San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Frustrations over homeless crisis boil over
A recent, disturbing viral video showing a San Francisco art gallery owner spraying an apparently homeless woman in the face with a hose has underscored an enduring gap between the millions of dollars the city spends every year on emergency teams to respond to homelessness issues and the scant tools the public has to summon them.
There are just three main phone numbers to call for help — and a lot of times, resolutions can prove elusive.
The three numbers are 911 if there’s an emergency such as fire in an encampment, criminal activity or aggressive behavior; 311 for nonurgent issues such as encampments blocking the sidewalk or abandoned vehicles, and (415) 553-0123, the police nonemergency line. The calls don’t actually go to police but instead to dispatchers who can route people to a wide range of aid agencies, including the emergency and health departments, that oversee at least 10 teams.
Response times are usually fast — about 17 minutes for the main crew handling such issues, the Street Crisis Response Team, according to city data. But a November city report shows that a majority of people the team interacts with “remain in the community” — which most often means on the street — instead of going to a treatment facility or hospital. And that report reflects a staggering number of contacts: 14,230 crisis calls handled by the team during the two years it’s been in operation.
Collier Gwin, the gallery owner who admitted to spraying the woman, said she had been behaving disruptively and sleeping in his entryway for days, despite his calls to social services to help her. His frustrations mounted over the apparent lack of progress, resulting in the confrontation with the woman, which has been widely condemned as unacceptable under any circumstances.
Street counselors responded again after the video was circulated, and this time the woman — who’s known in the neighborhood as “Q” — was hospitalized, according to city officials.
Homeless-aid workers, community advocates and city leaders said it’s unfortunate the situation between the two wasn’t resolved before it boiled over. But they pointed out that mentally ill street people and sidewalk campers who aren’t blocking anything and refuse help can require several visits from counselors before they move into shelters or treatment facilities.
And sometimes years can go by before the most dysfunctional people take that help.
“It’s not so simple as you just offer them a shelter. Some people feel like they’re not treated well in some shelters and they don’t want to go,” said David Nakanishi, a longtime homelessness aid worker who heads the city’s encampment-clearance team. “A lot of the folks we see would go inside if there was some safe place for them to put their belongings, but they need to pare down to two big bags and they can have trouble doing that.”
The Street Crisis Response Team began as part of the Mental-HealthSF program co-created by Supervisor Hillary Ronen. She said Wednesday “the jury is still out for me” on how effective it’s been in conjunction with the city’s other efforts.
“They are taking most of the calls to 911 that involve some sort of mental illness, which is fantastic,” she said. “The real question for me — and where I don’t know if it’s working as well as I hoped — is on the follow-up with people. They are talking to them and de-escalating on the street, and supposedly there is some follow-up but I’m not sure how great it is.
“And really the plan is to work with people who are really really sick and need to develop a trusting relationship with someone before they enter a real treatment program or come off the streets. And that’s the part that’s lacking.”
The Department of Emergency Management hired a coordinator a year ago to tighten up the efforts by the many crews handling street homelessness, from Nakanishi’s to the Street Crisis Response Team, and “that work is under way,” said DEM spokesman Francis Zamora.
One outcome from hiring Street Response Planning Manager Lauren Bell, he said, has been movement toward creating a new community based organization to take non-emergency calls. The so-called Community Response Team is based on ideas from the Coalition on Homelessness, and DEM is taking proposals from groups that would like to run it.
Bell’s task is to “look for overlap and gaps in services and efficiencies,” Zamora said, “and she’s been meeting the the teams and working with their departments to identify opportunities for improving services and collaboration.”
Meanwhile, the status quo seems to satisfy no one.
A concerted effort in 2019 to track the 237 sickest people living on the streets resulted in at least 70% getting housed, according to the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, with some of the rest getting temporary shelter. But that’s small comfort to people like Dr. Kevin Miller, who lives on Van Ness Avenue near Leavenworth Street amid some of the most resilient homeless encampments in the city.
He called the city’s response system “pathetic.”
“I’ve called the Fire Department, 311 or the nonemergency line many times over the years and yes, they come out,” he said. “I call to say there’s a homeless person in need of assistance, there’s garbage, there’s a tent blocking the sidewalk, discarded needles — you name it. It’s the same complaints, but the same problems keep coming back again and again and again.
“People have the right to live on the street if they have no shelter. I wish them well, and I know they are in crisis and need help,” he said. “But I also believe the public sidewalk should provide access to all, and how many times do we have to report the same problem?”
Jennifer Friedenbach, director of the Coalition on Homelessness, said she understands the frustration — but it goes both ways. There aren’t enough mental health, drug treatment, shelter or housing services to accommodate all of the roughly 20,000 people who are homeless in the city throughout the year, and she said housed people need to be proactive and patient. And don’t just depend on those three main phone numbers to call for help.
“I think first and foremost, what’s necessary is treating your unhoused neighbors with dignity and respect, getting to know them and figuring out what they need,” she said. “Getting to know what resources are available is important. You may have access to the internet in a way they don’t, so you can look up resources like winter shelters, churches that offer support, drop-in centers.
“Just like you would with any neighbor, you want to communicate in a constructive way to resolve issues. Most of the times that works, and occasionally it doesn’t. You just keep trying.”