The bold, blunt, sans serif of page 1 is the same: Street Sheet, it reads, followed by The Newsletter of the Coalition on Homelessness. Despite a few tries by graphic design classes over the past couple decades, that look has never changed, and even in our more daring or playful layout experiments, the Street Sheet has always remained recognizable as that same publication that first hit the streets of San Francisco in December of 1989.

On October 17 of that year, beneath the Santa Cruz Mountains, the San Andreas Fault slipped—a deceptive name for a devastating event. Like the massive cuts to public housing that had ushered in the ‘80s, the Loma Prieta Earthquake closed out the decade by creating a massive new population of homeless people.

Since 1983—when the cuts to public housing had forced the opening of San Francisco’s first homeless shelter—the City had partially addressed homelessness through a program that paid for-profit hotel owners an average of $3 million per year to shelter homeless individuals for a maximum of one week at a time. But in the quake, 25% of these “Hotline Hotel” buildings were destroyed or made uninhabitable. In response, the Department of Social Services (DSS—the antecedent to our current Department of Human Services [DHS], which is one half of the Human Services Agency [HSA]) decided to phase out the Hotline Hotel system.

It was in this context that volunteers at the Coalition on Homelessness issued the organization’s first newsletter. The first article addressed this phase-out: “…the first group of individuals affected by these changes spent their final day in Hotline with the following results: of the approximately 114 people displaced on that day, 20 applied for GA [General Assistance: county cash assistance]. Of the 20, only one person was actually accepted. Twenty-five people have signed up for the GA Modified Payment Program and received more permanent housing. It seems that 88 people have fallen through the gaping holes in the safety net provided by the Department of Social Services, holes created by the department’s reneging on its initial promise to house undocumented individuals, and by the department’s refusal to loosen in any way the current GA requirements.

“In light of the current progress of the plan, one would have to wonder: is DSS planning a phase-out or a bailout of the Hotline system? Are they planning to help people out of the homeless cycle, or simply help them out of town?”

We weren’t pulling any punches.

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A story that organizers often hear when they fist start working to influence Federal politics involves a meeting of civil rights leaders with LBJ in the oval office. Those were the days before the Voting Rights Act of 1965; the civil rights leaders argued that this bill was a moral obligation—no matter the fierce of opposition of Southern Democrats. LBJ agreed—or so the story goes—and then said: “Make me do it. Go organize your communities so that I have no choice but to do what’s right.”

Replace Southern Democrats with Blue Dog Democrats and it’s the same situation we find ourselves in today: We almost assuredly do have a President who will support our agenda, but we also most assuredly know that we are the only ones who can make our agenda a reality in the financially corrupt and morally bankrupt corridors of Washington D.C.

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