In civil society, if you’re hurt you should be able to get help. Call it simplistic, but we know how it should work. You can be sick or hungry, or have other urgent needs, and there’s a social commitment, a civic backstop, if you will, that we’ve agreed should exist. It’s our emergency rooms and St. Anthony’s and unemployment insurance and child protective services, the whole lot of it and more.
But if you’re unsheltered in San Francisco, things get complicated. Outrage-level complicated.
San Francisco, writ large, has weighed in. We want action on homelessness. Proposition C, a tax on rich businesses to increase spending and services, passed last November with a 61 percent majority, despite reservations about the effectiveness of our spending — worries voiced by Mayor London Breed herself, who opposed Prop C.
But when that money is slated to be spent — in other words, the action we’ve been begging for — some residents say no. Not here. Nothing against homelessness, but, well, not in my backyard.
It happened again, in rather spectacular fashion, at a community meeting Wednesday night at the Delancey Street Foundation along the Embarcadero, where San Francisco officials propose to build a new Navigation Center: a homeless shelter-plus, with comprehensive services and security. It would be the city’s seventh. It could serve around 200 people. It’s now a parking lot, so this wouldn’t displace anybody. City officials, including the mayor, made their best case for it. For many in the neighborhood, though, it wasn’t good enough.
This has been brewing for a while. Here’s a nice summary of a previous meeting in early March about the plans. It’s a scene that takes place with every proposed Navigation Center, like what transpired two years ago.
Leading up to Wednesday’s Delancey Street gathering, the battle lines were drawn with rival GoFundMe campaigns. (It doesn’t get more SF.) So-called Safe Embarcadero for All has raised more than $91,000 to mount a legal fight against the proposed center, while a guerrilla campaign called *Safer* Embarcadero for All has raised more than $160,000, benefiting SF’s Coalition on Homelessness. Tech CEOs like Marc Benioff and Jack Dorsey have written five-figure checks; even GoFundMe has contributed to the pro-shelter GoFundMe.
The antishelter Safe Embarcadero for All, which has two Twitter accounts and one website, says it’s the victim of “geographic discrimination.” (See the video at left.) The group says it isn’t against helping the homeless, but claims that City Hall isn’t listening; that the Navigation Center will bring drugs and crime; that there will be noise and other ills; that the proposed facility will be too big and unwieldy. (It’s not hard to hear in the complaints echoes of the current president’s comment about a neighboring country “not sending their best people.”)
The group is trying to brand the Navigation Center as the “megashelter,” taking a page from the anti-Monster in the Mission playbook. Last night’s meeting was set to assuage these concerns.
‘Space of hope’
Representatives from city agencies are easy to spot in their suits and blazers — no VC vests or business casual here. A consultant wearing a silver scarf with black polka dots kicked things off with a rundown on the meeting format. Officials were going to share their information, and attendees would submit comment and question cards, write Post-its on boards, or email their concerns. She also invited everyone to set aside differing views and “think of the highest hopes for the city,” creating a “space of hope.” Sometimes, she said, “we listen with judgment, or we listen preparing what we want to say next.” She wanted us instead to listen to understand. Also no jeering or booing. It came off somewhere between self-help kitsch and kindergarten, which is what we’ve come to with our local meetings. They can be so fraught they have to start with a group-therapy exercise.
Kerry Abbott, a deputy director at the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH), laid out the challenge: Around 7,500 people are without shelter on any given night, 4,300 are sleeping on the streets, and 1,100 names are on the existing shelter waiting list. Along the waterfront in particular, at last count 179 people are living unsheltered. Some 15 minutes into her presentation, there was a shout: “Stop lying!”
So much for the space of hope.
Abbott was followed by Kaki Marshall, HSH director of outreach and interim housing, who said she exited homelessness 20 years ago. Marshall described how these centers work. First, there are no walk-ins or lines outside. (Referrals only.) They don’t make folks leave in the morning and come back later or all eat at the same time, and there’s no blocking of sidewalks or driveways. There is staff on site to call, with crews to work on safety and cleanliness. “We actively discourage loitering,” she added.
Marshall discussed six other Navigation Centers that have opened, including one on South Van Ness in the Mission, which has engaged more than 700 people. Before the center, she said, there were about 300 tents and structures in the area, and fewer than 40 after.
Rachel Alonso of the Department of Public Works discussed site selection. The city looked into 100 sites; parcel size, access, construction or rehab costs, lease costs, proximity to needs, and proximity to transit all come into play. “Every site is unique and has its own set of challenges,” she said. “We’re not able to be picky.”
An audience member stood up and called the meeting nothing other than a ‘sales job.’
The proposed site on the Embarcadero, known as Seawall Lot 300, “checks a lot of boxes.” Such as: no need to negotiate a lease, it’s on a Muni line, and ready for water, sewer, and power hookups. (For the aesthetically minded, Alonso noted the different options for landscaping, paving, and decorative fencing.)
Next was SFPD Commander David Lazar with data points on homeless service facilities. The SFPD’s crime analyst found that six months out from opening, the areas around three of four Navigation Centers studied saw crime decrease by double digits, 10 percent to 15 percent. “Crime didn’t increase as a result of a Navigation Center,” he underscored.
Smart, capable, accomplished public servants didn’t come to make a ludicrous ask. They had slides and reports. They had facts. They’re doing what we hired them to do: help the homeless.
‘Do you want me to talk or not?’
Then the meeting took a turn. Mayor Breed walked to the podium. The crowd erupted with jeers and boos. As she started to speak, someone called her a “sellout.” She was told to “go home.” Breed replied that she is home, born and raised in SF. Eventually she asked “Do you want me to talk or not?” You can see from the end of her statement, which I recorded, that she wasn’t encouraged. Nevertheless, Breed stayed for the rest of the event and spoke to the press afterward.
The Q&A portion, going off the comment cards, also got dark. “I’m a mom, how will my son be safe?” was one question read aloud. HSH director Jeff Kositsky— whom The Frisc noted was revamping how the city works with the unsheltered — acknowledged there are costs of dealing with homelessness, but that there were social costs of not dealing with homelessness. People on the street “get extremely sick and are at greater risk of dying,” he said. It’s more cost-effective to address the needs. And by the way, most people experiencing homelessness “are much more likely to be the victims of crime than perpetrators of crime.”
Where does the funding for services come from? Kositsky pointed to a combination of federal, state, and local sources, including from the SF general fund. Someone blurted out “taxpayer!” as if channeling antigovernment miser Howard Jarvis. An audience member stood up and called the meeting nothing other than a “sales job.” Soon after, folks with Safe Embarcadero for All walked out. We were near the end anyway. Yet another meeting, with a full-on question and comment period, is scheduled for April 23 at the Port Commission. I’m betting Breed won’t show up.
The city’s intractable problem of homelessness isn’t simple. It’s also highly charged, emotional, and ripe for myth-making on several fronts, which advocates and journalists are working hard to debunk. On Wednesday night, there could have been a civil space to dissect and debate arguments based upon the subjects at hand — like HSH director Kositsky’s rationale for the most effective use of funds, or SFPD analysis showing lower crime around Navigation Centers — but instead, amid the shouts of “lying” and “sales job,” we got a slice of San Francisco public input at its worst: rigid, righteous, and 100 percent wrong.
As the meeting cleared out and attendees buttonholed city staff, a man named Joe approached Kaki Marshall. He asked one question: “What can I do to help?”
Joe, who later told me he lived a few blocks from the proposed site and didn’t want to give his last name, said that “rather than sit on Twitter” he had started volunteer work on homelessness. Marshall had told him: Do “exactly what you’re doing”—come to the meetings, stay informed, contribute, show your support.
Amid that toxic civic soup, that one interaction right there, that was the best of San Francisco.
Follow Anthony Lazarus on Twitter: @Sr_Lazarus
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