Several months ago Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation and other entities sponsored a Tenderloin visit of a mobile optical clinic to help poor folks get new glasses, etc. The flyer advertising the event said it was to be from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., which encouraged me to break the first law of getting any benefit offered to poor folks—get there early and get whatever it is.

So I thought a noon-ish visit to the van was doable. It wasn’t. What also wasn’t were the facts that only the first 100 people seen would get served, that those people were supposed to return beginning at 2 p.m., and anyone else who wanted to see if there were any “no-shows” (people who didn’t show up for their appointment) could be there then too and maybe get served.

This isn’t the only disconnect between entities with services and folks who need them, but that experience and several others lead me to a bit of ye olde rant and rave.

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Terry “Tresa” Chandler stood in the vaulted art gallery. Her tiny 4’11” figure was dwarfed by the colorful painting of a boy walking to school past a rotten tomato splashed against graffiti on a wall, ordering, “Homeless Go Home.” He is protected by four adults as he walks to a school for homeless children. Artist, Nili Yosha, crafted the work after Norman Rockwell’s illustration of guards escorting a small black girl into a newly integrated Little Rock school.

Terry tilted her head, peering at me with a shy, sardonic smile. “When people say this,” she observed, “they are doing it to be mean.”

“It’s good that homeless people get to see [this show] too. Then we can tell you if it’s real or not.”

“The best thing about this show is it makes people think.” Her voice echoed slightly, “I live it. It’s so real. All this is so true.”

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This coming fiscal year, the Mayor’s Office is demanding of the Human Services Agency (HSA) and the Department of Public Health (DPH) cuts that will definitely eliminate mental health services for 1,600 San Franciscans, and may eliminate mental healthcare access for over 45% of San Francisco mental health consumers; that will shut down such vital community services as Caduceus Outreach Services (a treatment program, despite its name) and Tenderloin Health’s drop-in center; that will increase rents by a third for HIV+ individuals who hold a rental subsidy. These are devastating changes that will result in destabilization for a great number of San Franciscans, in homelessness for many, and that may cause some deaths. These are changes our communities cannot sustain.

The Obama administration’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (that stimulus package we’ve been hearing so much about), however, offers us one of our very few reasons for hope. Since the middle of the 20^th century, the Social Security Act has caused the Federal government to refund states and municipalities a certain portion of all their expenditures on Medicaid, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, In-Home Support Services, foster care, and other basic service expenses through the Federal Medical Assistance Percentage, or FMAP. Through the stimulus package, the quantity refunded to state and local governments through FMAP has increased substantially. We’re only working with estimates, right now, but DPH has been using a number of $27 million for its fiscal year 2009-2010 budgeting purposes, and the Mayor’s Budget Director Nani Coloretti used an estimate that would amount to $18 million for HSA in the same year when speaking to the Board of Supervisors’ Budget and Finance Committee. In terms of these departments’ budgets, the FMAP for DPH would eliminate the need for over a quarter of the department’s cuts. For HSA, the FMAP is over 80% of the department’s mandated cuts.

There shouldn’t be any debate, here: The funds are required to stay within the departments, and it’s the Obama administration’s intent that these funds should be used to save essential services. But through its Budget Director, the Mayor’s Office has indicated that it is very seriously considering another use of the money: The Mayor will move more money away from HSA and DPH, and then fill the new gap he has created with FMAP funds, thus effectively leveraging the FMAP money to fund other City programs than those in the departments which directly serve low- and no-income people. This protects the Mayor from having to deal with solutions he might find politically more distasteful, such as cutting the City’s $10 million PR budget, laying off his City-funded gubernatorial campaign staff, or looking seriously at revenue options.

This is the kind of political shenanigans that can occur when the electorate is not informed of what’s going on in the corridors of power. One of the greatest sources of hope, right now, is that neither the Mayor nor his Budget Director has not yet committed to this course of action. Contacting their offices to let them know what you think of this budgetary shell game may well make a difference. The Mayor’s Office may be reached at 415∙554∙6141. The Mayor’s Office of Policy and Finance, headed by Budget Director Nani Coloretti, may be reached at 415∙554∙6114.

In the first few weeks of its sordid existence, the Tenderloin Poverty Court has seen an average of just over one case per day.

In addition to half a million bucks spent last year on the facility, the Mayor plus a Board minority approved $1.8 million for the Court, with plans to spend another $1.1 million of Department of Public Health funds on the Court’s “services”—really just a referral system for greatly needed voluntary services that are being cut from the same Department of Public Health’s budget.

And these numbers don’t yet include the cost to the Public Defender’s Office, or in the salary of the Mayor’s Homeless Czar, Dariush Kayhan, who has been appearing almost daily in order to testify for the prosecution. What is this, Czar Kayhan?: a plan to inspire homeless Bolsheviks?

We calls these offenses “status crimes;” conservatives call them “quality of life offenses.” What sorts of crimes can get you sent down to 555-575 Polk for some instant (“compassionate”) justice? Any misdemeanor committed within the catchment zone, which includes most of the Tenderloin, Union Square, and parts of SoMa. Many misdemeanors are crimes that most of us would like to see prosecuted; however, a number are simply survival in many poor people’s lives. In response to Tenderloin Poverty Court supporters’ claims that (despite the Mayor’s initial intentions) the court was not to be a homeless court, the Coalition on Homelessness requested that the following statutes not direct “offenders” to the court. This request was rejected. The following are the sorts of laws which threaten to turn the CJC into a homeless court:

California Penal Code 372 prohibits homeless people from, “obstruct[ing] the free passage of any… public park, square, street, or highway…” In practice, this citation is issued for sleeping on the sidewalk even when a person is not blocking passage.

California Penal Codes 602(m) and 602(o) prohibit trespassing. For homeless people, trespassing frequently includes sleeping against the wall of a closed business establishment at night.

California Vehicle Code 22520.5 prohibits soliciting within 500 feet (about one block) of ramps on and off of James Lick Freeway at the Southeast wall of the catchment zone. While the first violation is an infraction, the second and subsequent are misdemeanors.

San Francisco Police Code 22, 23, 24 prohibits, “obstruct[ing] the free passage of any person or persons on any street, sidewalk, passageway or other public place.” As noted above, “obstruction” is frequently used for sleeping on sidewalks when passage is not being blocked. While the first citation falls under section 22, and is an infraction, second and subsequent citations are misdemeanors. Misdemeanor California Penal Code 647(e) has the same effect.

San Francisco Police Code 120-2 prohibits the begging of alms within twenty feet of an ATM, or of the same person twice. While the legislation allows police officers to issue infraction citations for these cases, San Francisco Police Department General Order 6.08 states that it is departmental policy to issue misdemeanors.

In addition, three different Park Code sections and one Police Code section are “wobblers” that can be cited as either infractions or misdemeanors, at the police officer’s discretion. These laws prohibit sleeping (again), and punish those who sell VHS cassettes, clothing, umbrellas, gewgaws and knick-knacks without a permit they can’t afford.

While the following may sound offensively repetitious, please recall that I am discussing a repeat offender—One of such magnitude, so well-known and opportunistic, that his achievements in the fields of Gentrification Advancement and Gubernatorial Distraction, while short-sighted and predictable (we predicted them), were nonetheless so vigorously pursued (albeit, largely by proxy), and with such breathtaking levels of duplicity, callousness, and patronage (ah, the classics) that the thought of bestowing upon this Mayor a chance to further champion these sorts of priorities and interests at the State level (can’t you just see it? how about HOPECalifornia? then maybe Project Old Growth Redwood Connect? oh, the potential! oh, the humanity!), has yielded us, of the Coalition on Homelessness, simply bumper crops—absolute record-breakers—of apprehension, cynicism, dismay, and concern. The offender embraces a career politician’s traditional shunning of innovation (who knows how voters might fear a new idea?), which naturally strengthens his propensity for Policy Recidivism! These traits, combined with Newsom’s displayed predilection towards regressive “enforcement first” policies, serve nobody but those with an interest in widening the gaping maw of the Prison-Industrial Complex. Which brings us again (and again), to our recurring nightmare du jour: poverty courts.

Did you ask, “What’s this poverty court?” Okay, here’s a refresher: It’s Newsom’s administrative assault on the human and civil rights of San Francisco’s poor and homeless people. You heard about it on the news: that special homeless hoosegow, the new bargain brig; his Honor the Mayor calls it “Community Justice Center” (or “CJC”): a whole new bureaucracy, dedicated to adjudicating the persecution of the low- and no-income community, sorta the Mayor’s way of saying, “Thanks just for being there.” Or being here. Here or there—either one’s good enough for the cops, and no matter how ya slice it, it’s gotta be one of the last things poor and homeless people anywhere need.

In Dickensian England there were debtors prisons, where they jailed people who owed money. Later on, the English people noticed that this was counterproductive, decided it was unjust, and chose to eliminate those prisons from their systems, a long time ago! In 2006, I think, Newsom took a(nother) trip to New York and saw one of the city’s poverty courts. He made mention of the concept in his ‘07 “State of the City” address. Then, in the May 17, 2007 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, the Mayor and Kamala Harris by-lined an op-ed touting the notion as a “compassionate” alternative to an inhumane status quo. The Mayor’s Office then repeatedly tried to get the idea past the Board of Supes over the next several months. Eventually, the Mayor succeeded in cramming the Court down the Board’s collective throat. However, just to rub it in, His Honor used his authority to put it before the electorate on the November ‘08 ballot. Much to his chagrin, it was roundly rejected by the voters.

Then, against the will of the people, he spent our tax dollars on it anyway! It opened for business just a few weeks ago. The Public Defender of San Francisco, Jeff Adachi, has been there in person, stepping up to his office’s new responsibility himself. When I heard about that, I really wondered just what was on his mind. Acting on a tip from my editor, I pimped my position as a journalist and e-mailed Mr. Adachi a few questions. Mr. Adachi has a somewhat more temperate view of the CJC than my own, but this has not stopped him from being a stalwart defender of poor people’s rights at the court:

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The recession is hitting poor families hard. Even before the recession, across the country over 600,000 families were experiencing homelessness; children were the fastest growing subset of the homeless population. When the recession hit, thousands of families wobbling on the bring tipped over and fell face-first into homelessness, suddenly finding themselves living in the dark shadows of the most affluent country in the world. Cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles reported a doubling in the size of their waitlists for family shelters. Here in San Francisco, families are waiting six months to get into a shelter. At the same time the struggles faced by homeless families is tremendous and many families have trouble maintaining hope as the days go by.

In any well functioning society a sign of true stability is a sound family unit—the stronger the families, the more stable the community.

However, when the family is broken and in trouble, that means the foundation of the society is not as strong as it should be. Although there are many causes to homelessness, for many families the greatest cause is the high cost of rent. So many landlords require that a tenant make two to three times the rent, and with that usually being as high as $1,700 or more a month in San Francisco, many low-income families simply cannot afford to live in the city at all, but can’t afford to leave it either.

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On Friday, March 20, at 2:00 p.m., a congenial but saddened group of Steven Spencer Langbury’s friends gathered in his honor at the Coalition on Homelessness. About two weeks earlier, this soft-spoken southern gentleman affectionately known as “Bubba” died peacefully of cancer.

In a late February Coalition meeting, Director, Jennifer Friedenbach, startled Civil Rights workgroup participants by announcing a phone call from a sedated, thick-voiced Bubba requesting people visit him at the Coming Home hospice on Diamond in the Castro.

I first met Bubba, 59, three months before when he had arranged an interview between me and four male friends of a police brutality victim, a sweet-faced traveler musician nicknamed Ashtray. We met at the tables behind the McDonald’s across from Golden Gate Park. Bubba introduced us, then moved and lit a cigarette. I asked him to join us, but he declined. While we talked, Bubba sat quietly a table away, his baseball cap shading his eyes from afternoon sun. Coalition activist, Mara Raider, told me this self-effacing gesture was entirely Bubba’s humble, non-interference style, connecting people, then letting them tell their story. “Like he just had no ego. He sort of recognized it wasn’t about him. It was about him helping the kids.”

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Part 1: Hmmmm…

Who knows what lurks in the links of the Internet’s Websites? I’m not the Shadow, but on weekends I can be an amateur space cadet and the rest of the week a pretty good part-time Professional Procrastinator—which is why it took me a month to proceed from seeing the Tenderloin National Forest (TNF) on-line (while surfing links linked to the Website of the literary arts Luggage Gallery storefront) to discovering it on the way home from mostly unsuccessful hunting for free 3 or 4XL donated clothing.

Humbly tucked in behind massive metal gates between another arts entity, 509 Ellis, and the Senator Hotel at Ellis and Leavenworth Streets, the TNF was not available for hanging out, zoning out, chilling out, or relaxing—for good reasons: It’s under reconstruction for a Grand Re-Opening in May, 2009.

I spoke with a young man half-buried in a huge pile of tile cubes being laid down for a throat lozenge-shaped border path. Santiago’s cellphone serendipitously chirped at him as I was about to leave—it was Darrell Smith, who agreed to meet me there the next Tuesday (March 17, 2009) at 10 a.m. No coffee and doughnut hour in the lobby of my SRO hotel. Sigh. What we give up for a good—no, a great story.

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