Part of working with poor people in the ghetto is learning to read the rhythm of the neighborhood as it ebbs and flows. An important but unfortunate part of that rhythm in neighborhoods like the Tenderloin is recognizing the prevalence of self-medication and addiction.

Waiting for the elevator on my way to the office, today, I ran into a neighbor I’ve only managed to say, “Hi,” to on two prior instances in the 15 months I’ve lived there. Her once-pretty face peered up from her emaciated frame to ask me, “Do you have some crack?” I demur politely, but she persists, “I have two dollars. I thought I could buy just a hit.”

She is far from alone among my neighbors: Most of them have co-occurring disabilities of every description. A third of them are seniors. More than half have HIV. Another half of my neighbors have prison records.

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Be bop bebop…bop…bop

A slow mist rose from the ground commingling with candle wax, sage, and car exhaust. Bop…bop…be-bop…bop… Warm breath weaving through the rhythm of a conga drum entwining with words of resistance from African peoples, Raza peoples, Celtic peoples, Pilipino peoples, Native peoples, indigenous peoples all… ”One: We are the people! Two: Indigenous people! Three: And we are taking back the land and ONE: We are the Scholars! TWO: Indigenous scholars and THREE: We are taking back OUR land!”

Citing articles from the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples adopted one year ago by the UN General Assembly, displaced, evicted, and removed children, mamaz, daddies, tías and tíos, aunties and uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers, elders, ancestors, and spirits from all across Turtle Island—Oakland, San Francisco, San Jose, New Orleans, and DQ University—gathered to pray, testify, and resist on Market Street at sunrise in a spiritual, political, and revolutionary ceremony of resistance to out-of-control development, eviction, displacement and criminalization locally and globally.

“My whole family was displaced out of San Francisco,” Xicana mama of three girls, welfareQUEEN and POOR Magazine teacher and staff writer Vivien Hain called into the crowd, her powerful voice joining the layers of sounds as she re-told her family’s deep poverty scholarship of houselessness, welfare de-form, struggle, and displacement. Vivien cited Article 10 of the Declaration as she described how her uncle, a life-long Mission District resident, was gentrified out of his home with his disabled wife, and now is houseless on the streets of San Francisco. Vivien concluded her powerful speech: “Gentricide: That’s our new classification for the murderous act of gentrification.”

Since 1996—while on welfare and still dealing with the effects of over 15 years of homelessness as a child and mother, eviction, and deep poverty in LA, Oakland, and San Francisco—my mama, African-Irish-Puerta Rican and indigenous Taíno very poor single mother and I launched POOR Magazine as an indigenous organizing project to actively practice eldership, ancestor worship, and interdependence. We launched it as a direct resistance to the non-profit industrial complex, the criminal injustice system, welfare systems, and the school-to-prison pipeline that all work to separate, divide, and destroy our indigenous systems of caring and community. As a poor people/indigenous people-led organization, the personal and organizational lives, dramas, concerns, and struggles of the hundreds of co-leaders—poverty, youth, disability and migrant scholars at POOR Magazine—are intertwined with the running, survival, and thrival of ourselves, our families, our communities, and our organization. Like many other poor people/indigenous people-led organizations, there is no intention to unentwine that real and honest core of truth that is the indigenous organizational model.

In July of this year, POOR Magazine (as well as many of the non-profits and small businesses in our building who we stand in solidarity with) received a notice that our lease would not be renewed by the new owners of the building. POOR Magazine’s tenuous hold on stability was severed. As an organization, we weren’t planning to move until we had raised enough money to purchase a building so we could launch the revolutionary housing, arts and education project that acts as a long-term solution to homelessness: homefulness—a sweat-equity co-housing and sustainable community that would house and give equity, support, arts education, and economic development opportunities to homeless and formerly homeless families as well as house the offices and classrooms of the Race, Poverty, and Media Justice Institute, and Uncle Al’s Justice Cafe.

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For decades, new building owners have been purchasing industrial and residential land and building higher-priced condominiums, forcing thousands of families of all nationalities—most of them minorities—out of work, out of housing, and out of San Francisco.

To counter the offensive of gentrification aimed at lower-income minorities, the Mission Antidisplacement Coalition (MAC) was formed.

The fruit of that struggle has been a prospective, although, non-binding resolution initiated by MAC and other organizations to build 64% affordable housing in the Mission, SoMa, Showplace Square/Potrero Hill, and the Central Waterfront. These areas, the eastern part of the city, cover collectively about one fourth of San Francisco.

But a very different plan, coming from the Planning Commission, is going to be considered by the Board of Supervisors in a few short weeks—a plan that does not contain nearly enough affordable housing. It relies on private developers to provide a paltry 15 to 20% of units developed as “affordable.” From experience, such inclusionary housing requirement very, very rarely produces affordable rental units.

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The budget process for 2008-2009 was harrowing. “Harrowing” may seem like a strong term for sedentary squabbling over line items, but consider how this document affects all of our daily lives: Every municipal service, every function, is governed by the budget. The budget in large part determines the number of police in your neighborhood. It determines whether or not your street’s potholes get repaved. If you’ve got a house, it determines whether or not the MUNI stop out front will have a bus shelter.

For many San Franciscans, the budget means a great deal more than that. The Board of Supervisors’ Budget and Finance Committee hearings of June 19 lasted over thirteen hours. San Franciscans without housing pleaded with the supervisors to keep their emergency shelters open. Nurses begged for funding to care for the city’s ill. Children pleaded that their community centers remain open. San Franciscans fought hard for quality of life, and for the saving of lives.

And in many cases, they won. (more…)

A landmark suit filed in Federal court in San Francisco in August charges that San Francisco’s homeless shelter program “blatantly discriminates” against disabled homeless people. Although the majority of all homeless people are men, women, and children with disabilities, the suit is the first in the country to broadly challenge the homeless shelter program of a city as a violation of civil rights statutes that protect people with disabilities.

The suit alleges that the cornerstone of San Francisco’s approach to homelessness—the embattled “Care Not Cash” program that is the brain child of Mayor Gavin Newsom—systematically excludes homeless men and women with disabilities.

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