COMMENTARY
Before George Floyd’s murder on Memorial Day sent Americans into the streets, San Francisco was briefly abuzz with the release of dozens of Mayor London Breed’s texts. It’s worth revisiting those texts now.
In many of them, Breed is prodding SFPD chief Bill Scott and others to deal with homeless people and encampments. Sometimes she notes “illegal activity,” sometimes she just wants folks gone: “Please have officers deal with the people on Masonic and Haight who are sleeping and sitting in the middle of the sidewalk.”
“We got it,” Scott responds.
In other words, she’s calling the cops on people often just for being homeless, which often means people of color. In San Francisco’s latest citywide survey, 37% of homeless people self-identified as African American, 18% as Latinx or Hispanic, and 22% as multiracial. Both Breed and Scott are African American.
The texts emerged from an anonymous public records request and were posted on a publicly accessible site. The requester received hundreds of texts in all between Breed and Scott, often with others copied. The requester collected a subset, mainly related to homelessness, here, most of which date back to July and August of 2019. (You can browse through the full collection here and here.)
Mayoral spokesman Andy Lynch acknowledged that “the police have a role in responding to some of these concerns,” but said the texts lack context. Because the SFPD produced them, he said, the correspondence seems centered around Breed and Scott. They were also addressed to others on the city’s homelessness response team, known as HSOC, who aren’t in law enforcement. (HSOC includes the police.)
The mayor’s office announced today that it will work on a “systematic” plan to respond to noncriminal activity with health professionals and others — but not police. The announcement was one of several promised police reforms.
There is another inequality that Breed’s texts need for context: The homelessness crisis is a housing crisis rooted in decades of local resistance to development and settlement, often blatantly racist.
But the texts — Lynch confirmed their veracity — also make clear that Breed has expected the police to deal with many incidents or situations, and that Scott was the point man. Breed comes off as callous (as people texting sometimes do), concerned about the effect on local businesses and the general optics, but says nothing about the welfare of the people she wants moved:
“We have tons of people down here shopping and no officers, cleaning crew or anything in sight.”
“Man sleeping on Hayes St. near Gough. Can someone come ASAP. I’m in the area having lunch”
“Just drove up Franklin, only spotted one tent. Good job!”
There are several demands to clear the 800 block of Market Street, which Breed in one text calls “our bread and butter.”
To underscore the point, the anonymous requester also included a 2017 email thread, in which Breed — president of the Board of Supervisors at the time — asks Mohammed Nuru, then head of SF’s Department of Public Works, and Jeff Kositsky, then the city’s top homelessness official, to help deal with a homeless woman on Noriega Street — nowhere near Breed’s district. Breed was forwarding a request channeled through local restaurant owner and political insider John Konstin.
The material was disseminated over Memorial Day weekend via the Twitter account @dizz_h (which carries the descriptor “Socialism or Barbarism. Homelessness / tenant organizing w @dsa_sf”). Contacted by The Frisc, the account holder said they did not make the records request and don’t know who did: “Someone searching for other data found those texts and pointed them [at] me.”
Breed’s texts begged a question when they emerged last month. Now, after two weeks of powerful protests and growing demands growing to “defund” police departments, that question is now a blinking 30-foot neon sign: Why are the police in this loop?
Moving homeless people into shelters; asking them to clean up an encampment; performing street medicine: Those aren’t police jobs, which Breed, Scott, and other officials have often acknowledged publicly. San Francisco has had other tools at its disposal for years, and Breed knows this, as her 2017 email to Nuru and Kositsky shows. (Important to note: Homelessness advocates have criticized DPW for dismantling camps and confiscating belongings. Under Kositsky, the city’s Homeless Outreach Team, tasked with on-the-street healthcare and shelter referrals, won a contract extension last fall despite questions about its efficacy.)
The reform announcement today promises work “over the next year” to create a system to divert “nonviolent” calls to “non-law enforcement agencies.” Police have often been first to respond to a call because they’re closer, Lynch said, but the “ideal is to have homeless service providers respond.”
When asked if the new reform pledges would divert police funds to specific homeless services, Lynch said he couldn’t discuss budget specifics. The mayor must submit her two-year budget proposal by August 1.
No shelter, few alternatives
People aren’t just out in the streets protesting George Floyd’s killing, or that of Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, and so many others. They’re trying to hammer home the concept of racism and inequality being systemic — wound tightly through the fabric of our society.
There is another inequality that Breed’s homeless texts need as context: The homelessness crisis is a housing crisis rooted in decades of local resistance to development and settlement, often blatantly racist.
Now with COVID-19 threatening lives (and the homeless are among the highest risk), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has officially said disrupting outdoor camps without safe alternatives is also bad health policy.
The city has severely limited traditional shelter space to blunt the virus’s spread, but it has been slow to open alternatives. The 1,500 homeless people who have moved into hotel rooms is a fraction of what officials have promised. The city has moved 120 people into rented RVs, but many of them sat empty for weeks, costing the city hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The bottleneck has led to a renewal of sidewalk camping they had worked to prevent in recent years.
Two sanctioned tent sites open so far provide about 100 tent spaces. The one in the Haight-Ashbury has spurred opposition, even as two of the three main sidewalk encampments that the new site was meant to relieve have been cleared and cordoned off.
The neighbors have some fair questions: Will the official site (the city calls it a “safe sleeping village”) really be temporary, as the city promises? What happens to campers who refuse a spot at the site? What if those who accept a spot are replaced on the neighborhood’s sidewalks by another wave?
The city should answer those questions and be clear about its plan.
A local problem
Still, the opposition in the Haight is part of a longstanding pattern. San Franciscans often say they want fairness and housing, then stand aside or actively help when local opposition blocks projects. How many of the 150 low-income seniors who might have lived in a stymied project near Laguna Honda Hospital are currently on the city’s streets? We don’t know, but we do know that 35% of SF’s homeless population is age 50 and older.
We also know that about 70% of unhoused San Franciscans said last year they had local housing before losing it. Perhaps that count is off, perhaps not. It’s the best we’ve got. But let’s agree on this: Lots of people lose their homes here, become homeless here, and stay homeless here.
Compared with a lot of its neighbors, SF isn’t bad at building affordable housing. But that’s a low bar to clear. The city could be building more across the city if not for zoning laws. Two districts, 6 and 10, have built more two-thirds of the city’s affordable housing stock in the past decade. Other neighborhoods, especially the western districts, have practically stood still.
The near future holds little promise. Here’s the latest map of affordable projects in the city’s pipeline, according to the mayor’s housing department. The entire western half of the city is practically empty. The three western districts, 1, 4, and 7, have only 4% of the 33,000 planned units.
One of the few western bubbles, near Ocean Beach, represents 135 units for public school teachers, which have barely gotten underway after two decades of local resistance.
Our outrage shouldn’t just be directed at London Breed texting the police about homeless people. This is a deep San Francisco problem of neighborhoods refusing to share the burden, and their representatives doing nothing to change the conversation.
To be clear: This is no deflection of Breed’s responsibility. Hers is a mixed record, to say the least. She spent political capital to push through a specialized shelter, known as a Navigation Center, along the Embarcadero, over the objections (and a lawsuit) from neighbors. Yet in 2018 she opposed a business tax to raise $300 million annually for housing and homeless services. It passed anyway, but without her support it failed to gain a lawsuit-proof majority and is now tied up in court.
One cruel irony of all this: San Francisco has a conservatorship law, championed by Breed and District 8 Supervisor Rafael Mandelman over objections from many sides, to compel into treatment a small number of unhoused people who refuse help and are a threat to themselves or others.
Acknowledging a need to help might have saved the life of Leo Hainzl, the 94-year-old man recently murdered in Glen Park by a man with a documented history of what seemed like mental illness and accosting people in the neighborhood.
A mental health problem was left unaddressed. It became a tragic police matter.
Yes, it’s tough to provide help to the unhoused people who refuse it. That’s not the main issue, though. Plenty will accept help. Providing it, especially now with the coronavirus crisis and recession, is no easy thing.
Yet it won’t matter if we try to wish unhoused people away, whether by texting the cops to clear them, or by blocking the development of housing for them and for others who would otherwise fall into homelessness.
Having more health workers and fewer cops dealing with the homeless is a good idea. Creating more places for people to live is even better.
Alex Lash is editor in chief of The Frisc.
