Shut out of camp, forced to move on
Her door locks. She owns the bed, the dresser, the chair and everything else in the studio flat.
Simple things, sure. But for Kathy Gray, at 53, it’s all strange and wonderful.
Gray is a transsexual woman who has endured abuse on the streets for years, and this is the first permanent home she has been able to call her own for a decade or more. A year and a half ago, she was soaking in the rain in a tattered tent on Division Street in San Francisco alongside 350 other homeless people, no hope for any change in sight. Now?
“I thought it would be impossible for me to say these words, but I’m home,” Gray said the other day as she stepped into her flat at the Winton Hotel on O’Farrell Street, turned around and locked the door.
“Never thought I could have a real lock,” she said. Gray took a deep, satisfied sniff. “And one of my favorite
parts: This place smells clean.”
Of all the homeless people herded away from San Francisco’s biggest-ever tent encampment in a city sweep more than a year ago, Gray is one of the luckiest. She got a permanent roof. The more common narrative can be found in the likes of Oscar McKinney, who pitched his tent not far from Gray’s back then — and is still there today.
McKinney, 51, relocates his tent every few weeks when police or street cleaners tell him to. “I’m fine with that,” he said recently as he stuffed his gear into a bag at Bryant and Division streets to move a block away. “Just don’t make me move into some hellhole hotel room or shelter somewhere.”
Back in February 2016, when the Super Bowl riveted international attention on San Francisco, it wasn’t just football and tech-hip tourism that drew the headlines. It was Gray, McKinney and their hundreds of fellow homeless campers spread out all along Division Street in ragged tents and plywood shanties.
Driven by relentless rains, they’d drifted there throughout the winter to find shelter beneath a mile-long elevated section of Highway 101. Most were chronically homeless, meaning they’d lived outside a year or more and were beset with addictions, mental health problems or other personal scourges. Their encampment bubbled over into alleys, bare lots and side streets, a symbol of the divide between the city’s desires to solve homelessness and inyour-face reality.
The Chronicle has followed Gray, McKinney and five other campers since January 2016, when the encampment began to hit a peak, through the March 1 sweep and beyond. Their journeys demonstrate just how maddeningly complex it is to pull hard-core homeless people up off the street.
Of those seven, just two are in permanent housing. One is in a substance abuse rehabilitation center, one has pingponged between shelters and the streets, and three are back camping in the Division Street area.
KATHY GRAY
Gray’s pathway to the Winton Hotel took a winding route — as it does for most chronically indigent people — through several stops in shelters and city-funded hotel rooms before she landed her studio on March 31. A wiry Army veteran who has been in transition for nearly five years, she’s usually easygoing but lashes back whenever she is insulted for her sexual orientation. So having a place of her own was paramount, she and her counselors agreed.
The Winton studio’s rent is paid through federal lowincome housing and disability funds. Having gotten a grip on her methamphetamine habit through counseling over the past year, Gray is concentrating now on her transition procedures and planning what’s ahead. For now, that mostly means settling into a life without fear of being beaten up on the street or going hungry in the dark.
Last month, she even had a prestigious visitor — Mayor Ed Lee. He’d come to the Winton to promote the opening of new supportive housing units including hers, and after his speech Gray walked up to him to shake his hand and chat.
“Thank you for asking for help,” Lee told Gray.
Gray looked straight into the mayor’s eyes, something she couldn’t have pulled off a year ago when she was sleeping on concrete. “Thank you,” she said. “I’m not afraid to ask anymore. It’s on me now. I can’t mess this up.”
PAPA SMIRF
Papa Smirf — his street name, which he insists on using — has been on the streets with low-level drug convictions on his record for many of his 58 years, and just before the Division Street sprawl was dismantled he took a shelter bed. That lasted a couple of weeks before police picked him up on a warrant for drug possession while he was out walking — and he wound up in jail until the end of April 2016.
After that he cycled through homeless camps around the city, and by spring 2017 was just a few streets down from his old spot on Division. But then something changed: He finally hit the point where he was tired of sleeping alongside a gutter. So in late March, he moved into a shelter and started the process of obtaining permanent housing.
The shelter was the Navigation Center on Mission Street, and he was able to go in with his girlfriend, Dawn “Mama Smirf” Perry. They still spent some nights back at their tent on Vermont Street because their friends were there, but they both said they were looking forward to landing real apartments.
Perry got her studio in June under a government program that uses her federal disability check for rent. Smirf, however, ended up in a different, but unfortunately familiar, type of housing: In May, he was arrested on a warrant for not checking in with his parole officer on the drug possession conviction, and taken straight to jail.
“I was really happy in the Nav Center, doing good and serious for once about getting inside,” Smirf said in an interview at the County Jail.
“I’m going to start reporting to parole and keeping my nose straight when I get out. I won’t be down for long.”
His public defender argued for Smirf to be released to a rehabilitation program — and in mid-June, he was released to a residential substance abuse recovery center.
ANGELIQUE MAYWEATHER
Except for a weeklong stay in March at the Mission Street Navigation Center, 49year-old Angelique Mayweather had camped within a few blocks of her old Division Street space ever since her tent was cleared away — until a couple of weeks ago, when she cycled back into the shelter.
Mayweather’s last camping spot was at 10th and Division streets, and she said the whole time she was there, she wanted to go back into the Navigation Center. She was evicted from the shelter in March after she and her boyfriend got in a fight there.
That was the same boyfriend who spattered battery acid throughout her tent one day in May as he stomped off, saying he was done with her. The next night she was a few blocks away on Harrison Street, shivering from the cold as she huddled under a blue tarp in few blankets she’d found on the street.
Nearly three years ago, Mayweather was working catering jobs and had a place to live. But in a tumultuous life that began with being born to drug-addled parents and led through abusive relationships and an addiction to crack, stability has been elusive.