Homeless advocates lose their own home
Market forces push fighters for unsheltered out of longtime digs
Homelessness, which is everywhere in San Francisco, has come to the doorstep of the people who fight it.
The Coalition on Homelessness, which has been battling for the rights of homeless people for three decades, has lost its home just as surely as the folks living in tents on the Turk Street sidewalk outside the coalition’s front door.
“This is the world we’re living in now,” executive director Jennifer Friedenbach said with a sigh.
Market forces — a polite way of saying you can’t afford it anymore — have forced the organization to give up the lease on its offices in the heart of the Tenderloin. Moving day is in October.
If there is irony in the helpers of the homeless losing their home, Friedenbach doesn’t have time for it. She and the coalition are too busy. The coalition’s small staff drums up support for shelters, hotel vouchers and job training for homeless San Franciscans, cranks out the popular Street Sheet newspaper, and seeks to remind everyone else that being poor is no crime. Living in a tent is often nothing more than the luck of the draw.
Faced with a 30% rent increase and a new landlord, who could not be reached for comment, with plans to knock down the Turk Street building and erect an apartment house, Friedenbach searched for another spot. She found it two blocks away, at the offices of Hospitality House, another group helping the Tenderloin’s homeless people. It’s onethird smaller and it costs onethird more than the place the coalition had last year. It’s the same
story everywhere in San Francisco, Friedenbach said — in the Mission, in the Castro, in South of Market. Out with the old. In with the people with more money.
“Where are people supposed to live?” she said. “The seedy flat in the Mission with a room to crash in — that’s gone. The affordable places — gone. People are forced to be on the street. It’s exasperating. We’re seeing a lot of evictions.”
Meanwhile, she and the staff are trying to decide what to throw out.
Two dozen filing cabinets full of archives are being donated to the San Francisco Public Library, “archives” being a word for stuff that doesn’t survive moving day. Tens of thousands of unsold copies of the Street Sheet — the newspaper written and sold by homeless people for a buck on sidewalks around town — are heading for the recycling bin.
“We’ll keep 10 copies of each issue,” said editor Quiver Watts. “That’s it. No room for more.”
Homelessness is complicated, even for the people fighting it. The coalition shares its Turk Street building with the Tenderloin Housing Clinic downstairs. The clinic’s longtime director, Randy Shaw, says the coalition has constantly rebuffed his efforts to have the tents and the people inside them removed from the sidewalk out front. He says the tents are used not by homeless people but by drug dealers who scare away the clinic’s clients.
“I don’t think they should be out there 24/7,” Shaw said. “They call themselves homeless, but homelessness is not an excuse for dealing drugs and harassing people.”
Shaw said the clinic will have to move, same as the coalition, but not until 2022.
“We got a longer lease than they did,” he said.