‘The thing I miss most’: Newsom renews his chats with homeless
Gov. Gavin Newsom came back to the popular homeless fair he founded nearly 15 years ago as San Francisco mayor to do a victory lap of sorts Wednesday, speechifying, as a governor is wont to do.
But his favorite part wasn’t rolling out the accomplishments and plans — like how his Project Homeless Connect continues to help thousands of street people a year, how it’s been replicated in 250 cities around the world and how he hopes to pressure localities around the state next year to do more on the street crisis.
What he really liked was hanging out with homeless people again. Some were even the same folks who’d been homeless when he was mayor, revealing how intractable the problem has been for San Francisco.
Despite the rancor some of his policies ignited when he was mayor — particularly converting welfare payments into housing funding and restricting panhandling — Newsom was always comfortable chatting oneonone with homeless people. It’s still true. That was clear Wednesday after he addressed the 500 volunteers at the latest Homeless Connect
fair, now held four times a year to give legal, medical, housing and other help to homeless and other impoverished people all in one place.
As he worked the queue of what would eventually be more than 1,000 homeless people waiting to get inside, Newsom lit up — and they lit up in return. Several remembered him from early Project Homeless Connect events, which began in November 2014 after Newsom heeded the advice of his street specialists to “take the help to the homeless where they are.”
“I remember you,” David Harness, 64, said with a big smile as Newsom drew close to where he was in line. “You’re the mayor — wait, governor — you’re that guy that actually gives a damn!”
Newsom grinned. “Yeah, I’m still trying,” he said. “You’ve been here before?”
“Hell, I was homeless since I was 12, but lived inside eight years now,” he said. “This has always been a good thing.”
Another homeless man remembered Newsom coming to his camp years ago. One woman recalled him talking to her on a street corner as she was panhandling.
One man, 51yearold Richard Oliva, teared up and thanked Newsom for his help. Oliva was homeless until going into a rehab program three years ago, and this week moved into government subsidized permanent housing — which he says was funded by the $1 billion or so Newsom put into this year’s homelessness budget.
Oliva was volunteering at the table, giving out free reading glasses. It was his third year of pitching in at Project Homeless Connect.
“Because of you, I now have permanent housing,” he told Newsom. The governor gave him a long hug.
“Back as mayor, and now as governor, he sees the problem for real,” Oliva said, wiping his eyes, after Newsom moved on. “He understands it.”
Meghan Freebeck, CEO of Project Homeless Connect, pointed out that the program — which operates with 11 employees — has recruited 40,000 volunteers since its inception and helped more than 90,000 homeless people. Aside from the aid they get with housing placements, groceries and the like, though, perhaps the more important contribution from volunteers is treating people with friendly respect for a day, she said.
“I ask that no matter what you do today, ask someone what their name is,” she told her volunteers. “And then say hello to them and use their name — tell them how grateful you are that they were brave enough to come here, admit they have a need, and access all those needs with all of us here today.”
Newsom seconded that emotion, and said he is itching to get outside more like he used to when he was mayor. That’s when he would take quiet tours of homeless camps, visit street people to connect them with counselors, and continuously call his staff to urge them to get help for someone he’d met on the sidewalk — “which I know could be pretty annoying sometimes,” he recalled with a slight grin.
Now, however, with homelessness one of the state’s top problems — “the street population is more acute” than a decade ago, he said — he wants to connect more personally with the situation.
“I need to get back out in the streets again,” Newsom told The Chronicle, looking around at the fair he founded, anxious to go shake some more homeless hands. “It’s the thing I miss most about the job. I need to see it, to feel it, to touch it.”