By Marlon Crump

At his funeral, Idriss was eulogized as “Our Shaman” by the Dean of Students of SF Healds College, Mr. Patrick Hutchinson. Idriss counseled many fellow students, among them a single dad (who was suicidal), who said at the funeral mass that Idriss saved his life. These were just some of Idriss Stelley’ success stories,” his mother told me, a proud smile on her lips, as we continued our interview on the life and death of her son.

We sat at her home in the Bayview Hunters Point in early December. In between sips of freshly brewed coffee, Mesha showed me Idriss’ diplomas and awards and shared stories from his life.

I marveled at Idriss’ awards, trophies and accomplishments, including his Second Degree Black Belt Karate diploma and his Post Mortem “Resistance Award” received from POOR Magazine. Mesha continued showing me his seemingly endless memorabilia, including his craftsmanship of an unfinished stone sculpture, an Egyptian Sphinx that Mesha gave me to keep. Idriss was in the Marble Union and was working on this sphinx on the very day he was killed by the SFPD. “He did not get a chance to finish it…” she explained, her voice sadly trailing off. She then began to tell me about Idriss’ birth.

Idriss Scott Stelley was born on August 20th, 1977 at the Alternative Birth Center at the San Francisco General Hospital in a room full of incense, Indian music of Ravi Shankar and cheering friends.

Idriss graduated first out of 90 students from Optnet in Advanced Web Design, and was a Spanish tutor at Wallenberg High School, as well as a French and Advanced Math tutor at San Francisco City College and John Adams Community College.

With an IQ of 145, Idriss tutored in colleges even before his own graduation from high school through Independent Studies. He also taught ESL to undocumented migrants at the San Francisco Day Labor Program, volunteered on the AIDS Ward 5A, the very place of his birth , and aided in the soup kitchen at Glide Memorial Church. In addition, Idriss also volunteered at Arriba Juntos, a center in the Mission District that provides job readiness workshops, computer labs, and job search skills. He also taught graffiti-airbrush design at a Fillmore center for at-risk Youth, and at 7 years old, was the youngest performing artist of the SF Mime Troupe, in the “Madame Video” play. He also performed in several SF International Franco-American School’s Shakespearean productions.

Of eclectic taste, Idriss was an avid reader of the mainstream “classics”, but favored the works of Malcolm X and his beloved Koran (Idriss converted to Islam at 17.) In his apartment the air was often filled with music. From Bach, Bela Bartok, Debussy, Eric Sati, Aranjuez, and Misa Criola, to Miles Davis, Sidney Bechet, and Thelonius Monk to U2, Tupac, Paris, Sade and Michel Franti, Idriss appreciated many different styles of music.

In formal attire and bow tie, he routinely assisted his godfather, Mr. Henry Watson, who passed away, heartbroken, a year after Idriss’ death. Mr. Watson, head usher of the SF Opera House, was a wonderful Black man who introduced Idriss to rich AfriKan American culture as well as his musical and “classical” education.

Although I’ve never met or laid eyes on Idriss, Mesha has often told me of how much I remind her of her only child, because we both share a very rare kind of wisdom, and exceptional background. It is always a wonderful feeling to hear Mesha say this to me, because I have adopted her as my “godmother” and feel truly blessed with everything she offers me, especially post-trauma counseling.

Given everything that I have gone through in the past few years, in my dealing with homelessness, poverty, criminalization, racism, police brutality, and injustice, I feel that meeting Idriss would have restored hope in me about the fate of those struggling in this corrupt society. I believe that our relationship would have shown that unity in communities plagued with poverty, violence, racism and incarceration, is not impossible. And that despite the venomous lies of corporate media and its portrayal of non-white communities and people struggling with poverty, we can unite to make change.

“I taught Idriss that it is never too early to commit to social justice,” said Mesha. As we traded warm smiles, dusk began to blanket the earth outside. I sat my cup of coffee down and we both took a break, before Mesha began to share the most difficult part of the interview, and the deepest, darkest moment that forever changed her life and the lives of many others: The Death of Idriss Stelley.

To Be Continued…

By Andrew Jackson Kocher (A Common Homeless Man)

When, in the course of human events, it has become necessary for the Common People to dissolve the political commitments which have connected them with a centralized Federal Government, and to assume among the powers of the Earth the shape and spirit of a democracy which reflects the inalienable rights to which the laws of nature entitle them; a decent respect to the opinions of humanity requires that they should Declare the causes which impel them to make a charge of No Confidence.

We, The Common People, hold these truths to be self-evident, that all humanity is created equal, that they are endowed by their very existence with certain inalienable rights; and that among these are Life, Liberty, Access to the natural bounty of unspoiled land and the Fruits thereof;  Clean Air, Pure Water and the pursuit of happiness within a just and equal society.

To secure these rights, governments have been instituted over communities, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. The Common People maintain that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, by failing to uphold these rights, it is the moral obligation of the People to alter or abolish it and institute in its place a new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its obligations in such a form as to provide for environmentally sound interaction with the Biosphere Earth; and shall seem most likely to effect their safety, health and happiness.

Common sense will dictate that a government long established should not be changed for light and transient reasons and accordingly, experience shows that humankind are more disposed to suffer when corruption, pollution and other evils are bearable, than to correct the evil by abolishing the sources of the corruption and pollution to which they are accustomed.

But, when a long series of abuses, deceptions and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, exposes a design to reduce the Common People under absolute corporate despotism, it is our right and our moral obligation to reject such government and to provide a new form of government by the People to provide for our future security.

Such has been the patient sufferance of the Common People and such is now the necessity, which rallies them to separate themselves from the present Federal Government of the United States of America. The history of the present Federal government is one of repeated deception and usurpation, having in direct object the establishment of a corporate tyranny over the American population.

To demonstrate this, let the facts be submitted to a World in Peril.

Corporations, by their very nature, have no sense of national patriotism, and therefore cannot be loyal to any one people or political ideology. The only obligation of a multi-national corporation is to make profit. Therefore, they exist only to exploit the population of the Earth in the quest for ongoing profit.

We, the People, have been deprived of our inalienable rights.

The Federal Government has failed to represent the American people, either as individuals or en masse: as intended by the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights. We have learned that Free Trade does not guarantee individual freedoms and that Federal over-legislation provides the opportunity for Federal government to reach into the home or hovel of every common citizen.

We, The Common People, have been deprived of our inalienable right to the bounty of the natural world in the form of unspoiled lands, clean air and pure water.

The Federal government allows multi-national corporations to dominate and exploit the natural resources of America, and to restrict the access of Common citizens to the natural world, due to and as a result of, criminal exploitation of our environment. These same multi-national corporations continue to exploit the Common People through marketing experimentation and the quest for ongoing profit by establishing the complete dependency of the population on corporate production and distribution for the necessities of life.

The Federal government has employed deception and evasion in order to persuade the Common People to offer up their patriotism and progeny on the alter of corporate profit.

The Federal government promotes military aggression and the enhancement of a worldwide ideological struggle for dominion in order to create market opportunities for, and further promote the agenda of, multi-national corporations towards globalization of the world economy and the complete domination of the Common People.

We, therefore, the People of America, appealing to the judgment of the natural force of the universe for the moral righteousness of our intentions, do solemnly publish and Declare that the Common People are, and of right ought to be, free and independent people, that they are absolved from all allegiance to a Federal government dominated in policy by multi-national corporations, and that all political connection between the Common people and the Federal government is, and of right ought to be, totally dissolved, and that as a free and independent people, we have the power to reform our government, establish an ecologically sustainable and moral co-existence with the Biosphere Earth and the Human race, contract alliances, establish commerce, conduct peace, levy war and do all other acts and things which independent people of inalienable right do, and, for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our futures and our sacred Honor.

“If any single person in post WWII America could be said to have saved what is best about cities, it is Jane Jacobs.”—Randy Shaw, 2006

Urban planning theorist and activist Jane Jacobs was no fan of San Francisco’s Civic Center. “This particular center,” she wrote, “placed near the downtown and intended to pull the downtown toward it, has of course repelled vitality and gathered around itself the blight that typically surrounds these dead and artificial places.” For progressive North America, a damnation from Jane Jacobs is a heavy thing indeed.

Jacobs’ 1961 masterwork, *The Death and Life of Great American Cities*, has for half a century been a touchstone of progressive thought about how cities work and how they should be designed. The book argues that the beautificatory and “rational” urban planning movements of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries were movements that actually undermined healthy urban spaces: The clustering of monuments, the division of neighborhoods by highways, the privileging of the personal automobile over public transportation, the segregation of districts by use and by socioeconomic class, the promotion of residence in suburbs, all led to less human, less safe, less livable cities. Instead, Jacobs advocated mixed use neighborhoods with small blocks, and concentrated populations living in buildings of varying ages—all still major values for people who love cities for their human vitality and human interactions.

It is not surprising, then, that a putative progressive focused on “renewing” and “revivifying” the Tenderloin—one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods—would take note of Jacob’s criticism of Civic Center Plaza.

Randy Shaw, the Executive Director the Tenderloin Housing Clinic and a resident of the Berkeley Hills, has made changing the nature of the Tenderloin one of his dearest goals for the past several years. His promotion of a new name for the neighborhood that no one uses (the “Uptown Tenderloin”—along with the embarrassing fake slang “Upper Ten”) and his ongoing creation of a neighborhood historical museum have, until very recently, been the most notable aspects of his one-man campaign of neighborhood transformation.

But his recent efforts have been less risible, and far more detrimental to the residents of Shaw’s pet project. When the Board of Supervisors buckled to corporate pressure and created a mid-Market tax giveaway zone for bigger businesses (though not for small, family businesses), Shaw—despite significant neighborhood opposition and without support from any neighborhood or tenant group (in fact, his own organization’s tenant organizing project formally took a stand *not* endorsing Shaw’s position), pushed to have the Tenderloin included in the tax break zone, and succeeded. The most likely result of this legislation will be increased commercial rents, resulting in small businesses’ and service providers’ being pushed out of the neighborhood, while tenants face increasing pressure from the immigration of more and more suburbanites into the neighborhood. While we cannot know what future legislation or quirks of history will change this prospect, it is quite possible that this legislation—which Shaw promoted as a means to increase investment in the neighborhood (but investment *for* whom, into *what*?)—will be the single biggest factor in the Tenderloin’s gentrification.

But though Shaw supports a Reaganite trickle-down taxation policy, the man seems himself as a progressive, thanks largely to his distant but laudable history of eviction prevention and tenant defense. But now that Shaw has, through the favor of the Newsom administration, become one of the neighborhood’s biggest landlords, he seems disinclined to continue that history, though he won’t stop bragging about it. Thus, it is not surprising that in his consideration of Civic Center Plaza, he would begin with Jacobs’ damnation. It is equally unsurprising that he would all but completely misinterpret her critique, and read it in a manner that would promote not Jane Jacobs’ vision of the diverse, integrated, organic city of modernity, but rather the segregated, corporate city of Rudy Giuliani’s New York. This month, he wrote of his proposals for Civic Center Plaza in his vanity blog, BeyondChron.

To Shaw, Civic Center Plaza is a “dead spot” that is not living up to its urban potential. If used correctly, the Plaza could aid in the economic redevelopment of mid-Market and the Tenderloin by drawing visitors, and then trickling those visitors’ economic consumption out into the surrounding neighborhoods. The way to achieve this is by somehow making Civic Center Plaza more like New York City’s privatized Bryant Park.

Bryant Parkification is to be achieved by bringing in “a high quality, destination food truck”; converting one third to one half of the Plaza into recreational use in the form of a wintertime skating rink, yoga classes, and small-scale music events; and—most importantly—the creation of a public or private security force to enforce “park rules.”

Before we deal with reality, let’s talk about where Shaw is *not* coming from.

The Plaza Beautiful

Shaw quotes scraps of Jacobs, but he’s coming from nothing like her viewpoint. For Jacobs, the problem with the Civic Center (not, mind you, just the Plaza) is the problem of a whole movement: the City Beautiful movement. The notion—a fin de siècle precursor of such misguided modern dogma as the Broken Windows Theory—was that the creation of beautiful cities, largely through the creation of grand monuments, would lead to a more harmonious social order.

In San Francisco’s case, the rebuilt Civic Center was the only constructed piece of a 1905 plan by City Beautiful architect Daniel Burnham. Burnham, who had worked extensively in Pittsburgh and Chicago, had been brought in by Mayor James Phelan (who later ran successfully for the Senate on a “Keep California White” platform) to design a San Francisco that could become “the capital of an empire.” Burnham’s plan originally encompassed the entire city. Alas for virtue and empire, the remainder of the plan was eclipsed in 1906 by the immediate needs of tens of thousands of newly homeless San Franciscans who rebuilt their earthquake-razed homes with no concern for the infrastructural grounding of civic morality or a harmonious social order.

Jacobs’ contention is that Civic Center is one big useless clump of monuments. Things have not changed in the ensuing half century since the publication of her critique: Symphony Hall, the Opera, Herbst Theater, the PUC building, City Hall, the Superior Court, the State Supreme Court, the Burton Federal Building, Civic Center Plaza, Bill Graham Auditorium, the Main Library, the Asian Art Museum, UN Plaza, and whatever that strange UN building is, are all clustered into one tiny area, along with statues of Ashurbanipal cuddling a lion, Simón Bolívar riding his anatomically correct steed Palomo (felicitously—at least poetically so—smeared with guano de paloma), and a racist, dominionist deity of California, presiding over a suffering caricature of a Native American man who is submitting to white colonialists and the Christian faith. No matter how much one loves the Civic Center, it’s hard not to admit: It is indeed a clustercoitus of grandeur.

For Jacobs, a better use of these buildings and monuments would have been to integrate them with offices and shops in a way that made these monumental buildings more relevant and immediate for the public, and also served the economic needs of the commercial establishments. Her primary argument has to do with mixed use districts—districts such as the Tenderloin, where residences, shops, and other workplaces are integrated, often in the same building, and almost always on the same block.

What Parks Don’t Do

So much for the Civic Center as a whole: The *Plaza* itself must be understood in the context of how Jacobs understood parks:

“Too much is expected of city parks. Far from transforming any essential quality in their surroundings, far from automatically uplifting their neighborhoods, neighborhood parks are directly and drastically affected by the way the neighborhood acts upon them.” For Jacobs, it is impossible for a park to do what Shaw wants of Civic Center Plaza: It cannot change the neighborhood through increased use. Rather, it will have increased or decreased use depending on the diversity of use of the surrounding neighborhood. If there are both residences and businesses, ensuring use throughout daytime hours, and if there are not too many parks in the vicinity, a park will prosper. But a park cannot make surrounding neighborhoods prosper.

There are factors that can make parks more successful—a variety of visual experience for example—but they are secondary. Golden Gate Park provides a good proving ground for this. The Eastern half of the Park is perpetually busy because it is situated between the mixed business/residential areas of the Haight, the Inner Sunset, and the Inner Richmond. The Western half of the Park, however, is dramatically underused, because it is situated between the Outer Sunset and the Outer Richmond. These Western neighborhoods are all but exclusively residential, which means that relatively few people are around during the day. Thus, relatively few people have reason to be near the Park. Both the East and the West have interesting structures, have variety of visual experience, and have plenty of space. But one half is used, while the other remains nearly empty.

If Only…

While Jacobs clearly did not approve of Civic Center’s design overall, the Plaza *right now* is close enough to the 24-hour vibrancy of the Tenderloin that it serves the purposes Jacobs wished for parks generally. This might be a good time to leave the world of theory, return to reality, and try to drag Mr. Shaw back with us.

Let us consider how people in the Tenderloin regularly use Civic Center Plaza. For example, right now, we regularly have five food trucks in Civic Center Plaza during lunchtime. Shaw would like to see *one* “high quality, destination food truck…” (On a side note, doesn’t the notion of *destination* run counter to the purpose of food trucks?)

Right now, children play in the Plaza’s two playgrounds all day, and fill half the Plaza during midday recess. Young people play Frisbee and adults throw footballs or play catch with their dogs all over the Plaza at all times of day. Shaw, on the other hand, would like children to play, and would like a third to a half of the Plaza to be used for recreational purposes.

Right now, musicians play trumpet, saxophone, and guitar during the daytime, busking for tips and sometimes serenading diners at the two Plaza cafés and the five food trucks. Shaw wants small informal musical performances.

Right now, Chinese senior citizens use the Plaza for Fǎlún Gōng meditation and taìjí in the mornings. Shaw wants yoga.

And this yoga thing maybe gets to the crux of it: Yoga is wonderful as exercise and meditation, but let’s face it: Its primary appeal is *not* to the average resident of Tenderloin or SoMa residential hotels. But this doesn’t matter for Shaw’s vision for the economic development of these depressed neighborhoods: The development is not *by* us. It’s not *for* us. It’s not *about* us: It is, in Shaw’s own words, for the attraction of outside investment. But it is impossible to draw a causal connection between Shaw’s fantasy investment and the betterment of the everyday lives of people who live in the Tenderloin or SoMa now. In fact, the reverse is true.

The food trucks are great, and from a municipal economic perspective, we have no reason to favor one locally owned, local-employing dining establishment over another. However, if our purpose is to draw business to mid-Market and the Tenderloin, it’s worth noting that City and State employees who eat at the Curry Up Now food truck (which is one hell of a good eatery) are *not* dining at core neighborhood dining establishments such as Golden House, Golden Kim Tar, Taquería el Castillito, Wrap Delight, Burmese Kitchen, or Saigon Sandwich on the edge of the Tenderloin, nor are they eating at Gyro King, or Sam’s Diner, or Munch Haven in mid-Market. As with Shaw’s wish for yoga in lieu of residents’ uses of Civic Center Plaza, this redirection of customers *away* from local small businesses emphasizes that this kind of development is not for the people who already live here. It is—like the similar anti-small business Tenderloin tax giveaway that Shaw pushed through the Board of Supervisors last month—not for the purposes of residents, but for the repurposing of the neighborhood.

Fashion Week for the Tenderloin?

All the measures proposed by Shaw are Bizarro World parallels of actual Tenderloin uses of Civic Center Plaza… with one exception. The aspect of Shaw’s proposals which makes it like his ideal park—New York City’s Bryant Park—is the presence of an additional security force to “enforce the rules” of the park.
Somehow, this security force would both be a portion of a solution to the problem of homeless people “undermining” Civic Center Plaza, and yet would neither harass nor even interfere with homeless people! The mechanisms of this boggle the mind, and conflict starkly with the reality of private security at every other privatized once-public space in the country. Similar security officers at Union Square constantly harass homeless people in ways that violate poor San Franciscans’ civil rights.

But given that the would-be reformer’s prototype was Bryant Park, we decided to contact our allies at Picture the Homeless in New York to see if things were somehow different there.

San Franciscans who have not spent much time in Manhattan may not have a very solid picture of Bryant Park. If you’re a viewer of Project Runway, Bryant Park is the site of the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, at which the program’s contestants show their final collections. Bryant Park closes down to the public for the full week, becoming the exclusive domain of the invitation-only glitterati. Homeless people are apparently not among the invitation-only set.

According to our friends at Picture the Homeless, Bryant Park is a “glittering wonderland” from which homeless people are all but completely excluded. “We don’t conduct outreach there because there’s no point. Everyone has either been driven out by private security, or they’re trying so hard to blend in that they don’t want to talk to anyone else they think might be homeless.”

Such parks attack the fundamental civil rights of homeless people and other politically undesirable populations. But you don’t have to be an ethically decent humanist for this to matter to you: We cannot undermine the rights of a minority without hurting society as a whole. An exclusionary park undermines one of the fundamental roles of a *civic* center: Situated directly across from City Hall, Civic Center Plaza is an ideal location for the exercise of First Amendment rights. In a park that is designed to push certain kinds of people out, the core role of such a place in our democracy ceases to be possible.

Another Tenderloin—For Us—Is Possible

Civic Center Plaza could be a little prettier. It would be nice to have the reflecting pool back. It would be nice to have some benches. The Plaza could stand, right now, to be visually more interesting. But as far as use goes, Civic Center Plaza is vigorously used in diverse ways by residents of the Tenderloin and daytime workers at City and State buildings. It is, despite being the center of a poorly planned “City Beautiful” orgy of rotundas, Ionic columns, and weird statuary, a very healthy park, thanks to its proximity to the Tenderloin and Archstone Fox Plaza.

But Shaw’s underlying goal—a renewal of the Tenderloin—is, despite its violently misguided direction, rooted in some valid concerns.

The Tenderloin is vibrant and diverse. It is more of a true neighborhood—where life is active on the streets and people know one another—than any other part of the city. But we all know that we have our problems.

Beyond some fairly simple administrative measures that could be taken with relative ease (we could, for example, use more public toilets, especially ones open 24 hours a day), there are economic vitality issues, quality of life issues, and our enormously high unemployment rate.

Solutions that don’t come out of the Reagan or Giuliani playbooks are possible. The Tenderloin and mid-Market have far too many empty residential units and storefronts. There has been talk, from time to time, of a blight tax, which would push landlords who speculate on gentrification and avoid renting out at market rates to get those units back on the market, consequently driving down both residential rents, and mitigating a substantial barrier to entry for small businesses.

Similarly, small rent subsidies (which Shaw has opposed for families but supported for single adults) help low-income families to access market-rate housing, and free up finances to spend in the neighborhood, thus stimulating local economic growth. These subsidies have already been proven successful in San Francisco, and cost less per family than the provision of temporary shelter.

Police sweeps have been used time and again to address drug dealing in the neighborhood. This has only ever resulted in the replacement of one group of dealers with another. Most recently, this has led to an increase in violence. Economically, such sweeps are simply unrealistic: As long as demand for addictive substances remains inelastic, providers will find a means of making their money off of the existing market. Part of the solution is easier access to recovery programs. Right now, there’s a waitlist of a few months for *every* rehabilitation program. Another portion of the solution may be safe use facilities, much like those in use in Vancouver, and championed by our neighborhood’s popular former police captain, Gary Jiménez. Less money spent on drugs means more money flowing into sectors of our neighborhood and city economies that lead to real growth.

But we also need to recognize that the Tenderloin will never be—and *should* never be—a Hayes Valley. As long as we have the economic system that we do in the United States, we will have poverty. And as long as we have poor people, poor people will need accessible housing. As things stand now, housing in all US cities tends to be economically segregated. With residents of the Marina going absolutely apoplectic over the arrival of housing for homeless youth in that neighborhood, it’s hard to imagine full economic integration happening any time soon. This means that we *need* neighborhoods such as the Tenderloin for poor people. Shaw’s vision of a bleached-toothed neighborhood of yoga-practicing IT professionals cannot, ultimately, be a Tenderloin comprised of the same people who live here now. That doesn’t mean that conditions cannot change: We of the Tenderloin need real solutions for bathrooms, for addiction, for bedbugs, for irresponsible landlords, for domestic violence, for youth who don’t have room to play or do homework, for cultural alienation between people who don’t share a language, for unemployment, for poverty. And we can create those solutions.

This is not unprecedented: In the first part of the 20th Century, when unemployment was even more daunting than it is now, poor people pushed the Federal government to create jobs. Through the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps, we addressed unemployment nationally, and stimulated the economy through the creation of work and the production of expendable income. These efforts, combined with the production demands of the Second World War and the post-War period, brought one of the world’s biggest countries out of the weakest era in its economic history. The solutions for the 2010s may be very different from the solutions for the 1930s. But what has not changed is that those solutions need to come from us, and not from a resident of the Berkeley Hills who wants to recreate our neighborhood in his own suburban image.

RIGHTS 2A ROOF OPEN CALL

By L.J. Cirilo

Are you homeless, formerly homeless, ever resided in a shelter in San Francisco, or just plain disgusted by our city’s lack of affordable housing? Have you ever been mistreated or discriminated against while residing in a shelter, or been denied services from a shelter, know someone who has, or have a disability and been denied an accommodation? Then WE WANT YOU! Come to the Rights 2a Roof workgroup and join us in our struggle to demand better treatment, improve the shelter system, and force our law makers to make the creation of more affordable housing for all homeless a priority! We, the members of Right 2a Roof, have fought long and hard and have won many battles with the City of San Francisco and will continue to do so until every single man, woman and child living outside, in a car or doubled up in someone else’s garage or SRO, are provided permanent affordable housing! This is a human right and we demand our government to recognize the plight of the poor and say, “This is unacceptable!” No one should ever have to sleep outside, on a cold and wet concrete slab, under a bridge, or in a tent city just because they are poor and cannot afford the exorbitant rent in San Francisco. We as a community cannot and should not accept this. We at the Coalition on Homeless do not accept this. Currently, several homeless services are on the chopping block in an effort to balance this year’s budget. We at Right 2a Roof say “No more cuts! We have no bone marrow for you!”

Over the past several years Rights 2a Roof has successfully created 32 standards of care for all city funded shelters, passed legislation to halt the runaround by lengthening shelter stays, and we also recently won a lawsuit that led to greatly improved access and conditions for people with disabilities. We worked hard to pass the Shelter Monitoring Committee legislation which now ensures that each city funded shelter is inspected and that the conditions of the shelters are tracked, which has succeeded in exposing and correcting countless problems within the shelter system.

However, our work is not done. Currently we are working on ending the biometric imaging that makes it mandatory for all shelter seekers to have their picture taken, along with thumbprint imaging just to get a bed to sleep in. We are also going to the ballot this November to seek the removal of shelter from the definition of housing for Care Not Cash recipients, and to have a more equitable bed ratio for people who are not on the Care Not Cash program, thus decreasing the amount of time someone must stand in line to get a shelter bed. We are also conducting a housing survey to gain valuable information from those that are currently homeless, in order to shed light on the many obstacles which prevent people from accessing real affordable low-income and permanent housing. We at Rights 2a Roof are a dedicated group of homeless and formerly homeless folks who are working hard to ensure a safe and welcoming shelter system for homeless individuals and families where human, disability and civil rights are up held, where respectful staffing reflects the diversity of the community served and where there is accountability to the standards of care. We need your help – Come join the struggle!

We meet every Wednesday from noon to 2:00pm at the Coalition on Homelessness, 468 Turk St. For more information go to our website: www.cohsf.org or contact Right 2a Roof at (415)346-3740

The Story of the Idriss Stelly Foundation (Part 1 of 3)

POOR correspondent – Posted on 18 June 2010

by Marlon Crump


“Idriss was a beautiful baby boy. At age 4, he was mad at me, and said Mom, you better watch out, because next time around, I will be your mother.” I listened intently as mesha Monge -Irizarry lovingly remembered her son Idriss, whose life was brutally stolen by the San Francisco Police Department.

“When he was 20, I bought our home in the Bayview Hunter’s Point,” she continued. “Kids from Double Rock came to challenge him, curious about what a 220 pound Black man with a huge Mastiff/pit-bull dog named Nanok was up to, asking where he was from. Idriss responded, “Hang on for a second,” ran inside and came back out, with a folding table, two chairs, and a chess game. Soon enough the kids would come regularly and knock on our door, asking Where is E? I want to learn how to play chess!”

Listening to Mesha recall fond memories about her son, I couldn’t help thinking about my own past and the many struggles I’ve endured throughout my life even before my own arrival here to the Bay Area, in San Francisco from my native hometown of Cleveland, Ohio.

Luckily I met Mesha two years ago, one of the most incredible, compassionate, and monumental women in the world. It was during one of the most difficult periods I’ve ever experienced in my life. I had just survived a brutal encounter with the San Francisco Police Department and had begun to seek counseling and treatment for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as well as police accountability for their unjust treatment.

During my search, a friend told me about the Idriss Stelley Foundation (ISF.) I immediately called. I’ll never forget the first thing Mesha, the founder and director of the organization, said to me: “I am so very sorry that happened to you, Marlon, we will do everything to help you. That’s a promise!”

Since then, Mesha has become one of my dearest, closest friends and the ISF continues to help and support me in my mental health struggles.

The Idriss Stelley Foundation is the one of the very few non-profit, grassroots organizations based in San Francisco that courageously addresses the deeply painful issues surrounding police brutality.

The foundation has changed many lives and effectively raised public awareness about police brutality, racial profiling, police violence against seniors, people with physical and mental health disabilities, and especially the unjustified use of deadly force.

My interview of ISF, Mesha, and Idriss Scott Stelley, himself (in spirit), was going to be a very special interview.

I decided that doing the interview was especially crucial because the mainstream media has only written Idriss up as just another young, black statistic killed by a hail of police gunfire. I, along with the entire staff of POOR, strongly oppose that misconception and feel that the truth must be told. Most who never really knew him only remember how he died, but I felt that it was time to set the record straight.
My family of POOR Magazine, predominately Tiny aka Lisa Gray-Garcia, Leroy Moore, and Jewnbug (who was very close to Idriss) knew Mesha better than anyone in our family, including myself. Idriss’ heart was totally devoted to his family and friends, even up to the very day his life was stolen from him by numerous San Francisco Police Department Officers from the Bayview and Mission precincts and the TL Police Task Force (I will explain this terrifying account, later, in the true summary version, from Parts II-III of this story.) Ultimately, everyone that picks up a newspaper, turns on his or her television or radio, or logs in to the internet news needs to know how precious Idriss Stelley really was to those who knew him.

It was an extremely painful for me and for POOR Magazine (a grassroots organization that fights 24/7 against the evils of poverty injustices and re-framing KKKorporate Media News) to interview Mesha about her non-profit grassroots foundation, its history, and its organizational construction borne from the very blood of Idriss Scott Stelley.

I arrived at Mesha’s home in the Bayview Hunter’s Point community on December 3rd, 2007. After a warm welcome of hugs and kisses, from Mesha and Idriss’ pet dog, Nanok, I began her interview about ISF’s mission statement, history, and the successful impact it has had on everyone in BVHP (and possibly the universe.)

Instead of a story, The Idriss Stelley Foundation deserves a mini-series, as there is just far too much of this organization’s history that has been overlooked, misunderstood, and ignored by KKKorporate Media, and media in general.

Alex Haley, author of (space)Roots, exposed the whole callous origins and aftermaths of the inhumane slave trade in a 1977 television series. Today, over thirty years later, POOR re-introduces The Idriss Stelley Foundation Story, exposing failed proper procedural protocols and training in law enforcement’s response with unjustified use of deadly force, against people experiencing psychiatric crisis.

This is totally ironic, the concurrence of Idriss’ birth and the television worldly launching of Roots. From a metaphorical perspective, between the two, there are more root causes of hidden, neglected, and ignored evils that exist within this universe than many care to acknowledge.
Mesha Mongé-Irizarry was born December 5th, 1947, in the Pyrenees Mountains, the Basque Nation. The Basque Country Basque Euskal Herria is a cultural region in the western Pyrenees Mountains at the border between France and Spain, extending down to the coast of the Bay of Biscay (Cantabrian Sea.)

Her mother, Suzanne Mongé, was the head of a health organization, while her father René Mongé, was the editor of Social Informations Magazine in Paris, France. Mr. Mongé was also a playwright.

Mesha was the Director of Hayward Emergency Domestic Violence & Homeless Shelters when her child was killed. In 1968, Mesha was the treasurer of National Union of French Students (UNEF), during the socialist revolution uniting the Labor and Student movements, crushed by General De Gaulle in only two weeks.

In 1975, following her arrival in San Francisco, California, she was the program director of various community organizations, Women Inc, La Casa De Las Madres for Battered Women , Shanti, AIDS Services for people with HIV, and Lodestar, post-incarceration HIV services for women diagnosed with the deadly virus.

Mesha’s resume proved to be even more extensive, as she holds various degrees and licenses in Public Law and psychology. She’s even trained law enforcement officials and sheriff’s deputies in the areas of mental health for twenty years. From the tender age of 14 to this day, she has been involved with progressive social issues.

“I taught Idriss that it is NEVER too early to commit to social justice,” said Mesha with a vibrant, sunny smile, as she began to summarize the Birth of Idriss Scott Stelley.

To Be Continued

Governor Brown’s Budget Cuts: Women’s Lives on the Chopping Block
Sisters United Front for Survival

Citing California’s $26 billion shortfall, the state legislature on March 15 approved $9 billion in cuts to an already-frayed safety net. Hardest hit in the flood of reductions are women. Lawmakers justified their actions as painful but necessary. But, the truth is that in this economic crisis, as always, the state is supporting greed over need, sacrificing the most vulnerable while protecting massive business sub-sidies. It’s time to change priorities!

• Balancing the budget on the backs of women and the disadvantaged

Most severely impacted is Cal-WORKs, which provides cash assis-tance and job training to the poor, most of whom are single mothers. Over 1,000 families in San Francisco would lose assistance in San Francisco and grants would be reduced by almost $100 a month. The loss of other services adds to the misery of women and the indigent. Hacked are medical programs, in-home care, mental health, early childhood and developmentally disabled services.
The state is also slashing the budgets of community colleges and the California State University system which serve workingclass students, a majority of whom are women. And, a campaign to vilify public workers and their hard-earned pensions threatens the well-being of those lucky enough to have jobs.

• Switch the priorities: Tax the Rich and Corporations!

Welfare moms have long been a Republican target as a symbol of “Big Government.” But the hack-and-slash mayhem emanating from Sacramento now is Democrat-led. With the June special election eliminated, the Governor will be looking for ways to address the remaining deficit. More budget cuts are likely, possibly totaling as much as $12.5 billion. Once again, workers and the poor will pay and pay and pay. All this because neither party will call for big business to pay its fair share!
The deficit exists in large measure because corporations and banks are paying less and less into the system. Wealth is being transferred from the working class to the richest few.

• It’s time to reverse the flow!
• Enact an oil severance tax California, where Chevron is headquartered, is the only state in the entire world that doesn’t tax extraction (a 9.9% tax = $1.2 bil./yr.)
• Close corporate tax loopholes ($3-5 bil./yr.)
• Eliminate war expenditures (CA share = $14.5 bil./yr.). U.S. Out of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya!
• Reduce prison spending Release all women incarcerated for defending themselves and their children from their abusers; cancel the Three Strikes law.
• Stop privatization and contracting out; use union labor ($34 bil./yr.)
• Reinstate the top income tax bracket to 11% ($4 bil./yr.)

We demand the State restore social services regardless of immigration status; expand CalWORKs, provide childcare & job training!

Issued by: Sisters United Front for Survival (A project of Radical Women) 415-864-1278, baradicalwomen@earthlink.net, www.radicalwomen.org

A Message from the Chair…
By L.J. Cirilo

I wanted to take this opportunity to introduce myself and personally invite my fellow d6 neighbors, anyone currently or formerly residing in a city funded shelter, all shelter service providers and stakeholders, along with any other concerned community members who may be interested in learning more about the conditions homeless people are facing in the current shelter system and the overall work of the Committee, to attend the next public meeting of the Shelter Monitoring Committee.

We will be discussing some very important topics such as the 2011-2012 Budget as it relates to homeless services, I will be presenting a draft budget letter for the full Committee’s approval, as well as the presentation of the Jan-Feb-March 2011 Quarterly Report. To find a full agenda for May’s meeting and more about the SMC please go to: http://www.sfgov3.org/index.aspx?page=2779

Mission Statement
The Shelter Monitoring Committee is an independent vehicle charged with documenting the conditions of shelters and resource centers to improve the health, safety, and treatment of residents, clients, staff, and the homeless community. The Committee’s mission is to undertake this work recognizing individual human rights and promoting a universal standard of care for shelters and resource centers in the City and County of San Francisco.

Bob Dylan’s latest album, Christmas In The Heart, is an unusual collection of Christmas standards. All proceeds from the album will go to support homeless services. Dylan granted an interview exclusive to members of the North American Street Newspaper Association to talk about the album.

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.

It’s common, if infrequently articulated, knowledge that homelessness isn’t good for you. Homelessness is accompanied by a substantially higher mortality rate than has the population at large, difficulty obtaining employment, and enormous social stigma.

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »