The Coalition on Homelessness has enlisted over a hundred Bay Area artists in the battle to end homelessness. These artists are backing the Coalition’s annual auction, Transforming Art into Action: Many Voices, One Community, which will feature more than 120 pieces of art for sale, musical performances and live art-making by local muralists and printmakers. This gala fundraising event for the Coalition on Homelessness will take place from 5:30pm to 10pm on Thursday September 8, 2011 at SOMArts, 934 Brannan Street in San Francisco.
Providing a snapshot of contemporary Bay Area art, the auction will highlight dozens of painters, sculptors, photographers and printmakers, including conceptual artist John Baldessari, renowned abstract painter Gregg Renfrow, printmaker Favianna Rodriguez, neo-pop stencil artist Scott Williams, and many others. Transforming Art into Action is the 11th annual auction sponsored by the Coalition, and it is our largest benefit celebration of the year with hundreds of expected attendees.
The event will also feature special musical performances by singer/songwriter Erica Benton and Golda Sargento, front woman of the indie rock band Golda and the Guns. Muralist Hugh Leeman will lead a live art, painting session, and the Great Tortilla Conspiracy will conduct on-site screen printing, using tortillas as a tongue-in-cheek canvas for their silk screened edible art. The $25 admission includes free food and drink provided by the California Culinary Academy, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds.
For further information about Transforming Art into Action: Many Voices, One Community, visit the Coalition on Homelessness website at cohsf.org or call Lorraine DeGuzman at 415-346-3740 x307.

By Ted Gullicksen
Miguel Wooding, a longtime San Francisco Tenants Union leader & volunteer and the founder and Director of the Eviction Defense Collaborative passed away Sunday, July 24, in a snorkeling accident while vacationing in Mexico. He was 46. There was a public memorial for him on Saturday, August 20, at the Women’s Building, 3543 18th St. in San Francisco.
Miguel grew up in the Syracuse, New York area and moved to California where he attended Stanford for several years, living cooperatively and completing most of the physics major (including an honors project) and taking many graduate-level classes before stopping school to go teach English in China for two years.
On his return, he decided (after the earthquake in 1989 made continuing classes complicated) that his calling lay more on social issues than science, and left college (short only 1 or 2 easy courses) to move to the city to pursue that path. He really was, unlike almost anyone else at Stanford, there only as long as the education was interesting to him, and not at all for the utility of the degree.
He lived in the cooperative they called the “Anarchy Arboretum”, and worked initially with Swords to Plowshares, which is where (in an office with 5 people named Michael) he began to be called Miguel. While working at Swords, Miguel began volunteering at the San Francisco Tenants Union in 1991 and soon became a core volunteer, active in all aspects of the organization. Besides counseling tenants, Miguel oversaw the transformation of the Tenants Rights Handbook into a “real” book, he coordinated trainings for counselors and he was crucial in every legislative effort by the Tenants Union in the past 20 years. Miguel was also a founding member of Homes Not Jails, the squatting group, and an HNJ leader throughout the 90s and was arrested dozens of times fighting to get housing for people who were homeless.
But his real achievement was founding the Eviction Defense Collaborative, which helps tenants fight evictions when the evictions go to court. In 1995, funding cuts forced the closure of the agency providing this service and Miguel organized tenant attorneys and volunteers from various legal; aid and tenant organizations to begin providing this service again. From there he secured enough funding to get an office and hire 1 staff member. Today the EDC has 14 staff and dozens of volunteers and besides helping tenants fight evictions it helps tenants who are behind in their rent with funds so those tenant won’t get evicted. Thousands of renters have been saved from eviction due to the EDC.
Miguel saved the homes of thousands of people and found homes for hundreds of people living on the streets. He is much beloved and will be missed by many.

Eric Quezada, Executive Director of Dolores Street, and beloved father, son and friend to so many, passed away minutes before 6:00 a.m. on the 24th of August, after an entrenched battle against cancer.
He passed the morning after a candlelight vigil was held outside of his house in his honor on one of those rare balmy Frisco evenings. In the crowd that gathered, one could see a beloved cross section of community that Eric had touched in so many different ways – his friends, his family, folks who had fought side by side with Eric for domestic workers rights, youth opportunity, violence prevention, immigrant rights, housing justice, anti-gentrification soldiers and so many more. Eric left behind a legacy of struggle for justice that has lasting impact in neighborhoods across the city like the Mission district, As a longtime community and housing activist in San Francisco’s Mission and Bernal Neighborhoods.
Prior to joining Dolores Street in the fall of 2005, Eric worked at the Mission Housing Development Corporation and the Mission Economic Development Agency. He also served on the Board of Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center and PODER (People Organized to Demand Environmental and Economic Rights) and as second Vice-Chair elected to the Democratic County Central Committee.
He played a central role in the volatile ant-gentrification movement in San Francisco during the dot com era – a movement that successfully halted much of the transformation of San Francisco into a bedroom community for silicon valley and partially derailed the wholesale displacement of working class families and jobs. This movement was largely responsible for bringing back district elections and the opening up of city hall to progressive candidates representing community instead of a unilateral representation of downtown interests.
Eric was personally involved in the creation of hundreds of units of housing affordable to the poorest San Franciscans, and most recently the rehabilitation of the Dolores Hotel, which will provide housing and bilingual services for homeless folks in the Mission District. He had a leadership role in the creation of the Secret Garden, a cultural, art and gardening space in the Mission District. In fact, his accomplishments are far too long to list here.
According to Ana Perez, immigrant rights leader, “few people have such a deep relationship with people in our community, the clarity of revolutionary politics, the energy, the unstoppable work ethic, and the courage to say the truth and take on anyone who needs to be challenged in defense of community [as Eric.]”
Eric saw the connection between poverty, racism, unemployment, gentrification, and homelessness. He was one to connect the dots and stand strong for the most disenfranchised members of our communities. When he was running for District 9 Supervisor, one the candidates made caustic remarks about homeless people in the district, and Eric reportedly dragged him out after the debate and showed him the Mission Neighborhood Resource Center and gave him an impromptu education on how insulting “my people” was directly insulting him.
In Eric’s struggle with cancer, he personified his fighting spirit, not only living years longer then his original prognosis, but truly living and working during that time. He got so much accomplished post cancer, it is almost inconceivable– started a democratic club, got the Dolores Hotel going, got elected to the DCCC, fell in love, parented a baby girl, buried his father, ran an organization, helped lead an immigrant rights coalition through brutal attacks on civil and human rights – and through it all kept his Fighting spirit so alive it is spreading like wildfire throughout San Francisco as we speak.
From the Coalition on Homelessness and Street Sheet, we will always love you Eric, and we will always be grateful for your hard work and sacrifice.
PRESENTE! La lucha sigue! “The struggle continues!”

Poetry By Dee Allen (Inspired by the statue “Ecstasy” by Das Mann & Cusolito)

This girl called Ecstasy
Walks through Patricia’s Green in Hayes Valley,
As she does everyday.
Taller than all the rest.
Larger than life.
It’s not hard to catch sight of her
From sidestreets.
Last seen on Octavia Boulevard, Ecstasy

Of scrap-metal skin,
Machine-cog toes, flexing
Wrought-iron & pipe limbs, long, flowing
Chain & hook tresses,
Covered in rust
Acquired from past, forgotten rains

Continues her afternoon walk, nothing else matters,
Tossing her head back to face the open sky,
Anticipating potential fortune
That lies at the end of her day.

Federal cuts to mental health and affordable housing programs that began in the 1980s are responsible for this shameful reality. HUD’s low/moderate-income housing budget was cut from $77 billion in 1978 to $18 billion in 1983. These cuts have put millions of people on the street, many of whom are mentally ill and some who pushed to the brink of insanity by having to live on the street.
Local governments reacted to the very visible upsurge in the street population with public space restrictions and ordinances that criminalize activities like sitting or lying on sidewalks, panhandling, and sleeping outside. These punitive policies are largely driven by the concerns of business interests, and go hand in hand with the increasing privatization of public spaces.
All of this has a particularly dramatic impact on people who have difficulty navigating the criminal justice system: Once cited by police, a person who does not go to court or pay the fine ends up having a bench warrant permitting arrest on sight. Arrest records can block access to the very services and benefits that are needed to help stabilize such an individual. Whether intentional or not, the bottom-line is that these laws are disenfranchising tens of thousands of mentally ill homeless people.

Been Here Before

“It’s unfair how we are treated.”
—Survey Respondent

Mentally ill people have long been stigmatized by society. They have been met with pity and repulsion, sometimes with reluctant charity, their “treatment” often horrific. People labeled insane have also been removed from public view, be it in attics, asylums, or jails.
Rikers Island Jail in New York City, Cook County Jail in Chicago, and Los Angeles County Jail are now the three largest psychiatric facilities in the United States. Los Angeles County Jail alone warehouses up to 3,300 mentally ill people a night. The situation is so dire at Chicago’s Cook’s County Jail that the sheriff has threatened to file a lawsuit against the state of Illinois for allowing his jail to become a “dumping ground” for the mentally ill.
There is precedent for locking up mentally ill people at the current alarming rates. In the middle of the 19th century, jails were filled with indigent mentally ill people criminalized under poor laws. Poor laws were imported from England during colonial times and used to control the movement of the poor and to distinguish those considered “deserving” from those considered “undeserving” of aid. The “undeserving poor” were punished in jails and workhouses.
Our mental health and criminal justice policies are not all that different from the poor laws of the 1850s: Poor mentally ill people are languishing in jails untreated due to discriminatory “quality of life” or “nuisance crime” laws. Instead of increasing treatment and housing options in the community, we are shutting down programs and substituting them with costly jails. Despite reports ad nauseam about the human and social toll of this approach, the overriding policy remains simply getting mentally ill people out of sight.

Taking it to the streets

“We’re always told to move on, but to where? There are no places for us to be.” —Survey Respondent
The voices of those most impacted by these punitive measures–mentally ill homeless people themselves–are currently nowhere to be found in policy debates. To better understand the reality of those caught in the vicious cycle of insufficient treatment, homelessness, and jail at the street level, WRAP and our partners conducted surveys with 336 self-identified mentally ill homeless people in seven cities — San Francisco, Los Angeles, Berkeley, and Oakland, California; Portland, Oregon; Denver, Colorado; Worcester, Massachusetts; and Houston, Texas. We also conducted a small online survey with 48 front-line service providers in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Portland.
The findings from the two sets of surveys build on other recent data from the Department of Justice and mental health researchers. The findings from the two surveys are very similar and reveal a discriminatory pattern that deserves closer public scrutiny.
Results from the street outreach found:

80% reported being stopped, arrested, or cited due to “quality of life” offenses.
52% reported being harassed by private security (usually from private, quasi-governmental Business Improvement Districts.)
48% reported having ignored tickets issued against them.
57% reported having bench warrants issued for their arrest.
22% reported having outstanding warrants at the time of the survey.
31% reported having been incarcerated.
30% reported having lost their housing or being discharged from a program due to incarceration, while only 5% reported having been referred to a program when brought before court.

This closely mirrors the experiences of service providers in various cities:

74% of service providers reported that at least 70% of their clients had been arrested due to “quality of life” offenses.
Almost 20% of service providers reported that their clients’ interactions with police occurred because they appear to be homeless.
Over 60% of service providers reported that their clients had interacted with police for drinking-related offenses, 30% for loitering, 16% report for jaywalking, and 16% for trespassing (which usually means sleeping in a doorway.)
53% of service providers reported that approximately 20% or more of their clients had bench warrants.
44% of service providers reported that 50% or more of their clients had outstanding tickets.

The human story behind the numbers

The following story comes from Caduceus Outreach Services – a program that used to provide alternative forms of psychiatric treatment, restorative social supports, and healing for homeless people with severe mental illnesses. The story highlights the lived experiences embedded in the statistics above and illustrates the counterproductive policies now in place. The story is by no means unique.
DJ is a 35-year-old African American man. He has been homeless since his early teens when he ran away from a small Southern town to escape physical and sexual abuse. He has been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Dissociative Identity Disorder. He is now in early out-patient psychiatric treatment and taking medications that prevent the worst of his hallucinations.
He is well known to the police, as he is unafraid of telling them what he thinks when they tell him to move along. He will call out the inequality by which the law is applied and enforced, reminding them that if he were a white woman having a street sale on the sidewalk in front of her home they would not tell him to move along. As a result, he is frequently ticketed for not having a vendor’s license or for trespassing, and despite lack of evidence, has been arrested several times for selling stolen property.
Because the streets and parks are dangerous, DJ carries knives for protection when he camps out at night. He has been rousted and searched, arrested for carrying “concealed weapons,” as well as ticketed for camping, sleeping on the sidewalk, and trespassing. His arrest record takes up 27 pages, with most charges dropped by the district attorney.
During a police sweep of a homeless encampment, he became so angry that he held up one of his knives and yelled at the police, “Why don’t you just shoot me then, you know you want to.” He was arrested for assault with a deadly weapon on a peace officer as they claimed that he had advanced on them with a knife. While his case was negotiated, DJ received no psychiatric treatment, no medication, lost his place on a housing waiting list, and had his disability benefits application denied because he couldn’t attend appointments. The result was time served and three years felony probation, which, if violated, would result in his being sentenced to state prison. The likelihood of DJ, and thousands of other people like him in similar situations, making it through probation without the appropriate supports is next to zero.
Caduceus Outreach Services, one of the few programs with a proven track record for reaching hundreds of people like DJ, was shut down in 2010 due to budget cuts.

Ineffective, expensive, and cruel

Money is being spent on jails rather than services. Municipalities, business districts, and downtown tourist centers support “quality of life” or “nuisance crime” laws because they lead to more lucrative and less disturbing downtowns. But they are also an enormously expensive process.
In 2009, a California jail bed ranged from $25,000 to $55,000 and a bed for acute mental health services in a psychiatric unit in a California jail cost $1,350 a day. A University of Pennsylvania study found that homeless people with mental illness who were placed in permanent housing cost the public $16,282 less per person per year compared to their previous costs for mental health, corrections, Medicaid, and public institutions and shelters.
The scale of this issue is enormous and the cruelty and abandonment suffered by poor and homeless mentally ill people like DJ is unacceptable. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, as many as 64% of people in jails nationwide have mental health problems. In the 1980s and early 1990s, people with severe mental illness made up 6-7% of the jail population. In the last five years, this percentage has climbed to 16-30%. Nationwide, there are three times as many people with mental illness in jails and prisons as there are in hospitals; 40% of people with severe mental illness have been imprisoned at some point in their lives; 90% of those incarcerated with a mental illness have been incarcerated more than once.
We deal with this national shame as we so often deal with personal shame: we pretend it isn’t there; we try to hide it. The obvious answer is–of course–affordable housing and residential treatment centers. Neither is on our current national agenda. But as a country we must wake up to the reality that we treat mentally ill homeless people the way they were treated 150 years ago.
Ignoring that truth is the real shame.

By the Park Merced Action Coalition

On Monday, July 11, at 11am, San Francisco residents, San Francisco Tomorrow, Parkmerced Action Coalition, their attorney Stuart Flashman and members of the Board of Supervisors rallied on the steps of City Hall to call attention to the Board of Supervisors’ approval of a plan to demolish their rent-controlled community. They released the following statement:

STOP THE DESTRUCTION!
Learning from history, social fabric and neighborhoods can evolve organically for the betterment of San Francisco rather than calling for wholesale demolition with short-sighted economic benefits—particularly when true infill development alternatives would be both feasible and profitable.

In order to stop the destruction of one of San Francisco’s few multi-ethnic, multi-generational, and family neighborhoods, San Francisco Tomorrow (SFT) and the Park Merced Action Coalition (PMAC) have filed a lawsuit against the City for its June 9th approval of the Parkmerced Development Project.

The Final Environment Impact Report (FEIR) for the Parkmerced Project is inaccurate and inadequate.  If allowed to continue as approved, the project will destroy 1,538 units of affordable, rent-controlled housing, adversely affect the environment and well being of those living, working, and playing in the region.  In addition, the suit points to the project’s inconsistency with priority policies enacted by San Francisco voters in Proposition M as well as other inconsistencies with the City’s general plan and violation of the City’s Sunshine Ordinance.

The lawsuit calls for the court to set aside the project approvals until the Park Merced Project complies with the California Environmental Quality Act and the City’s general plan policies.

VIOLATIONS INCLUDE:

· Demolition of 1,538 seismically sound rent-controlled townhouses and their surrounding gardens.

· Not addressing livability issues associated with the 20- 30 year demolition and construction project, including: noise, air quality, and loss of open space.  The Project’s findings DO NOT MEET legal air quality standards.

· Failing to assess the seismic impact of the existing towers, nor providing for their retrofits and upgrades.  Additionally, no provisions exist for loss of open space and other unavoidable adverse impacts for tower residents.

· Slaughter of migrating birds by the Project’s shoreline windmills, and a general refusal to look at alternatives that could avoid the Project’s many impacts.

· The faulty reference to development as a “transit village”, since no third party assurances or funding sources are identified for transit and related work.  The addition of 6,342 parking places also contradicts the concept of a transit village.

By Healthy Living News


A new study shows that homeless individuals, especially those suffering from mental illness or substance abuse, have a death rate significantly higher and a life expectancy that is significantly shorter than those with homes. The study, recently published in the journal The Lancet, collected data on people in homeless shelters using Denmark’s nationwide homeless registry. The data consisted of 32,711 homeless people, aged 16 years and up, who where homeless between 1999 and 2009.


To determine the rate of death and life expectancy, researchers separated the homeless registry data into several groups. These included those with psychiatric disorders, those with a history of substance abuse, those with a dual diagnosis of both, and those who had no such diagnosis.

Researchers then compared their rate of death, or mortality, to that of the general population. They discovered that for those homeless, the rate of death was 6.7 times higher for women and 5.6 times higher for men. The group with substance abuse disorders had the highest mortality of any of the homeless groups, followed by those with a dual diagnosis. Information on the causes of death, when available, showed that suicide and violence accounted for more than a quarter of them.


”There was a larger disparity in life expectancy between the homeless shelter population and the general population than previous studies have found,” said study author, Dr. Sandra Nielsen.



The study also revealed that homelessness can cut short lives for those who are still young. For those homeless, age 15-24 years, their estimated life expectancy was, respectively, 21 and 17 years lower than men and women in the general population.



Regardless of age, however, Dr. Nielsen said that the death disparity confirms that homeless people living in shelters constitute a high-risk, marginalized population whose physical and mental health needs require more attention.



In an accompanying commentary in The Lancet, Professor John Geddes and Dr. Seena Fazel of Oxford University wrote that more work needs to be done to end death disparities among the homeless. That includes improved integrated psychiatric and substance abuse treatment to better address the problem.

Another concern regarding the study was its country of origin. Denmark provides free health care and a substantial social-service and housing support infrastructure. These should be helping alleviate death disparities among the homeless.



The Lancet commentary also pointed out potential cross-border differences in data. 
”International comparison of studies of homelessness,” it noted…”is made harder by the different social and housing systems between developing and more developed countries, and between small well-organized and highly socially integrated Nordic countries and larger more heterogeneous countries such as the USA.”



The commentary added that the situation is likely to be worse in countries with less well-organized welfare systems.



And fixing the death disparity problem for the homeless is now even a more daunting challenge. The crash in housing markets and the recent recession has increased homelessness in the U.S. and Europe, all while social services are being cut due to severe government financial restrictions.

The past few years have been brutally cruel to the poorest San Franciscans. They have watched access to health care erode, school staffing slashed, and a whole host of specialized community programs shut their doors due to budget cuts. For homeless people, it has meant the loss of six drop-in centers and exhaustingly long waits for shelters. Over 3,000 people now wait in line every day at the Saint Anthony’s Foundation for lunch. The situation is tense for many struggling to make ends meet.

Six months ago, San Francisco’s budget forecast was grim. Facing an almost $400 million shortfall, the Human Service Agency proposed shutting down two drop-in centers for homeless people serving communities of color. Residential treatment programs were going to get slaughtered…public benefits slashed…supportive housing decimated. We expected the closing of after school programs and violence prevention programs galore. This, after years of reductions, meant the breaking point for services poor people depend on for survival.

The Coalition on Homelessness and community members came together to analyze impacts through the Budget Justice Collaborative in our struggle to stave off reductions. Work was done to figure out what reductions could be absorbed without harming poor people. Community and labor worked together to come up with a host of alternative revenue ideas.

Luckily for the destitute of San Francisco, Newsom was gone. Interim Mayor Ed Lee held a community process, and actually listened. He prioritized safety net programs. He asked Fire, Police, and the nurses to give up their raises. The city garnered more sales tax than expected.

By the time the budget came to the Board of Supervisors, there was about $8 million left to come up with to stave off reductions to poor people. In addition, there was about $9 million in other items Board members wanted to fund, from capital projects…to halting privatization of security guards…to new Police Academy class…to trees. A year ago, the Board would have had to make up about $15 million instead. The Board accepted about $11 million in recommendations from Budget Analyst Harvey Rose, who identified wasteful spending. What the Board reduces, the Board can replace with other items. There was some other revenue as well, and it added up pretty well close to balancing out with all parties satisfied.

When it came to the end of the process, however, the consensus building that came out of the Mayor’s Office started to fall apart. Apparently, Chief of Staff Steve Kawa (a holdover from the Newsom years) did not get the memo that this was the new era of getting along. The office insisted, even though they had the funding, that they were going to contract out. This put many Board members in an awkward spot, since they would like to have the future support of labor unions, and would never get it if they contracted out. In the end, even though the Mayor’s Office had funding to cover it all, they still had to cut a bunch of stuff out of the budget. There was a transparent effort to pit the non-profits against the unions. However, since most non-profits are now unionized, this made divisiveness hard to manufacture.

When the budget finally balanced at 3am the morning after the last day of June, there were no cuts to supportive housing, no cuts to job training, after-school programs, nor violence prevention. It would have felt better for everyone involved if political game playing had not occured, but overall, the most vulnerable San Franciscans were protected. There were a lot of community stakeholders that helped make this happen. Supervisor Jane Kim really stepped up and resisted a lot of pressure, and Supervisor Carmen Chu put aside her own personal priorities and tried to work collectively with folks. In the end, we have a city budget that all San Franciscans should be proud of: a budget that has integrity and principles infused throughout, and a budget that–while not perfect from any one perspective–can be, quite simply, named “fair.”

Pain + Suffering= $$$ For Wells Fargo
Protests Launch National Prison Industry Divestment Campaign
By Lydia Heather Blumberg

On July 1st, protesters in community and labor groups nationwide will take to the streets in protest of the private prison industry’s business model of lobbying for harsher incarceration policies for drug users, immigrants, and other marginalized populations who are often scapegoated as being the origin of our nation’s problems. These policies have devastated state and federal budgets worldwide, forcing a slash and burn of the social safety nets that the poor and middle classes depend upon for survival. Protesters will call on Wells Fargo Bank to divest its holdings in GEO Group (one of the two largest private prison companies in the US that runs immigrant detention centers and Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp for the federal government) and CCA, Corrections Corporation of America. In addition, protesters will demand that Wells Fargo put a moratorium on foreclosures and stop the criminal lending practices targeting communities of color, as well as pay its fair share of local, state, and federal taxes.

Immigrant detention centers cost taxpayers over $10 billion a year while making big money for hedge fund managers and shareholders like Wells Fargo. Prison stock held by Wells Fargo alone is currently valued at over $88 million. The private prison industry and its investors have a long and shameful record of targeting and incarcerating communities of color by lobbying for legislation to enact “three strikes” laws, criminalize undocumented immigrants (through laws like SB1070 in Arizona and a similar bill in Georgia, home of the largest private prison in the nation), and increase sentencing standards for even the most minor drug offenses. Political candidates financed by these groups often run on a “tough on crime” platform. With CCA and GEO Group making $200 a night per immigrant detained, it all adds up to a profit of over $5 billion a year made just by these two companies–at the expense of taxpayers (and the destruction of the lives of thousands of families of those incarcerated.)

Even San Francisco has fallen prey to the financial manipulation of Wells Fargo and its policies of backing political campaigns that increase incarceration. Last August, The Bay Citizen reported that one of the largest contributions to the so-called “Civil Sidewalks” campaign was made by former Wells Fargo CEO and board chairman, Richard M. Kovacevich. The Civil Sidewalks campaign, backed by banks and big business, put Prop L on last year’s San Francisco ballot, which criminalized people for the simple act of sitting on a sidewalk.

The July 1st action is just one event in a long-term campaign for national prison industry divestment. The protest, sponsored by Communities United Against Violence, among other organizations, will feature a rally and street theater beginning at 11am in front of the Wells Fargo Bank at 464 California Street. Several similar-themed direct actions have happened over the past few months, including a protest in May at a Wells Fargo shareholders’ meeting and a Communities Rising rally on June 17th in front of City Hall. The rally on June 17 was sponsored by CURB (Californians United for a Responsible Budget) and the SF Drug Users’ Union to commemorate 40 years of Drug War failure, calling for an end to the failed War on Drugs and national divestment from the Prison Industrial Complex in order to fund education and health care.

Can’t make it to a rally? Slactivists far and wide can make their voices heard by moving their money from Wells Fargo accounts to local credit unions which invest in our communities. Want to learn more? Surf to immigrantsforsale.org and justicepolicy.org.

Following the SF “Meme” Troupe’s 2pm performance (theme of the meme: Integrity!)

Make this July 4th a day to be remembered… Join the rally in Dolores Park by 4pm so you won’t miss the lively and lyrical march to the Open Housing Occupation site.

Festivities both inside and outside the occupation site will include: performance art, live music, FREE dinner (lovingly prepared by SF Food Not Bombs), poetry, and direct action.

Housing must not sit vacant while people are forced to live on the streets. 2010 Census figures over 32,000 vacant housing units in The City while approximately 10,000 individuals remain homeless. People must not be evicted for profit. Human rights should come before property rights. Come out and make your voice heard! We realize the need to respect the individual while we embrace the need for collective empowerment, equitable communities, and mutual aid.

In 2005, there were an estimated 1 billion (yes, BILLION) people worldwide living in squatted homes and squatter shantytowns. By 2030 the projected number will jump to 2 billion or ONE in FOUR people on the planet.. We will unite, we will fight, and…WE WILL WIN!

Actions are taking place in countries worldwide this July 4th, providing a great opportunity to celebrate our autonomy and integrity. We are seizing this moment by creating a liberated space and by gathering squatters and homesteaders from throughout the Bay Area to begin organizing a vital regional squatters’ syndicate based on autonomy, integrity, shared resources, and mutual aid.

We welcome any additional overnight occupiers, musicians, performers, cooks, medics, liasons, and direct action heros to join us, so don’t be shy. For more information about Homes Not Jails, surf to HomesNotJailsSF.org.