Bob Dylan has at various times revolutionized folk, rock, country, and gospel music. However, any Dylan fan who claims not to have been surprised that Bob has released an album of traditional Christmas songs is pulling your leg. Christmas In The Heart is another surprising move by an artist famous for surprises. Yet when you hear Dylan’s direct and obviously sincere readings of “O Come All Ye Faithful,” “Little Town Of Bethlehem,” and “The First Noel,” this unlikely exercise seems of a piece with the rest of Dylan’s work.

From the very first, this was an artist who made us look at the familiar with new eyes and ears. While some critics tie themselves into knots analyzing Dylan’s motives, it has usually turned out that Bob Dylan means exactly what he says. Featuring members of his touring band along with Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo and Chess Records vet Phil Upchurch, Christmas In The Heart is Bob Dylan’s celebration of family, community, faith, and shared memory. And a timely celebration it is. Recognizing the worldwide problem of hunger, Bob Dylan has donated all of his proceeds from the record, in perpetuity, to organizations around the world to help with hunger and homelessness.

We sat down to talk in the Waterfront Plaza Hotel in Oakland on a rainy, windy, October day.

To read this article in full, get a copy from a local Street Sheet vendor. If you’re not in San Francisco, there’s a good chance your local street paper is running the interview.

These negative impacts are compounded for homeless children, and their schooling suffers as a result. Researchers at Columbia University have found that homeless children are half again as likely as their housed peers to perform below grade level in reading and spelling, and more than twice as likely to perform poorly in math.

The causes are obvious: Without stable housing, homeless children are subject to far higher stress; they frequently do not have adequate space to do homework. They lack access to many of the resources employed by their housed peers.

With the current recession, this problem is expanding dramatically. Looking at the first year of the recession, the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth (NAEHCY) and First Focus published the report The Economic Crisis Hits Home: The Unfolding Increase in Child & Youth Homelessness. NAEHCY looked into homeless student populations at 1,716 school districts across the country. In the first semester of the 2008–2009 school year, nearly 20% of these districts had enrolled more homeless students than they had in the entirety of the 2007–2008 school year. A further 49% had seen at least half the prior year’s number of students within the first few months. Over 95% reported some increase. And 2008–2009 built on increases the prior school year.

We’ve seen the same situation in San Francisco, where the demand for family shelter has become so great that the wait list for a homeless family to receive shelter is now several months long.

We’re in trouble.

Over the years, on multiple occasions, politicians on the Federal government have proposed segregated schools for homeless children as a means of addressing needs unique to these kids. As a society, we renounced this kind of thinking in 1954 when the Warren Supreme Court finally delegitimized state-condoned segregation.

What’s the solution? NAEHCY is supportive of a great number of efforts within schools to better inform educators of homeless children’s unique challenges, and to integrate efforts with the district homeless liaison. But a real long-term solution must be bigger than this: We need there to be funding for programs that support homeless youth, and even more than that, we need the government to restore funding for housing that will prevent families from children from becoming homeless in the first place.

On January 20, homeless people’s organizations from across the West Coast will converge on the Federal Building here in San Francisco to launch our movement to demand that the Federal government address the issue of homelessness honestly, and with the urgency that the crisis merits. This is one of our demands.

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.

The work of the Coalition on Homelessness led, the following month, to the allocation of one quarter of the Hotline budget’s funding to support a new agency that the Coalition was fundamental in creating: The Community Housing Partnership. To this day, CHP is the number one provider of housing for formerly homeless people in San Francisco.

Through the Street Sheet, we had created an effective tool to disseminate important information about homeless policy to our people: homeless people, front-line service providers, and advocates.

With the February 1990 issue, we printed our first art (a print by Eliza Miller and a drawing by Jane “in vain”—the latter of whom published a new piece in the August 15-31 2009 Street Sheet, and is selling art in our September 10 art auction [see page 2]). Powerful artwork created by homeless people became a core part of the publication, with cartoons, prints, and graphs exploding over the next several months. (The first photograph would not be run until a year later, in February of 1991, when, like proud parents, we sent out to the world a photo of CHP’s San Cristina Hotel—its first residence for homeless people.)

In August 1990, the Street Sheet first experimented with another tool for communicating, publishing a poem entitled “Toastin’ Marshmallows of the Mind” by Biro. Poetry remains essential to the educational work that the Street Sheet does, and is one of its more popular features: the annual poetry issue is always one of our best-sellers.

Through our art, through our poetry, and through some of the only real journalism about homelessness that was being done anywhere, the paper had become much more than the newsletter that its masthead still proclaimed.

In the same month as Loma Prieta, Phil Collins released one of very few pop songs the Anglophone world has ever heard about homelessness, “Another Day in Paradise.” In December, the single reached number one in the US, and spurred sales of the album …But Seriously. and the ensuing Seriously Live! tour. Seriously Live! hit the Shoreline Amphitheatre in September of 1990, and Collins and his handlers invited the Coalition on Homelessness to table, both to fund-raise and to educate Collins’ fans. As an educational tool, we printed 20,000 copies of a tabloid-format “Highlights of 1990” issue.

This ended up being several thousand copies too many. After the show, we gave them away to volunteers and panhandlers, who discovered that the people of San Francisco at large were somewhat more voracious readers than were Phil Collins’ fans: The Street Sheet could be sold for a dollar!

One year after the Street Sheet was first published, it represented itself as a “newsletter” for the last time, and in January of 1991, we began producing a regular tabloid-format Street Sheet newspaper: A Publication of the Coalition on Homelessness, San Francisco. We increased production seventeenfold, from 1,700 to 30,000 papers a month. We were nearly immediately able to run success stories from the new vendor program:

“By selling the Street Sheet for four weeks, I was able to keep myself in a room until I landed my present job, which pays $8.50 an hour [precisely double minimum wage in 1990]. Thank you Homeless Coalition for making the Street Sheet available. It really does work.”

Since 1991, the vendor program has become a parallel raison d’être for the Street Sheet: it educates the broader public about the realities of homelessness and the policies that regulate their lives; it provides a forum for the thoughts and opinions of people who are excluded from mainstream media; and it now provides a supplementary income for over 200 vendors every month.

And that’s the paper that we’ve been for two decades, this year.

We’ve done a lot since 1989: We’ve created millions of dollars of income opportunity for homeless people (our millionth issue was in 1993—we’ll hit ten million copies in 2010). We’ve run several writer workshops, we’ve gone full-color (and back again, as our budget’s been cut), and in 2007, we finally went on-line: Readers from Sri Lanka to Lesotho can read every month’s Street Sheet on-line—we even run more material on-line than we can fit in the print edition!

Perhaps the biggest change has been how widely the work that we do has spread: We are one of many voices of homelessness in the Bay Area—we work closely with POOR Magazine in San Francisco and helped start up Street Spirit in the East Bay. And while we are the oldest living street newspaper in the country, we are now but one among dozens of newspapers who are members of the national North American Street Newspaper Association, of which we were one of the founding mebers in 1996.

But the core of what we do remains the same. In the November, 1997, issue of the Sheet, then-editor Lydia Ely wrote in a retrospective on the paper:

“What’s changed in these eight years? Not a lot. We still tell it as it is. We’re one of only a few papers that doesn’t charge vendors for papers and that doesn’t require vendors to wear badges, undergo training, or otherwise participate in another social service ‘program.’ We’ve gone this long without accepting advertising, we’ve kept our staffing and cost needs down to next to nothing, and we’re still not afraid to step on anyone’s toes. We’re proud to be here, proud of our voice, proud of our vendors — and we’ll be around as long as there’s homelessness.”

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.

January 20, 2010 will mark the one-year anniversary of the Obama administration. While a year can feel very brief, the first year in office pretty much can set the tone for everything that will follow. In Ronald Reagan’s first year in office, he cut funding for existing public housing by more than half, and for new public housing by more than three quarters. Public housing has never recovered, and our country’s poorest and most vulnerable communities have been torn apart by homelessness.

The one-year mark, then, will be a very important indicator of the direction and the capacity for change of President Obama’s administration. We need to all come together and do some serious evaluation of the pluses, minuses, and absences of what has happened thus far, and plan for the fact that whatever we might have expected or hoped, anything we hope to accomplish can only come through the sheer determination, skills, and energy of no-bullshit, hard-core, locally-based community organizing.

We must come together because we can no longer stay separated by geography, language, income levels, skin color, sex, age, or immigration status and idly watch as our communities are torn apart by neglect, greed, and gentrification. Because it’s not an array of distinct problems—neglect in LA, greed in Portland, gentrification in San Francisco—but a universal pattern of oppression: from anti-homeless loitering and sleeping laws to Business Improvement Districts in low-income neighborhoods to immigration checks at health programs and public schools to arrest histories in public housing, all low-income, poor, and homeless people are finding themselves being squeezed out of their communities, being squeezed out of society, and being squeezed into jail.

Twenty years of Street Sheets testify that what we are saying here is nothing new: Communities of poor people pitted against each other for attention and/or crumbs from the table of bureaucrats, politicians, foundations, and the mainstream media is as old as the “War on Poverty” and as pointless as a 35 person 20 minute meeting with a mayor, a governor, or a police chief. Our attempts to appeal to the spiritual, moral, human side of those entities that are controlling our lives, that are demonizing and displacing us from our communities, have been smacked down by the reality that the only church of any real substance in corporate and political (a redundant statement today) circles these days is the church of the ATM. Regardless of the moral aspirations of any particular administration, the voracious maw of moneyed interests is so powerful that any real, meaningful change can only come through tremendous organized power from below.

None of this is new. But a new day is dawning in organizing.

No longer will we stick with the what’s-in-it-for-my-‘hood approach to organizing. This has proven to be as ineffective as trying to convince businesses that it will help their profit margin to stop being the ruthless capitalists that they inherently are, or trying to convince a politician that if she or he shows compassion and speaks of the humanity of poor people they will surely get elected.

If a corporation wants to gentrify a neighborhood, or establish a Business Improvement District, a meeting on that corporation’s turf to search for a soul, or the two minutes of polite testimony that we are each allotted at a local city council meeting has proven time and time again to do us way more harm than good. On top of being purposely incredibly boring!

If we don’t recognize that each of our individual communities will improve only in proportion to the lives of every community, then to hell with us. Focusing only on we-us-ours organizing in order to build our membership base is a waste of the very valuable time we are quickly running out of.

Why? Because the harassment on poor people in LA’s skid row under Chief Bratton are an attack on the same people hounded in Portland under that city’s recently overturned Sit-Lie ordinance. Assaults on poor people at the US-Mexico border by Sheriff Arpaio are part of the same campaign of criminalization as San Francisco’s “zoned” policing, gang injunctions, and the desanctification of Sanctuary.

It’s a new day. From now on, we will make up our own set of rules for community organizing. We will come to the party with the strength that only hardcore, fearless, cross-community protest can give us.

And when we recognize that our interests lie across community borders, that our problems are bigger than any one city hall or police department, the bigger goal becomes clear: US poverty is a national problem, and we need a national solution. President Obama may want to deliver us that solution, but he will be frustrated by the Church of the ATM unless our communities unite so forcefully that what we all want is his only choice.

On January 20, 2010, come join us at the Federal Building in San Francisco. Organizers from up and down the west coast will be coming together to create a new set of rules for community organizing and to plan for America’s next great social justice revolution and party.

If you can’t join us in San Francisco, go to the Federal Building in your community and we’ll figure out a way to all hook up. The only thing that matters is to get together, celebrate our beauty, and create a plan, so that all of us can combine our resources, talents, skills, and intelligence to bring about the day when the word “entitlement” isn’t considered a curse when spoken by poor people, but when housing, education, healthcare, and a living income are entitlements for us all.

The rally at the San Francisco Federal Building is being organized by the Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP)—a West Coast alliance of homeless people’s grassroots organizations, of which the Coalition on Homelessness is a founding member. To get involved in San Francisco, contact Jenny or Bob at the Coalition on Homelessness at 415.346.3740, or visit us at 468 Turk Street (between Hyde and Larkin). If you’re living elsewhere, contact the Western Regional Advocacy Project at 415.621.2533. Learn more about WRAP’s work at http://www.wraphome.org.

Rejecting the Governator’s transparent attempt to balance a bungled budget on the backs of students, children, people with psychiatric diagnoses, and elders, Californians voted down six of his May 19 Special Election Predatory Props, including 1D and 1E, that targeted youth and people who use and need our communities’ mental health services.

Nonetheless, elders and people with disabilities are still simultaneously whacked by Federal, state, and City budget cuts.

Faced with a $575 million budget shortfall—proportionately worse than the state’s—San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is trying Arnold’s gambit: During an economic downturn when Federal and state funds are needed most, he’s slashing Department of Public Health services to San Francisco’s most vulnerable people in order to balance his budget.

You didn’t read in the pro-Newsom Chronicle that Tuesday, May 12, at 10:30 a.m., almost 700 elders, folks with disabilities, and supporters baked in the Civic Center sun under the Mayor’s office window protesting the budget cuts. This was the Silver Tsunami.

These dangerous “terrorists” wore T-shirts warning “Call Me Old, Then Call 911” and held signs announcing “The Senior Moment is NOW!” At quarter to noon, Mayor Newsom perhaps ducked in through a side door, directing the SFPD to shut the Seniors down on a permit technicality.

Maybe the police were confused by Supervisor-negotiator Ross Mirkarimi’s billion-dollar sentences. Perhaps they feared trampling by furious seasoned citizens wielding crutches, canes, or purses, yelling dangerous chants like “Gavin’s not treating the Seniors right. Let’s give him a big Spank!” The megaphone blared, “Spank! Spank! Spank!” to the Brass Liberation Orchestra’s New Orleans jazz. Whatever—the fuzz gave up.

Henny Kelly did insist, “We need a senior riot!” but City Hall was not stormed. Though the above-described scene smacks of Monty Python’s “Gangs of Old Ladies” bit, no kerfuffle ensued. In fact, 73-year-old Lenny Reiter described 700 quiet, respectful elders in chairs happily socializing over lunches made by meal providers including 30th Street On Lok and Meals on Wheels.

At the rally, Commissioner Edna James for the Department of Aging and Adult Services, read a letter to Newsom requesting that other departments share cuts equitably. DAAS made all the cuts they could, some other departments did not. Newsom returned asking DAAS to slash the most crucial poor and disabled services—food programs like Meals on Wheels, Project Open Hand, Kimochi, Western Addition and Bayview Hunters Point; meals and other programs at On Lok’s 30th Street Center, the Curry Center, the Aquatic Park Senior Center (the oldest in the City), and the In-Home Support Services supplying aides who help wheelchair-bound seniors with crucial tasks they cannot do alone—housework, cooking, shopping, doctor visits, and wound-cleaning. The cuts damage those providing services and immobilized people desperate for their help.

Edna James insisted the Commissioners didn’t want to cut any more until all departments had done so. “It wasn’t fair. We did our part. So don’t come back until all the departments comply with the Mayor’s requests.”

The event’s hardworking planning committee arranged for transportation for seniors, chairs, food, and speakers. Coordinated through the Coalition of Agencies Serving the Elderly (CASE), the committee included James Chionsini, the “go-to guy” of Planning for Elders in the Central City’s Health Care Action Team (HAT); James Keys, Health Program Director for Senior Action Network; Ashley McCumber, Meals on Wheels’ Executive Director; Jim Illig, Director of Project Open Hand and Health Commissioner; Valerie Villela, 30th Street Director; Nelu Zia, SF Adult Day Services Network; Stephanie Asbell, Program Director of SF Family Service Agency; Colleen Rivecca, St. Anthony Foundation’s Advocacy Coordinator; David Knego, Curry Senior Center Director; and others.

Margaret Baran, Executive Director of the In-Home Supportive Services Consortium, said, “We brought a bunch of clients today. They mainly stay home, but we are thrilled we were actually able to get some out to this rally. Great turnout! People did a lot of work getting it organized—the meals and chairs.”

CASE literature commits to facilitating 40,000 seniors’ and San Franciscans with disabilities’ living “safely with dignity and independence in their homes and communities,” and “increas[ing] their participation in the City budget process.”

Believing “a society is judged by how it treats its most vulnerable,” CASE asked Mayor Newsom to restore funding. “Cutting senior services will mean [difficulty meeting] basic needs: [a meal, access to information and healthcare, and social activities], increasing isolation and hospitalization.”

CASE’s research documents that “by 2030, one in five San Franciscans will be over 65.” It warns that San Francisco is not ready for this tsunami wave. They urge the Mayor to “create a budget that respects SF elders, keeping them in the community and out of expensive institutions like hospitals and nursing homes.”

James Keys told the crowd, “If they don’t stop taking cuts from senior programs now, when your children become your age, they will have nothing. They will be homeless out in the streets. Do we want that?”

The cry resounded, “No!”

Keys called, “Do you hear that, Gavin Newsom? Seniors don’t want their programs cut!”

Marie Jobling, Community Living Campaign, previously presented the Insight Center’s Economic Security Index Study to the Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Committee. This study paired San Francisco’s soaring expenses with bottomed-out fixed incomes of San Franciscans ages 65 and up. Jobling wants cost of living increases for seniors and people with disabilities.

DAAS Commissioner Betty Landis saw the concept of a tsunami several ways:

An elder tidal wave so huge people start paying attention.

A surge of age 50 to 60 laid-off workers, not rehired, homeless, without services.

An aftermath of total economic devastation.

Said an observer about the Baby Boomer Tsunami due to hit with no plan, “Seniors vote a lot,” so the growing wave, “can sink Gavin’s Governor-Ship.”

Supervisor Chris Daly thanked the organizations that made the Silver Tsunami happen. “We cannot afford to balance the budget on the backs of those who built this city, who deserve to live [here] with dignity and honor.”

Joanne Smith sat in the crowd holding a sign bearing elders’ photos created by Bobbie Bogan of Seniors Organizing Seniors. Without explanation, the State sliced the first of two $20 cuts from her Disability check. The second cut looms in the next couple months. $40 is a huge chunk from her low, fixed income. Five years ago, when her leg started to buckle, this subsidized International Hotel resident and disabled arthritis-sufferer retired from her nurses’ aide job. If cuts deprive her of morphine, pain stops her in her tracks.

“They shouldn’t take money from the poor,” she insisted. ”I don’t see [the rich] taking a [pay cut] to make sure the City Hall lights go on.”

Could you live on $870 a month in San Francisco? Funny, smart, 74-year-old former dancer Vicki Westland does. “If I skim by on everything, don’t make a long-distance call, breathe, get shoes, or whatever, I have approximately $50 a week to eat on.”

Working as an operator taught Vicki the art of wake-sleeping. AT&T may eliminate “Life Line,” a senior discount phone rate. An activist most of her life, Vicki spoke at AT&T State Building hearings where English barrister-types (Vickie wanted to dress them in curly wigs) woke-slept behind a raised dais, just their heads visible. “These six AT&T regulators looked down at us, drinking coffee, half asleep. Pay attention!” she said. They laughed.

Governor Schwarzenegger took $43 from her Disability income, and who knows how much more to come? In July, Medi-Cal cuts will eliminate vision and dental assistance, hearing aides, medications, and creams and lotions for her degenerative and psoriatic arthritis, an auto-immune disease that makes her hands and feet itch, burn, and bleed. Sometimes, walking in the ocean relieves it. A two-week trip to the Dead Sea would cause remission. “Who wants to do that?” she laughed.

“Medically, I’m frail.” Arthritis compromises her hands. Degeneration in hips and spine prevents her reaching her toes. She fears falls, and needs help with cleaning, medications, and equipment.

Like most elders, Vicki tells a housing horror story: She experienced nine hellish years of abusive management. Now, she loves her subsidized housing at under $300 a month.

“I am seeing more people [of all races] who, ten years ago, would never have thought of going to City Hall and protesting out of need, necessity, and fear.”

“I am a Boomer, born in ‘46,” said Raymond Vega, a Latino San Franciscan. “Sixty-three this July.”

Ray was part of the Silver Tsunami because “We need to make the City, state, and government aware that people’s lives are affected.” Ray’s life definitely is. He needs Denti-Cal. (“I am starting to lose teeth.”) Medi-Cal cut back his In-Home Support Service from five days to four. “The workers are losing employment.” He is concerned about Verdie Jones, a compassionate listener who has worked 20 years and would have been a strong support during his upcoming spinal surgery for lower back and neck degenerative arthritis.

A former worker with people with developmental disabilities, Ray’s gentle manner belies his constant pain: He suffers lower backaches and swollen diabetic feet. Delay in getting a new motorized wheelchair inhibits food shopping and important visits to friends, family, and his nurse practitioner. Pushing a manual chair a mile to Mission Bay Safeway is an arduous ride-walking trip, 30 minutes each way. A return cab is a $5 expense.

There’s not much wiggle room on $900 a month in the highest rent district on Earth. Ray must budget every penny for rent, food, utilities, transportation, medications, dry cleaning, and incidentals. This balancing act is the monthly senior brain gym. Still, each person finds satisfaction in things taken for granted by others—a call from a sibling, a dollar day at the racetrack, a trip to Vegas, a large-screen television, beating the budget devil to buy some coveted item, cooking a great $2 meal, or a good conversation with a friend.

The stress of worrying about loss of future services adds a burden that wears down one’s lightness of heart. Ray seems to manage this with patience, Vicki with assertive humor, and Leonard Reiter with hard-won acceptance and self-control.

Lenny is an artist, creating interior and landscape architectural drawings. Trained at Brooklyn, New York’s prestigious Pratt Institute, Lenny took his art traveling to Israel and Italy. Early struggles with emotional issues related to family and 1950s attitudes towards gay men gave him discipline and self-understanding. An emotional disability forced him to stop working early. Like Vicki and Ray, Leonard knows what he needs, how to save, how to plan ahead, and how to spend within his limits. He lives on Social Security, a small inheritance, and paid teaching jobs. However, his professional salary may have provided a freeing financial buffer others don’t have. He gives through an abundance of volunteer work.

Seniors age at very different mental, emotional, and physical rates. However, money, or lack thereof, is a great equalizer.

Spirited friends Laura Cheney, 84, and Feryl Logue, 79, lunch at Trinity Church. “Socialization keeps you healthy.” They support Meals on Wheels’ continuation. “That’s the only food well over 100 seniors get a day.” They report that these elders worry how they’ll eat after the program closes on June 30.

Dark-haired attorney Lucia Trujillo provides Mission-based legal services to seniors at La Raza Centro Legal, a program suffering cuts. She believes these “most vulnerable US Citizens… should not be the ones hurt in this economy.” Those “getting paid the most should sacrifice their paychecks to give to the needy, the poor.” Her clients losing their SSDI “can’t shop at Safeway: It’s too expensive for them. They must think about how they will utilize their money to eat for the week.”

With meal programs gone—even Glide and St. Anthony’s feeding less—the pressures will be even greater.

Come join us for an evening of fun, dance, music, and entertainment.

The Coalition on Homelessness has been Fighting for Justice for the Poor and Homeless in San Francisco for 20 years.

Musical performance by Antioquia

Admission is on a sliding scale: $10-25. Free parking available.

These were just some of the findings in a study of shelter seekers the Coalition on Homelessness will release this month. The survey of over 200 homeless city residents included in The Runaround also revealed that they had an even-money chance of having favorable or unfavorable experiences finding a haven in the shelter system.

When asked how many times they were unsuccessful in attempts to access shelter during the fall of 2008, 122 of the 212 surveyed said they experienced a total of 1,059 turn-aways, an average of 6.05 times per person.

“While the City claims to have 100 empty beds a night in the shelter, two out of three people seeking shelter are being turned away due to lack of availability or to bureaucratic hurdles that result in empty beds not being made available until close to the middle of the night,” said Coalition Executive Director Jennifer Friedenbach.

The City also observed shelter turn-aways as a common phenomenon: The Shelter Monitoring Committee found on three separate occasions a total of 197 of 290 shelter hopefuls—about two-thirds—were unable to get shelter reservations through the CHANGES database, reputed to be prone to glitches.

Surveys were administered at numerous sites, including shelter reservations locations, shelters, and on the streets. People were approached and asked to participate by Coalition volunteers, most of whom themselves have experienced homelessness.

Of the respondents, 89—roughly 45%—said their experiences looking for shelter were positive, while 86 found them negative. The top reasons explaining their reactions were similar and ranked accordingly: Those who had a favorable experience most frequently cited getting a bed, dealing with great shelter staff, and a experiencing a smooth process of reserving a bed as the primary reasons for their positive rating. By the same token, unsatisfied would-be shelter guests found the lack of beds, bad staff, and long waiting times as the main factors behind their negative reviews.

The Coalition also noted the time between arriving at a shelter and securing a reservation often varies. 13% get temporarily housed after three to eight hours, 12% within one day and another 12% get their bed after eight days or more—assuming CHANGES doesn’t drop the reservation by check-in time.

With last year’s closures of the Buster’s Place drop-in center and Ella Hill Hutch Community Center, and the reduction of hours at Tenderloin Health, the process of getting sheltered now requires longer waiting times outside a shelter or resource center. Homeless people—especially those requiring case management or receiving public benefits—are finding a greater scarcity of space and services. Effective July 1, they must expect even leaner, meaner times, thanks to a 25% funding reduction in all City departments.

But the homeless people surveyed suggested ways of making the situation more bearable: Better staff training topped the list at 13%, followed by fixing the CHANGES system at 12% and increasing the availability of shelter beds at 11%.

Their input also informed the 2007 Shelter Shock study, where reports of shabby conditions and unprofessional conduct by shelter staff were well documented. That report paved the way for establishing the shelter standards of care law enacted last year.

The 2007 report Shelter Shock referred to in this article can be found here. The Runaround will be located here when it is released. The release date will be announced here on the Street Sheet’s blog. If you’re interested in getting involved in the struggle for safe, adequate shelter and fair shelter access, join the Coalition on Homelessness’ Right to a Roof workgroup, which meets every Wednesday at 12:30 p.m. at 468 Turk Street, between Hyde and Larkin.

Opponents of Proposition 1E make a lot of good points:

It Cuts Services to Those Who Need Them: In a time of social crisis, we need to provide our communities with more support, not less. MHSA funds have provided healthcare for over 200,000 people. This number will necessarily be reduced by Proposition 1E reductions.

The First Cut is the Deepest: There has already been discussion on the state level of moving all MHSA money to the general fund. Given that political will, we need to be careful not to set a bad precedent. If this recession continues, and our politicians continue to value other expenditures over social services, we will most likely see proposals of further cuts to core mental health and other poor people’s services.

It’s Unnecessary: MHSA funds amount to less than a quarter of a percent of the state budget. The potential impacts in other budget sectors of the loss of services could well amount to more than this.

There’s No Accountability: While the MHSA had strict auditing and accountability requirements, Proposition 1E will move hundreds of millions of dollars to a legislature that can spend without any special recession-period restrictions.

None of us benefits from living in a state that can’t balance its books: We need a sane state budget. But we cannot ask our society’s most vulnerable members to bear the burden of our legislators’ profligacy. For this reason, the Coalition on Homelessness and the Street Sheet join with organizations across California in asking you to vote against Proposition 1E, and to thereby save mental health services for the people who this recession is hitting the hardest.

Most arguments made in this article come from the California Council of Community Health Organizations, but factual claims have been checked against existing and proposed law.

According to the United States Department of Labor, the unemployment rate for the month of March is 8.5%, which is 3.4% higher than it was in March 2008. This is not just a trend pointing toward people losing their jobs: This is a hecatomb. 694,000 people losing their jobs in March and 13.2 million people unemployed are appalling numbers, and these numbers do not take into account undocumented and underemployed people—often those hit hardest by crises. So what do those numbers represent? They represent 694,000 families that will struggle, they represent 13.2 million people who are on the verge of becoming homeless, and they represent 8.5% of the workforce of this country that isn’t working.

So what will the future hold for all these families? We don’t know, but twice as many families become homeless in San Francisco every day, many more move into single-room occupancy hotels, many of these families are homeless for the very first times.

What, if any, of the stimulus package that all the politicians have been talking about will these families see? We don’t know, but the Mayor of San Francisco is still considering spending the Federal Medical Assistance Percentage money from the stimulus package—funds intended by the President to save endangered poor people’s social and health service programs—to offset less critical program cuts or for one-time expenditures.

How many more services that serve vulnerable populations in these dire times will we see disappear? We don’t know, but with a projected deficit for the City and County of San Francisco of $438 million, and massive cuts coming from the departments that fund most of the services that help vulnerable populations—the Human Services Agency and the Department of Public Health—the situation is gloomy at best.

But back to where we started: What does it mean, today, to celebrate the struggle of workers for basic rights? What does it mean when there is no work? What does it mean when a lot of the jobs we do are not recognized as real jobs? We are a generation, a people, a country of invisible workers, undocumented, underemployed, forgotten by statistics. But we can reclaim May Day as a day on which we want our voices to be heard, we want our people to be seen, we want our basic right to work to be respected.

Many of us will be marching on May 1, remembering the struggles of those who came before us. Many of us will march with and as immigrant workers to demand justice and legalization. Many of us will continue to fight for work to be a right of everybody. And when May 1, ends we will continue to fight and struggle.

Happy May Day! It still makes sense!