San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Disgust, despair on hard-hit block
Tent camp, drugs, filth push heartsick neighbors to the edge
The Chronicle receives a deluge of email every day, but one message sent to the news desk on a Saturday evening in April was particularly memorable.
“There is a suitcase full of human s— on the corner of Isis and 13th,” the email read. “Last night, I had to threaten violence to a man smoking crystal meth on my front porch. This morning, my 2-year-old son and I watched a rat rummage through the trash in our gutter. “Things have been getting worse and worse on my block since 2010, and the city does NOTHING to fix it,” the angry email continued.
I replied, saying I’d be happy to talk to the man who sent the message and giving him my phone number. I expected to hear from a crank, but that wasn’t who was on the other end of the line when the phone rang.
A pleasant, soft-spoken man said he was the one who’d e-mailed “about a suitcase full of poop.”
poop.”
“That’s a good way to start a conversation,” he added with a laugh.
He was Ernst Schoen-Rene, a 46year-old computer programmer who invited me to his home to see the misery for myself. He lives on Isis Street, which stretches just a block from 12th to 13th streets on the edge of South of Market near the Mission District border.
This little block turned out to represent the hellscape that some neighborhoods in San Francisco have become — and then, within weeks, became part of a crackdown on tent encampments by Mayor Mark Farrell. The neighbors, like so many city residents, experienced a swirling mix of emotions, from disgust and despair before the tent clearings to cautious relief and uneasiness about the homeless campers’ unclear fate afterward.
But right after the suitcase-full-of-poop email, it was just sheer frustration.
“I don’t mind a reasonable amount of urban grit,” explained Schoen-Rene, a native of Chico who’s lived in San Francisco since 1994, always opting for edgy neighborhoods.
He and his wife bought their Isis Street condo in 2010 for $748,000, and by the time he sent the email, he had come to regret it. He felt stuck, unable to afford anything else in today’s nutty housing market or the far higher property taxes that would come with a new purchase.
“Some days, I want to burn this all down with a flamethrower,” he sighed in exasperation.
Some of the city’s biggest names — from San Francisco Travel to the Chamber of Commerce to the Hotel Council — have loudly protested the disastrous conditions on San Francisco’s sidewalks in recent months, and regularly get meetings with City Hall politicians, but the voices of everyday residents aren’t always heard.
The ones just trying to raise kids, work and, well, live. The ones with so little power, they can’t get their supervisors to respond to their requests for help. The ones with the misery literally on their front doorsteps.
Those are the people who live on Isis Street, which should be everything that’s good about San Francisco. Funky flats. A group of progressive neighbors, many of whom are artists, writers and other creative types. A walkable neighborhood where you can get to Rainbow Grocery and a host of bars and restaurants in a flash. There are about 30 units of housing on the block, and six kids younger than 5 are growing up there.
It should have been the best of San Francisco, but by April, it had become the worst.
Schoen-Rene’s 2½-year-old son, Laszlo, invented a game called “jumping over the poop.” Another kid across the street collected syringe caps and floated them down the stream of dirty gutter water for fun. People “as high as a kite” hopped Schoen-Rene’s 10-foot fence. He once tried to pick up a pile of cardboard somebody had ditched on the sidewalk to recycle it. But it was much heavier than he expected. There was a person passed out inside.
Homeless campers cooking over open flames on the sidewalk have started fires. They’ve partied and injected drugs on Schoen-Rene’s front steps, one time repeatedly throwing trash at his door, alarming the family inside with the thumping sound.
“There’s the poop and the needles and the rats,” Schoen-Rene said. “Oh, my God, there didn’t used to be rats.”
But the breaking point for him came when neighbors found a black suitcase with wheels on the corner that had clearly been used as a toilet by homeless people.
“I actually started crying, I got so frustrated,” Schoen-Rene said. “I flipped out. I started writing to everybody.”
He wasn’t the only one who’d reached his limit. For Neker Ortiz, who works at Giannini’s Auto Body, which backs up onto Isis Street, that moment came when he saw one too many vagrants breaking the windows of cars parked in the neighborhood and stealing items from inside. He said he chased one thief down.
“He was crazy, but I was more crazy than him,” Ortiz said. “I was so pissed.”
Much of the problem has stemmed from the fact that Isis Street sits near a Highway 101 overpass, which in the winter of 2015-16 became a magnet for homeless people in tents seeking shelter from the cold and rain. At its high point, 350 people lived in tents sprawling under the overpass, creating a shameful shantytown in the middle of one of the world’s richest cities.
The late Mayor Ed Lee directed the clearing of the tents in February 2016, but they never fully went away. This April, there were dozens of tents dotting the blocks around Isis Street.
The neighbors sought help again and again. Records from the city’s 311 call center show that this year, from January through May, residents on the small block made 158 calls requesting assistance. Seventy-seven calls related to encampments, and 26 calls were about human waste.
That’s 158 calls in the first five months of this year, compared with 159 calls in all of 2017 and 63 calls in 2016. In 2013, just 13 calls to 311 came from Isis Street.
The residents also called police again and again. They emailed politicians at City Hall again and again.
“I don’t feel like anything ever happens,” Schoen-Rene said in early April.
The people who have homes on Isis aren’t get-off-my-lawn types. The neighbors I met seemed very progressive and genuinely heartsick that other people were living in these filthy conditions on sidewalks.
“I really strongly believe San Francisco is for everybody, not just us, but the community should be livable for everybody,” said Schoen-Rene’s wife, Jill, an attorney and children’s book author. “The suitcase is a symbol. Nobody should have to poop in a suitcase, and nobody should have to find a suitcase full of poop.”
Annie Whiteside, who’s lived in an apartment on Isis Street for 27 years, is
well known in the city’s punk scene and used to run Annie’s Social Club and Annie’s Cocktail Lounge. Now she manages a bar on Divisadero Street. She sports cat eyeglasses, bright red lipstick and tattoos covering her arms.
She said it’s scary walking by herself or riding the bus late at night after work, so she has to pay for car service. She can’t wear shoes inside anymore because the bottoms became so disgusting from walking on her sidewalk. She has struggled to sleep at night because of the tortuous sounds of screaming and fighting wafting up from the street below.
In the middle of the night not long ago, a man rolled around in the middle of the street “acting like a wild beast — just screaming,” she said. She called 911. She often refrains from calling police if black men are involved, not confident officers would treat them fairly.
She’s certain that if the same scene played out on Telegraph Hill or in St. Francis Wood, the city’s reaction would have been swift and decisive. She likens City Hall to “a snail climbing up Twin Peaks.” She thinks the city should build many more Navigation Centers and install many more public toilets and garbage cans.
“We have all this wealth in the city, and then we have this huge homeless problem,” she said. “It’s so uneven. It’s so unbalanced. They shouldn’t have to live like that, and we shouldn’t have to live like that.”
Karen Koltonow, an artist who’s lived in an Isis Street apartment since 1984, agreed that what’s most devastating is the huge influx of wealth into the city juxtaposed with extreme poverty on the sidewalks.
“It builds a rift and a resentment among people,” she said. “I just try to be kind, as kind as I can.”
But remaining calm can be hard at night, when the same noises keeping her neighbor, Whiteside, awake jolt her out of bed, too.
“I listen. I try to make sure nobody’s getting killed. I don’t like to hear female voices,” she said. “I feel kind of powerless and helpless. It kind of gets to me.”
Kolotonow’s apartment is filled with art. She makes little pins with unique phrases stamped onto them. On one visit, she was wearing a pin on her purple sweater reading “Artists’ lives matter.” She gave me a pin reading “Words matter.”
Schoen-Rene wears a safety pin as an earring and has a painting of a skull above his fireplace. Shortly before the mayoral election, he said he’d vote for “anybody but London Breed probably,” referring to the supervisor with the most moderate political viewpoints, who did go on to win. Other neighbors said they’d vote for Breed over Supervisor Jane Kim, who has represented their neighborhood during its decline.
On one of my visits to Iris Street in early April, the sidewalks at the end of the block underneath the freeway were teeming with homeless people. One woman leaned against a wall with drug paraphernalia spread around her. She alternately cried, gave huge clownish smiles and screamed profanities.
A man with a pile of belongings and a dog nestled in an open suitcase stood nearby. He said his name is just Roni and he’s been homeless for eight years. He said he’s addicted to meth. His teeth seemed to be disintegrating.
“It’s a hard way to live. There’s a lot of stress,” he said, talking loudly over the sound of whizzing traffic above. “I just want to be somewhere where I can relax. Sleep maybe.”
Weeks later, people like Roni were gone. Mayor Farrell had directed the clearing of the remaining tents in the area, emphasizing that those living inside had been offered services and shelter repeatedly and had declined.
“This is just the beginning,” Farrell said. “Tents should not be part of the permanent landscape in San Francisco.”
Whiteside said she was glad for “a little reprieve” but wondered why the sudden change after so many calls for help. And what happened to all those people in tents who are now gone.
“For months and months and months, nothing happens, and then they clean,” she said shortly after Farrell’s move. “Now my street’s clean this week, but those people aren’t trash. It’s a double-edged sword.”
Would it hold? Would Isis Street remain clear? So far, so good.
Schoen-Rene called the changed landscape “almost uncanny.” He’s happy and relieved, but also confused. He doesn’t know where those who didn’t accept shelter went — and the Farrell administration hasn’t bothered to track them.
“It’s as if they all got raptured,” Schoen-Rene said.
It’s far from perfect. On a recent day, he saw a tent on his corner with four people inside “with needles hanging out of their feet.” Police came and whisked them out of the neighborhood, signaling Farrell’s determination to keep the area clear. There’s still human feces on his street sometimes. And rats. And the wait-and-see feeling that the disastrous conditions could reappear at any time.
“Still, it’s amazing to have the street clean,” Schoen-Rene said. “It’s clean. It’s nuts.”
“They shouldn’t have to live like that, and we shouldn’t have to live like that.”
Annie Whiteside, an Isis Street tenant
for 27 years
“He was crazy, but I was more crazy than him. I was so pissed.” Neker Ortiz, a neighborhood worker who chased down a man who broke into a car
“I feel kind of powerless and helpless. It kind of gets to me.” Karen Koltonow, an artist who has lived in an Isis Street apartment since 1984
“There’s the poop and the needles and the rats. Oh, my God, there didn’t used to be rats.” Ernst Schoen-Rene, shown with wife Jill and son Laszlo