I happened to meet Dexter Greene late one evening in June, when I was doing research for a story about the lighting design of a new electrical substation in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood. The small plaza next to the substation had become a homeless encampment; two men were eating dinner in the back of a truck container.
Another man, bundled in a heavy jacket, was standing around. To ease my own apprehension, I said hello and let him know what had brought me there.
He began to ask questions that revealed a surprising knowledge of construction: How were the lights on the concrete benches getting power? Were the fiberglass panels protecting the lights enough to keep dust out?
I became as curious about him as he was about the story I was working on. He had no qualms talking about himself, and it didn’t take long to get his name and the reason he was so tuned into his surrounding environment. It turns out that Greene, 41, is a “scrapper” — and in the good years foraging for scrap metal in San Francisco, he says he was able to make a small fortune, which he then spent.
The benches by the substation, he noted, were a convenient spot to lay out his wire-stripping tools.
It also turns out that Greene has lived mostly in vehicles and abandoned buildings, all while struggling with mental illness and methamphetamine addiction.
His formative years were scarred by instability and abuse, which appear to have had long-lasting consequences. Daniel Wlodarczyk, a UCSF doctor who has provided street outreach services via a medical van for 30 years, says a history like Greene’s is not unusual. “Everybody has their own story, but having a traumatic upbringing and suffering subsequent traumas is very common for people living on the street, particularly those with addictions,” Wlodarczyk observes.
San Francisco has more than 850,000 residents. At last count, nearly three years ago, more than 8,000 were homeless, either on the streets or in temporary shelters. The next official count is due next month, and no one will be surprised if it shows a significant uptick.
The root of homelessness is, of course, a lack of homes, and our city, region, and state have struggled to build enough for everyone. But as Dexter Greene’s story demonstrates — and as Dr. Wlodarczyk notes — other supportive services are just as important.
San Francisco’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH) can offer other help, including substance use and mental health treatment, primary medical care, job training, and public benefit access — so long as all the stars align. Even if HSH staff connect with a person experiencing homelessness and have capacity to make additional assessments, the individual also has to be motivated. That’s not always a given.
Samurai sword and trust issues
I met Greene again in September in his neighborhood, the north end of Bayview-Hunters Point. It’s miles away from the flashpoint of the Tenderloin, where drugs and homelessness have spurred the mayor to declare a controversial state of emergency, but the same problems persist here.
Greene’s makeshift home was a recently purchased refrigerated truck box, also known as a “reefer,” without the truck. Greene had furnished the interior with an upholstered bench that approximated a bed and some metal garage shelving.
As we talked, he was trying to wire together a solar panel and battery for lighting and charging his tablet. He had also bought a katana, a three-foot-long, brightly polished samurai sword, for security purposes. During our interviews, he was on high alert for unfamiliar sounds, jumping up a couple times when he thought he heard someone.
A few days before, he said, he had invited a meth dealer out of the cold, and she had taken his wallet with his ID and food stamps card. He said he knew where she could be found and planned to pay her a visit with his katana. The rampant theft in the community made it hard to trust people, he told me.
Greene’s early childhood would have given anyone trust issues. He says his mother, Colleen Nicholson, was addicted to heroin and gave birth to him in the SF General Hospital parking lot, and he had to detox in the hospital as a newborn. His biological father, Robert Mason, was in prison at the time. Nicholson was married to another man, Richard Greene, also a heroin addict. Two years later, they had a daughter, Ola.
In 1984, Richard Greene went to prison, and Nicholson lost custody of the children. Between the ages of four and nine, Greene recalls a blur of foster homes and cars that came to pick him and his sister up every few days: “I had to look out for her because both my parents were heavily into drugs.”
Greene recalls running away from foster care at the age of eight to be with his mother, who he says was dealing crystal meth to support her heroin habit. During that stay, Greene adds, he tried meth for the first time.
(Greene was eager to tell stories about himself, even unflattering ones. I have tried to confirm them all independently. Some that I could not confirm are still included here. I have left out assertions that are clearly not true. Greene gave me permission to discuss his medical history with professionals who have treated him, but the SF Department of Public Health refused to let staff speak about him.)
In 1988, Richard Greene, who had moved to Texas after completing rehab and getting out of jail, took custody of the children and remarried. “That’s when the bad things started to happen,” according to Dexter Greene, who didn’t want to go into details, except to say that he has been diagnosed with PTSD.
Greene’s sister, Ola Murphy (née Greene), whom I reached in Texas, says their stepmother was an alcoholic and very abusive toward Dexter, once prompting Ola to call the police. Murphy, now a stay-at-home mother of two young boys, also recalls a complete lack of parental supervision: “We grew up without any rules. We could go out in the middle of the night at age eight.”
At age 13 and still in Texas, Dexter says he and a friend stole a truck and took it joyriding. They were caught, and that began his involvement with the criminal justice system, including two years of prison for what he says was the involuntary manslaughter of a cop. (In Texas, juvenile criminal records are restricted, and I was unable to confirm Greene’s convictions.)
Urban mining
After leaving prison in 1997, Greene returned to SF. He reconnected with his biological father, Mason, who was living in a small truck in the Dogpatch. Mason went scrapping at industrial sites like the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard looking for copper, one of the most valuable metals in the scrap world, and Greene followed suit.
By his own estimates, there are at least 100 scrappers like him in San Francisco. The United States is one of the world’s largest exporters of scrap metals, sending out nearly $3 billion in scrap copper in 2019. Scrapping can be part of both the informal (legal) and underground (illegal) economy, and many scrappers employ both approaches, according to Michael Chohaney, a geographer who has studied “urban mining” in Detroit. The legal practice involves sifting through refuse for valuable materials, or being hired to gather them from construction or demolition sites, while the criminal enterprise involves breaking and entering buildings and stealing materials.
These days, Greene says he only scraps legally. “Primarily I get it out of dumpsters, or when I have permission. I don’t go and tear out buildings now because it’s dangerous and wrong,” he says.
The nature of the business still requires discretion, and typical working hours for him are between 10 pm and 5 am, requiring many layers of warm clothes. But even on the legal side of the fence, scrapping requires discretion and can be dangerous. “Along with the physical risk, exposure to chemicals like asbestos is another big concern,” says Chohaney.
Greene says he once made $15,000 from a haul of high-grade copper wire. He spent it on vehicles and drugs. ‘That’s what it was about back then.’
A decade ago, as the Dogpatch and Central Waterfront continued their post-industrial transition, plenty of vacant warehouses sat waiting to be demolished. During peak years, Greene says he could make as much as $20,000 to $30,000 a week — a staggering but not implausible amount of money, confirms Chohaney: “I can believe it. Ten years ago, metal prices were incredibly high, and guys who were selling drugs [in Detroit] put a pause on that and started taking copper out.”
Greene says his best haul came in 2011, when CJ Fagoni purportedly sold his meat warehouse in the Dogpatch to a housing developer. As Greene tells it, he and a friend had been camping out in a building next door and were on good terms with Fagoni, who told them he was leaving. “I gave him a big hug and started crying,” adds Greene. “He started crying too and said, ‘I’ve been here since I got off the ship [from Italy]!’ He was 98 years old. He was crying tears of joy.” Greene adds that Fagoni showed him the bounty of his sale: a $5 million check.
As Greene remembers, Fagoni asked the demolition crew to pull the wiring and pile it up for Greene and his friend. The warehouse yielded 30,000 pounds of copper wire, some which was the highest grade, and Dexter says his half of the haul was around $15,000. He spent it on vehicles and drugs: “That’s what it was about back then.” He and his partner called their scrap-for-dope scheme “Scrapolapolopagus.”
When the warehouses were mostly gone, Greene says his friend wanted to burglarize buildings, so the two went their separate ways.
In and out of housing
Greene has lived in vehicles, tents, and abandoned buildings for most of his adult life, but in recent years has relied on city shelters and supportive housing, or at least has tried. His limited success is an example of how SF’s homelessness crisis isn’t simply to be fixed by giving people roofs over their heads — it requires that and much more.
Greene is part of the city’s chronically homeless population, estimated at more than 3,000 people, or 38 percent of those unhoused, according to the city’s 2019 survey. For the last few years, he has been in and out of Navigation Centers, the specialized shelters that provide an array of health services as well as stays that last longer than at the typical overnight shelters.
In 2015, he was at the end of a 30-day stay at the “Nav” on Bayshore Boulevard, but got into an altercation with a staffer. Greene says he attacked the man for stealing his cell phone, and so to this day, the site has a 500-foot stay-away order in place against him. (We were not able to confirm the order against Greene, but an HSH spokesperson said that stay-away orders are used to counter threats against staff members.)
These days, Greene’s got a dormitory bed at the Central Waterfront Navigation Center on 25th Street, yet he splits time between there and his “reefer” box about a mile away. “I want to be housed, but the Nav has all these new rules. I can’t bring in my tools, I can’t bring in anything new, I can only have one visitor a month,” says Greene. (I reached out to Episcopal Community Services, which manages the center, but haven’t heard back.)
By his own account, Greene could be living in a Tenderloin apartment if not for the stress caused by a neighbor. When the pandemic hit and the city shut down the shelter system, Greene says the city first moved him into an emergency shelter-in-place hotel, and after three months, he got his own room at the Senator, a city-owned SRO with subsidized housing.
However, Greene says he voluntarily moved out because the tenant above him in Room 706 continually stomped on the floor. The last straw, he adds, was when her feet finally came through the ceiling. (HomeRise, the property manager, did not respond to requests for comment.)
The damage done
Greene isn’t scrapping anymore. He now relies on his monthly SSI check of $1,041.04 and food stamps to purchase necessities and support his drug use. He calls himself a “functioning addict,” smoking about a gram of meth a day to combat lethargy and ADHD. During our conversations, he didn’t hesitate to puff occasionally on a glass “bubble.”
Greene recently sold his samurai sword. ‘You know what, I don’t need this. I’m going to get into trouble.’
He says he has talked to a doctor about quitting and believes a prescription medication could help. (As of earlier this year, there were no FDA-approved drugs to treat meth addiction.) During one interview, he fell asleep in the middle of our conversation for about five minutes. “For me, it’s maintenance,” Greene explains. “I can’t do what I normally do and get on with my life.”
Even at maintenance levels, though, regular meth use causes extremely high blood pressure and a fast pulse rate, “and over time can lead to heart failure,” says UCSF’s Wlodarczyk, noting there is an SF General Hospital clinic just for people who have developed heart failure from using stimulants. “It’s very sad to see young people whose hearts are functioning at 25 percent of what they should be.”
Greene also smokes two to three packs of cigarettes a day, putting him in the “heavy smoker” category.
Dr. Margot Kushel, director of the UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations, has said that, for unhoused people, “50 is the new 75.” Greene’s biological parents are no longer living. Nicholson died at age 44 in 1995 from a combination of sedatives and alcohol, listed as a suicide on her death certificate; and Mason died at age 58 in 2012 from liver cancer.
Back in Texas, his sister Ola Murphy knows there is more to her brother than labels, descriptions, and disorders. “He’s extremely smart and kind-hearted, and it drives me crazy that he is on drugs,” she says. “Hopefully there’s still hope.”
When I last talked to Greene in October, he told me he had gotten rid of the katana instead of going after the dealer who stole his ID: “After I had it professionally sharpened, I dropped a piece of my hair on it and it split right down the middle. [I thought] ‘You know what, I don’t need this. I’m going to get into trouble.’”
Greene says he sold the sword for a quarter gram of meth. He wasn’t sure what the future held for him, but was glad that he was back on the HSH list for permanent housing.
Perhaps Greene’s biggest challenge is to ask others for help. It’s not likely to be easy after a life of so much self-reliance and mistrust, but maybe he’s ready. Perhaps that’s why, on that night in June when we first started talking, he was willing to start telling me his story.
Lydia Lee writes about architecture and urban planning for various publications. Previous stories for The Frisc included an interview with architect David Baker and a feature about the proposed redesign of Civic Center.