On some past columns, here’s the next chapter
Too often, journalists bring you the stories of compelling people without any follow-up. Readers often ask, “Whatever happened to ... ?” Here are some updates on three women who’ve been featured in this space.
Etoria Cheeks: The story of the high school math teacher who was homeless was shocking, but now there’s a happy ending. Hint: She has a new home.
As a refresher, Cheeks earned about $65,000 a year teaching math and coaching badminton at the Academy-San Francisco at McAteer, a public high school on Portola Drive. But being evicted in December from a Daly City house that went into foreclosure turned her life upside down.
The newcomer from Georgia had no family here, few friends and little cash because of a dispute over the security deposit. She rented a dorm bed in downtown hostels for a couple
of months and, when her money ran out, slept in a homeless shelter for one awful night.
The teachers union found a retired member with a spare guest room who put Cheeks up until she could find her own housing. “San Francisco isn’t geared for me — it’s not built for someone like me,” Cheeks said in the spring.
Just after her story appeared, Mayor Ed Lee announced that he’d selected a site to build teacher housing and would put $44 million toward the plan.
But the story also had a more personal benefit for Cheeks. Landlord and artist Spike Kahn read the column and reached out to Cheeks to tell her she had a vacancy.
“One thing led to another, and now she’s my tenant!” Kahn said. “I bemoan the fact that the middle class has all but disappeared out of San Francisco. I wanted to walk the walk and not just talk the talk.”
Cheeks moved into a one-bedroom apartment on Grove Street in NoPa this month. She declined to reveal her rent, but called Kahn “really flexible.” Asked how she felt when she turned the key to her own apartment, Cheeks said, “Oh, it was so amazing — it was a seriously long journey.”
Cheeks had resigned from the San Francisco Unified School District, figuring she’d move somewhere where housing is less expensive and the pay better. But now that she’s found secure and apparently affordable housing in the city, she’s trying to get reinstated. Meghan Freebeck: The May story of the 29-yearold who founded a nonprofit called Simply the Basics to provide toiletries for homeless people was inspiring not only to readers but also to other leaders in the homeless world.
Freebeck had moved to San Francisco from Chicago in 2013 to take a job as deputy director of San Francisco Suicide Prevention. She founded her nonprofit in her spare time, taking no salary. It is the country’s first full-scale hygiene bank and provides 2,000 basic items, including tampons and socks, to homeless shelters every week.
Now, Freebeck has left Suicide Prevention to take a job as acting CEO of Project Homeless Connect, the city’s onestop shop for homeless services.
And that’s just one of several changes in store for Project Homeless Connect, founded under then-Mayor Gavin Newsom in 2004. The organization broke away from City Hall a few years ago and has operated under a fiscal sponsor, HealthRight 360. The new plan is for Project Homeless Connect to become a project of Simply the Basics.
Kara Zordel, 40, the current head of Project Homeless Connect, said the structure will allow both organizations to save money by streamlining efforts and sharing staff and office space. Zordel will resign within a year, and Freebeck will be CEO of the whole enterprise. Zordel said she plans to work as long as she can before taking time off to deal with health needs.
“It’s given me so much inspiration, and it will be really hard to leave it,” Zordel said, adding she’s confident the organization will be in great hands under Freebeck.
Freebeck said she was leery when Zordel approached her, since she wanted to devote time to Simply the Basics.
“She was the innovative one who said, ‘Don’t stop doing that; let’s do it together,’ ” Freebeck said. “It’s pretty exciting, and I couldn’t turn that down.” Erica Sandberg: In August 2015, I told you about Sandberg, a 53year-old personal finance writer and Nob Hill resident, who was on a mission to publicize the importance of not just walking past homeless people in distress.
Hear a mentally ill person shouting nonsensically? See a homeless person passed out on the sidewalk, exposing himself or injecting drugs? Make a phone call. Depending on the situation, it could be to the Homeless Outreach Team, the police nonemergency line, 311 or 911.
“I’m so tired of complacency, of people saying, ‘There’s nothing we can do,’ ” she said back then. “The one thing we can do is make noise.”
Sandberg is still one for making noise. She’s filed papers to run for mayor in 2019.
Former state Sen. Mark Leno is the only major candidate to have filed paperwork so far, and many other politicos are expected to enter. But Sandberg, while not a household name, will certainly make it interesting.
“I don’t have much regard or respect for politics,” Sandberg said. “It was definitely a strange intellectual twist for me to go, ‘OK, I guess what I’m going to do is run in my own way.’ ”
She has no big desire to sit in Room 200, but she has a huge desire to see her beloved San Francisco treated better. She said it’s outrageous that the city spends $305 million in taxpayer money per year to combat homelessness and yet the misery on the streets continues.
“People are so frustrated with the mushrooming encampments and politicians turning away and throwing out words like ‘income inequality’ and then running out of the room,” she said.
She believes the city needs to start over on homeless spending. She’d start by focusing more on mental health care. The original story on Sandberg prompted a huge response — some loved her and some hated her. Here’s betting her mayoral run will also be polarizing — and fun to watch. P.S.: There’s another update on a woman from past columns. That proposal for a Maya Angelou statue outside the Main Library has passed its first hurdle. The Board of Supervisors’ budget committee approved an allocation of $250,000 to the effort over the next two years.