Homelessness

THE INTERSECTION looks at change in the Bay Area through physical intersections and street corners — where different cultures, desires and histories meet every day. 

Season one focuses on Golden Gate Avenue and Leavenworth Street in the Tenderloin, a neighborhood that some feel is changing, while others feel it’s getting worse. What you’ll hear this is season is what producer David Boyer found while spending the better part a year getting to know the people who live and work nearby. This is episode one — listen to more. 

Famed mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade sings in this weekend’s Bay Area performances of Street Requiem, a choral contata to call attention to the plight of people living on our streets and in other insecure conditions around the globe.  On this week's Out in the Bay (7pm Thursday), Australian co-creators Andy Payne and Kathleen McGuire – conductor and artistic director of the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus from 2000 to 2010 – play selections from Street Requiem’s World Premiere in Melbourne last year and speak with host Eric Jansen about their creative collaboration and their work to help people in need. (Broadcast 7pm PDT Thursday 8/27/15 on kalw.org + 91.7fm SF.)

The next time you're in San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf, if you look carefully you’ll see a symbol of this support: a black cross drawn in marker. It’s the coat of arms for the Black Sheep, the area’s unofficial homeless first aid squad.

March 29 was the last night Delilah Soto slept on the street. She’s a recovering heroin addict who’s been living in a tent in San Francisco’s Mission District with her girlfriend, Rocky Anderson, and their dog Sparta. That night, she learned they had another choice.

Nearby, 1950 Mission St. was dead space. A closed-down school site sitting on premium San Francisco real estate, begging to be repurposed. On March 30, the gates opened on a new pilot program called the “Navigation Center”.

On the  April 13th edition of Your Call, we’ll have a conversation about the documentary The Homestretch, which follows three homeless teens in Chicago as they try to stay in school, graduate, and build a future. Over 2. 5 million children were homeless at some time in 2013, according to the National Center on Family Homelessness. Compared to previous years, this is the largest number of homeless children in the US ever. How should we tackle child homelessness? It’s Your Call, with Rose Aguilar and you.

Guests:

There are at least 7,000 homeless people in San Francisco each night, and only enough shelter space to house a small fraction of them. This is one of the reasons San Francisco recently held the first Town Hall to End Homelessness in which city officials and community leaders renewed their commitment to do just that.

But if you’re going to talk ways to end homelessness in San Francisco, why not start by talking to the people with the most experience?

Jacqueline Cooper is a lot like you.

“I'm not any different than anybody else,” she says. “I'm a mother, I'm a daughter, I'm a sister, a wife at one point.”

However, there’s more to her than that. For one, she’s a retired United States Marine Corps sergeant. For another, she’s dealt with mental illness throughout her life.

The latest count of homeless individuals in San Francisco revealed that 6,436 people in the city are without a home. That is a number that has barely changed over the past few years, even though the city spends more than 165 million dollars a year on homeless services.

The gravel edge of the railroad tracks that backs on to a warehouse wasn’t the end of the line for Marshawn Lewis and his neighbors. In fact, they’ve already scattered.

Crews dismantled a large homeless encampment in San Jose Thursday. Called the “Jungle,” it’s thought to be the biggest homeless camp in the country. The camp was home to up to three hundred people who occupied over sixty acres of a park along a creek bed. But San Jose has been under pressure from different agencies who say the Jungle is polluting the creek.

Early Thursday morning, Tamara Cockrell walked away from the Jungle, pushing a shopping cart piled high with all her belongings.

City Visions host Joseph Pace speaks with Bevan Dufty, Director of Housing Opportunities, Partnerships and Engagement, about what his office is doing to enhance homeless services -- and the complex challenges that persist in helping people to leave the streets.

Links:

San Francisco’s Ten Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness: Anniversary Report 2004 to 2014

Every day, more than two dozen people pass through a hackerspace in San Francisco’s Mission district called Noisebridge. At its broadest, “hackerspace” means a place where people can create and make things better. In practice, that often means computer programming. 

San Francisco  spends about $165 million each year on homeless services, according to a report requested by city Supervisor Mark Farrell. In an attempt to understand the cost effectiveness of those programs, Supervisor Farrell organized a series of eight hearings this spring, focused on homeless services in San Francisco. Farrell sat down with KALW's Ben Trefny to talk about what came out of those hearings.

Last fall we reported on the impromptu community that grew up on a spit of land in the East Bay known as the Albany Bulb. Homeless people put up tents and wooden sheds all over a grassy former landfill with gorgeous views of the Bay.

Bulb campers said that even though they didn’t have conventional houses, they did have a group of people that took care of one another, shared meals, and hauled water together.

On any given night in the U.S. there are more than 600,000 people who are homeless.  In San Francisco, the government estimates there are about 6,400 people living on the street or in shelters.  The numbers have increased only slightly over the past few years, but with the lack of housing in the city, many are wondering what the county is doing to help. Bevan Dufty,  works with the mayor's office as  the Director of Housing Opportunity, Partnerships and Engagement  or HOPE.

On the west side of the city of Albany, there’s a peninsula jutting into San Francisco Bay. It’s beautiful there, right on the water, with hiking trails and beaches looking directly out toward the Golden Gate Bridge. On that piece of land, there’s a broad hilly mound covered in brush, grass, trees, scattered concrete slabs, and rebar that’s come to be known as the Albany Bulb.

California has the largest concentration of homeless veterans in the nation, and in San Francisco, it’s likely that more than 700 homeless vets will sleep on the street or in shelters this Veterans Day. 

According to Bevan Dufty, director of San Francisco’s Housing, Opportunity, Partnerships and Engagement (HOPE) program, housing homeless veterans is a high priority for the city. And the number of homeless veterans has decreased since last year, thanks in part to the opening of a permanent supportive housing facility called Veterans Commons.

On Tuesday, San Francisco supervisors will consider legislation to close the city’s parks overnight. If passed, no one will be allowed in parks run by the city's recreation department between midnight and 5am.

About 3,000 homeless people live in Oakland. Their challenges include finding places to stay, food to eat, and something else that many people take for granted: self-care. Simple things like a shower or a haircut. If you don’t have a home, where do you go to clean up?  Sometimes, a sink in a public bathroom is the best you can find.

Nearly every city in the US has a Tenderloin. Here in San Francisco, it’s a neighborhood home to a dozen social service agencies, low-rent residential hotels, or SROs, and thousands of low-income – and-no-income – residents. Premature deaths from HIV/AIDS, heart disease, and complications from substance use and abuse mark the lives of many in the Tenderloin. It’s a part of the city known for open drug use. A place many people avoid and one where individual lives can be easily forgotten.

Imagine having nowhere to sleep, now, imagine that reality if you’re older, and maybe you suffer from illness or decreased mobility.

Bevan Dufty is Director of Housing, Opportunity, Partnership, and Engagement for the city of San Francisco. In his new role brainstorming solutions to the city’s stubborn homelessness problem, Dufty has come up with some pretty novel thoughts. We wanted to hear about some of the most innovative, so we invited him in for a segment we call “Radical Ideas.”

Joseph Luna woke up this morning in a sleeping bag under the Harrison Street on-ramp to Highway 101. He sleeps here when he needs to get out of the rain.

Luna does not sleep past eight because he'll get rousted by police. His sleeping spot is near a five-way intersection, in back of a city tow lot. In his morning routine, he will get up, stack the cardboard and shove his stuff into a big black duffel bag, the only bag he owns.

Just after midnight in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley, two men smoke cigarettes outside the gate of an abandoned school. They’re waiting for the right moment to break in.

“We’re looking to gain entry to a long-vacant private commercial building that’s been vacant at least four years,” says Matt Crain. “Tonight what we’re going to do is just go in through the back. I’m going to pick a padlock that’s on a side gate of the place, and if that goes smoothly then we’ll proceed to the back and see if there’s an open door or an open window, and just proceed from there.”

Finding an apartment in San Francisco these days is an uphill battle on any kind of budget. Craigslist ads and open houses can provoke hundreds of responses from people ready to compete for their share of the city’s scarce square footage, even at times willing to pay for months of rent in advance. For people without cash, things are a lot harder. Among those who find it most difficult are chronically homeless veterans.