Homeless helping others off streets
North Beach area count finds more
Kristie Fairchild greeted the news that San Francisco’s latest homeless count showed a 39 percent jump in North Beach’s down-and-out population with a sardonic chuckle and a shake of the head. No big surprise, she said. North Beach and the streets spreading away into Fisherman’s Wharf and Chinatown have played host to about 300 homeless people, give or take a hundred or so, for at least a decade, Fairchild said. And with this year’s binennial city street count setting the supervisorial District Three population at 389 — out of a citywide homeless count of 7,499 — that’s still right about where it is.
How does Fairchild know this to be true? Because she sees just about every one of those homeless people at the pioneering homeless and poverty-aid center she runs called North Beach Citizens.
“They’re finally reporting better numbers because they’re
doing a better count,” Fairchild said the other day as she spread out chairs for the morning crowd at the center, an airy little oasis on Kearny Street near Broadway. “It never really changes. We always joke that when we get one guy with a wheelchair off the street, another comes in to take his place. It’s like clockwork.
“We deal with it year in, year out,” she said. “Just don’t tell me there are really a ton more people in North Beach than there were two years ago. It’s the same need, the same sadness on the street, the same challenge all of us have to rise to.”
Until recently, those struggling on the streets of one of San Francisco’s most tourist-laden neighborhoods included Diane Tomasello, 51, who came to the center in 2014 after fleeing an abusive relationship. She was sleeping outside, no glasses to see with, struggling to stay clean of crack.
“Kristie helped me get my glasses and my teeth and my place to live,” Tomasello said as she helped Fairchild set up the day’s lunch spread of tofu, broccolini and wild rice. “If it wasn’t for her helping me become who I am today, I might be out there still, I guess. Or worse.”
Tomasello is typical of the 100 or so people housed every year with North Beach Citizens’ help, in that they don’t just disappear into their new homes. Many come back to pitch in as the center dishes up food and counseling for everything from housing and welfare applications to job hunts. They help clean, they chat up the new people coming in — they become part of the center’s community. It’s part of the deal.
The nonprofit, started in 2001 by Oscar-winning filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, takes the unusual approach of enlisting its needy clients as “citizens” who agree to behave on site and work toward a better life for themselves and others at the center. The goal is to get housed, healthy and either employed or on a steady government stipend.
There’s no fighting or shouting allowed in the center, a three-story drop-in facility of tables, offices, kitchen and meeting rooms with no shelter beds. Soothing music eases from the stereo, there are yoga and meditation classes, and art done by homeless people hangs on every wall. Many of the clients pick up trash in North Beach for a small stipend from the center — last year they filled 3,271 bags.
It’s not like they’re all angels of the alleys. Those who come in often struggle with booze or drugs, and some are on probation. But in the neighborhood and in the center, they form an odd amalgam of placidity — just like the neighborhood they’re in, with its contrasting combination of strip clubs, Italian cafes, the City Lights bookstore, a shrine to St. Francis of Assisi and the rough-and-tumble Saloon bar.
Sam Dodge, deputy director of the city Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, said one reason the street population seems to always hover around 300 is that North Beach hasn’t changed much in a long time — unlike, say, the Mission District with its flood of new, high-end housing.
District Three takes in more than North Beach — it also includes Fisherman’s Wharf, and it extends along the waterfront down to Justin Herman Plaza. North Beach resident Angela Alioto, former city supervisor and a leader in efforts to end chronic homelessness, said she believes much of the increase tracked in the biennial homeless count comes from the waterfront areas.
Also, the city beefed up its efforts this year to get an accurate count, and Dodge noted that there aren’t that many out-ofthe-way spots in North Beach where a homeless person can hide.
“It’s a 24-hour part of the city, so it’s not like it has a lot of natural dead zones for people to crash in,” Dodge said.
He added that the 16-year presence of North Beach Citizens has also had an effect. Its staff has encouraged better street behavior, like coming to the center for help instead of panhandling, and leaving big Washington Square Park free of tents so tai chi groups and the like can use them.
“Plus, Kristie is a San Francisco hero and an inspiration,” Dodge said.
Fairchild was a ceramicist before she took on the North Beach Citizens gig about two years after the center opened. Coppola liked the fact that she was an artist and a quick thinker with a spine.
“This may sound a little sexist, but she’s a good mom, and many of the people who come here had terrible childhoods,” said Marc Bruno, who directs food and blanket programs at the nearby SS Peter and Paul Church. “They need that — someone who cares, but is firm and sets limits.”
The limits set by Fairchild and her staff — five full-timers, five part-timers and interns and 200 volunteers — are simple: Respect everyone at the center, pitch in to help, strive for self-improvement, and don’t come in loaded or violent.
“I won’t put up with bad troublemakers,” said Fairchild, 49, whose bluegreen eyes can flicker from calm to commanding intensity in a nanosecond. “You have to want to be in this space. I want a community, and that’s what we have. But that takes work on everyone’s part.”
That need for community is also reflected in the annual $923,000 budget: Nearly all of it comes from donations.
City Lights co-founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti helped Coppola brainstorm North Beach Citizens.
“The whole idea of qualifying to be a citizen really works,” said Ferlinghetti, who still lives in North Beach. “You have to want to be a citizen; if you fall off the wagon you can’t participate. They’ve been very good neighbors.
“Francis had a good idea, and it works.”
Coppola, whose American Zoetrope film company offices are a block from North Beach Citizens, came up with the idea of the center when he kept encountering the same homeless people on his daily walks around the neighborhood.
“My thought was that if you treated a pyramid of homelessness by redeeming the very top few percent and solving their issues, and then using them as employees to deal with the next percentile ... (then) little by little you would deal with the whole population,” Coppola said via email. “Of course, this depends on a very gifted altruistic administration — which we were fortunate to find in Kristie Fairchild.”
Christopher Ramange rambled into the center a week ago for snacks and got a personal dose of that altruism. Seeing that the stringy 52-year-old was feeling anxious, Fairchild took him outside and let him help her fire up her bubble-making machine on the sidewalk. It’s something she often does to perk up the mood.
With bubbles filling the air and drifting to the Hustler Club strip joint across the street, she and Ramange were soon plotting his next steps toward stability.
“They put me on a list for housing,” Ramange said. “I need everything from these guys, and when I come here they help me heal and stay still long enough to feel God’s great power.”