When I was 23 years old, I overheard a snatch of a phone conversation one afternoon between my mother and her older sister — my Aunt G.R., which stood for Georgia Ruth.
“‘Guess what, G.R.? Kristi loves camping,’” my mother said, with a cutting emphasis on the last word. She didn’t have to add how stupid she thought it was.
The remark stuck with me, but I didn’t understand until two decades later, in 2012, when I received a cache of black and white photos in the mail from my cousin after her mother — my Aunt G.R. — passed away. The pictures were of my mother and G.R. when they were little girls in West Texas, along with their mother and father and other families.
My mother Dorothy was born in Desdemona, Texas, the short-lived home to one of the top-producing oil wells during the Lone Star State’s early 20th-century boom. There is no Desdemona today.
In one photo my grandfather, in a suit and hat, holds my mother as a baby. He’s standing between a car and the support rope of a canvas tent. Behind them is a patch of trees with long leafy branches. They could be setting up camp, as there’s a pile of canvas behind them.
In another picture my mother, curls in her hair, is standing with G.R., who sits in the dirt nearby, holding a cart that could be a stroller. They’re in front of what appear to be workers’ barracks. There are trees, but no sidewalks or yards — just dirt with weeds here and there.
In yet another photo, my aunt, mother, and another child are standing in a field with trees and scrub brush all around. They’re all squinting into what must have been a glaring Texas sun.
The fields and dirt yards were their play areas, and the barracks and tents were often their homes. My aunt and mother, the only siblings in the family, had a father who worked as a wildcatter during the Texas oil boom early in last century.
In other words, they were homeless for much of her childhood.
Covering homelessness in San Francisco the last three years for The Frisc, I’ve periodically replayed in my head my mother’s Texas drawl, mocking my affinity for spending recreational time in a tent.
Before the pandemic, we often heard about our new Gilded Age as the gap widened between rich and poor. The pandemic has made things even worse.
I don’t just think about my mother’s remark, I also think about how most of her childhood spanned the boom of the late Roaring 20s and the subsequent bust of the Great Depression.
The affordability crisis
Life for my mother and her family was very uncertain, and having a roof over their heads — and staying together in the same place — wasn’t always a sure thing. Knowing about this uncertainty, one generation removed from my own life, has added depth and context to what I see around me.
A lot of the homelessness in San Francisco and across California is the result of a housing affordability crisis. Over the last decade, rents for two-bedroom apartments in San Francisco increased between 37 percent and 48 percent, depending on the real estate index. Over the same time, the minimum wage in San Francisco nearly doubled to $16.32, but that yields an after-tax income of roughly $29,000 — not enough to afford even a studio apartment in the city.
In the 2019 biennial one-night census of unhoused people in San Francisco, known as the point-in-time count, two of three respondents said the main obstacle to permanent housing was that they couldn’t afford rent.
The total of more than 8,000 people on the streets or in unstable housing situations was 17 percent higher than the previous tally, in 2017, and many observers felt it was an undercount. (The 2021 count was canceled because of COVID safety concerns.)
This jump was all the more startling because it happened on the watch of the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, or HSH, created in 2016 to streamline services previously done by several city bureaucracies.
A reckoning
When then-Mayor Ed Lee inaugurated the new, consolidated department, he boasted that it would solve the homelessness crisis.
In August 2020, the investigative arm of San Francisco’s legislative branch released a scathing report: HSH was falling very short of its goals. Most of the research for the analysis happened before the pandemic. Coronavirus then shut the city down and made the situation worse.
But the pandemic has also forced a reckoning. Many people on the streets and in shelters, who couldn’t stay home and stay safe, got emergency hotel rooms — although not as quickly or as many as homeless advocates and some officials wanted. There is little argument now that the city must spend money, much more of it, but also more wisely and efficiently, to make a dent in the problem. State and federal programs must play a role too. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention made it clear that having a roof over one’s head is a health-care issue.
In San Francisco, the mayor and supervisors have agreed on a new budget with more than $1 billion dedicated to homelessness services and housing.
So what have we learned in the past 15 months? We’ve avoided widespread death, but our displacement and affordability crisis continues unabated.
When I was planning a series of stories for The Frisc, with help from the Annenberg Center of Health Journalism’s Impact Fund, I realized that you can’t look forward without understanding the past. In this case, I needed to explain to readers how the city’s bright outlook for its homelessness department, which promised to tap into the city’s top-notch data and tech expertise, could fall so short of doing its job. I also needed to track the department’s progress since the 2020 report took it to task.
Another story soon rose to the surface: The city had hundreds of housing units waiting empty for qualified homeless folks to move in. But the people were stuck in limbo. The system wasn’t working, with nearly 900 vacancies at one point, all while families like Nathan Caine, his fiancée Cimber Sims, and their baby Nova waited in shelters.
(After our story, Caine, Sims, and Nova finally moved into a one-bedroom apartment in April, using a rental subsidy that will expire in 18 to 24 months.)
Digging more deeply, I learned that HSH is often reluctant to give up more than the bare essentials of information. It was only thanks to an advisory board, chaired by a formerly homeless veteran named Del Seymour, that many details about the vacancies and unspent grant money emerged. Seymour knows how to crystalize what’s at stake, just as he did earlier this year after HSH officials tried to explain the hundreds of empty housing units.
“There’s 100 people laying outside tonight that could really be inside tonight,” Seymour said then, “so I’m asking now that the department listen to these [homeless service] providers. Every one of them said they’re willing to sit down with you to talk about how to fix this thing.”
It’s really important to listen to people who’ve experienced homelessness. They know what’s working and what isn’t.
Other kinds of roofs
Even with a flood of city, state, and federal funds for housing, it is clear we won’t be able to build or convert hotels fast enough to meet demand. There are simply too many people, and construction and conversion takes a long time (especially here in SF).
For several reasons, there’s a big push to get the chronically homeless into supportive housing. Many need mental health treatment, but our system is stretched thin. I reported on the mental health provider shortage through the lens of Amanda Ling, a UCSF nurse practitioner who spends part of her time in the Tenderloin.
Others who can’t find stable housing but might not need as high a level of support could be left outside looking in. So what are the plans for them? I traveled to San Jose, which has built two “tiny home” villages as alternatives to multiunit permanent housing. It was working for Hoang Nguyen, who commuted from his tiny home to his Amazon warehouse job by bicycle every day. Could San Francisco pursue similar alternatives?
As I talked to Ling about her clients, to Caine and his family about their frustration, to Nguyen in his tiny home, and so many others, it struck me how diverse the homeless population is. Some people, like homeless families, are harder to see than others.
They might live in their cars or RVs — the largest increase in homeless residents in the 2019 count. Or like my mother and her family, they might live doubled up with other families. As I learned later, whenever my grandfather’s work didn’t provide family housing, my grandmother scrambled to find housekeeping jobs where her kids could live with her.
Whether it’s a poor family in Texas in the 1930s, a single man suffering from substance abuse in the Tenderloin, or an LGBTQ youth kicked out of their home who comes here looking for a new form of family, unhoused people are not a monolithic population. As varied as the reasons are for people winding up without a roof over their heads, so too should be the solutions.
Kristi Coale (@unazurda) is a San Francisco-based freelance writer and radio producer for various outlets, including KALW’s Crosscurrents and the National Radio Project’s Making Contact. The USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism 2020 Impact Fund has supported her homelessness reporting for The Frisc.