a threat. They tell their readers that poor folks need to pull up their bootstraps, and if they can’t do that, they can expect to be housed in prison.

The Chronicle hires privileged folks to write about us and tell lies about what we go through and who we are. They pretend like the way their people create cost-of-living gaps, displace communities, criminalize and discriminate against us, refuse to pay living wages, refuse medical care and social support services for veterans, seniors, the elderly, those with mental and physical health needs, racism, homophobia, sexism, and motherism all have nothing to do with the fact that 6-10,000 people in San Francisco—many of whom are families with small children and working parents—do not have a place to call home. They like to pretend like its not their fault that homelessness is a crisis in this nation, and the only way they can buy into this flagrant illusion is to spend millions in media campaigns against poor and homeless folks.

This is an old story. It’s the media’s job to spin bull for the rich folks, the corporations, and the governments that hold ‘em together. POOR Magazine has been fighting the corporate media since it was birthed out of Tiny and Mama Dee.

On March 6 and 7, Tiny and the Poor News Network (PNN) family brought their skolarship to the campus of UC Berkeley with the co-sponsorship of the East Bay Community Law Center and the Center on Culture, Immigration, and Youth Violence. After months of hard work, the 2008 Spring Symposium “Whose Poverty? Whose Crime? Unlocking the Criminalization of Poverty” rocked UC Berkeley.

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In an outlandish and brazenly dishonest article by Chuck Nevius, columnist for the SF Chronicle, the Coalition on Homelessness citation defense program was blamed for the overdose of James Hill, a man who passed away recently in the San Francisco Library’s Main Branch.

Nevius claims that if he had been convicted of open container, he would have been given treatment. In fact, there is no treatment attached to traffic court, nor any treatment being offered by the District Attorney. The most the District Attorney has provided is a list of services that includes phone numbers for all kinds of social services including treatment programs that are full, with waiting lists of over 500 people.

This is the latest in a long line of lies printed in Nevius’ column.

For example, on March 2, 2008, Nevius argued that panhandling is out of control because the Coalition on Homelessness defends panhandlers in court. Once again, before he ran the article, we informed him that we had only defended a handful of panhandlers (less than 2% of the number he suggests) over the year before he printed it. Not because we wouldn’t, but because that is how many show up at our office for defense. Others were misdemeanors and did not go to traffic court. He ran the misinformation anyway.

San Franciscans are deeply concerned with human dignity. The lack of safe and affordable housing will not be solved by making people without homes into criminals and falsely and recklessly blaming advocates for situations far beyond their realm of work.