CONVERSATION
The tents that popped up on sidewalks all over San Francisco in the first weeks of the pandemic last year drew shock and anger from many residents and businesses.
The explosion of campsites and the concomitant backlash were no surprise to Mary Howe, executive director of the Homeless Youth Alliance (HYA), a nonprofit that has provided counseling and services in the Haight-Ashbury for more than 20 years. “When there is nowhere for people to be, they will exist somewhere,” she says.
At the onset of lockdowns, group shelters shut down and Mayor London Breed was slow to secure hotel rooms. But Howe knew where homeless people would go: onto sidewalks, right where she once slept. Howe, 41, came to San Francisco as a 15-year-old runaway.
She also knew that the young homeless people she counseled in the Haight-Ashbury preferred to stay nearby, to stay “with their community,” so she pushed the city to open a sanctioned tent site in the neighborhood.
However, many in the neighborhood didn’t want the tents there, sanctioned or not. Howe was ready to take the arrows that were certain to come her way. HYA was tabbed to run the “safe sleeping village” in the old McDonald’s parking lot at the end of Haight Street in June 2020. “Never have I seen this city be open to really trying something new, and COVID made that possible,” she says.
Angry neighbors were only one of Howe’s problems. (She held weekly virtual meetings to hear their concerns.) The site was first meant to be open for just six months, but the city kept extending its run in two-month increments. The uncertainty made logistics difficult, including hiring and keeping staff needed for round-the-clock operations. And even amid the drought, infrequent downpours would soak the tents and everything inside them, because the city didn’t prepare the site for bad weather soon enough.
The site served 84 people in the 12 months it was open; Howe says almost 80 percent of them went on to find some form of housing.
Running the site, dubbed “CAMP” (Community Action Made 4 People), also gave her a chance to have a more permanent neighborhood footprint, which HYA has lacked since losing the lease on its Haight Street drop-in center in 2013.
HYA currently offers meals, needle exchange, counseling and other services two hours a night, three days a week at the site of the former Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, which is where The Frisc caught up with Howe recently to talk about lessons learned from the tent site, which closed at the end of June this year, how to better help the unhoused, and what makes her love her job.
The conversation has been edited and condensed.
The Frisc: How would you say things went with the tent site?
Mary Howe: You’re dealing with people whose lives are intensely traumatic and chaotic, but having a space where people felt safe and that they had some autonomy, just a space to call their own and kind of let their guard down, is a tremendous thing. So all of it was a total success.
From the get-go, we really researched it and took a very different approach than any of the other safe sleep sites in San Francisco.
And what was that?
We retained control over intakes into the camp, people who were already known to us and who already existed in this neighborhood. It was a community response.
The other sites are all filled by referrals from HSOC [Healthy Streets Operations Center, the city agency that moves people and their camps off the streets]. We were never going to be used as a tool to displace someone. We want people to engage in our programs because they want to. HYA is very informed by the community we work with, so we allow people to dictate how our services are run.
I think people change because they’re given opportunities to change, and because they’re treated with respect and autonomy. We always allow people to come exactly as they are, and we accept people as they are.
Do you think the camp was a good neighbor?
I felt like we were tremendous neighbors. We had meetings every two weeks with the neighbors. On alternate weeks, I had a smaller group of just neighbors on the actual block of Camp, and then on the other weeks, it was the larger Haight community, with the police, the supervisor, and all that. I was in regular communication with the neighbors that entire time.
Do you feel like you allayed their concerns?
There’s always a dynamic of people feeling discomfort when they have to see chaos and poverty. When people are living outside your house, you’re probably not super-excited about that, and you feel that something should be done. I have to be open to hearing people’s experience, but we had no power over what happened outside the fence.
I was explaining to one neighbor: “So they’re gonna do a sweep tomorrow, which means those people will be moved.” And he’s like, “Where will they be moved to?”
I’m like, “They’ll move outside someone else’s house. And then that person will be the person I talk to every day about it.” And he was like, “Well, that doesn’t seem like a solution.”
We’ve now got more money to create permanent supportive housing for the homeless, but not everybody is going to get it. What other housing options should SF be working on?
There’s San Francisco and then there’s the Haight. Camp showed that [tent sites were] a model that really did work, but nothing works for everyone. So I think there should be transitional housing. I think there should be permanent housing. I think there should be safe sleep villages, and so on.
We have no permanent supportive housing here [in the Haight]. We have no transitional housing. There’s nothing here.
Is that by design?
Yes. I think it’s always this age-old NIMBYism, right? In theory, we support not allowing homelessness to exist, but we don’t want that solution to be anywhere near us.
For all other safe sleep villages, people [leaving the site] will be housed in that neighborhood, or you have the opportunity to stay within the community you identify with, whereas there are no exits within this district. We’re advocating for transitional housing for young people [in the Haight] so they are within the group they identify with and move on to permanent housing.
You’ve been at this a long time. What gives you hope? What keeps you going?
I love my job every single day. I just love connecting with people. We always talk about the most profound thing we do as an agency is to bear witness to people’s lives and build relationships. When people feel connected and have support, so many things are possible, and when people don’t have that, it’s very hard to do anything else.
The fact that we know people’s names and remember their birthdays and just have normal conversations, I don’t even know how to describe the profound effect that it has. It doesn’t generally enable the systematic change I would like to see, ’cause we’re not in charge of that. But maybe those connections we make, maybe those people will move into positions in government that allow for those changes, you know?
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.