Rousted campers move on
She has kept the crack habit at bay since 2013. Her daughter, Marciana Mayweather, said all that kept her anxiety-ridden mother from moving into housing for the homeless is a shortage of such housing and “herself, because she’s got to want to change before change can come.”
That desire seems to have arrived, Marciana said. A street counselor who has been working for more than a year to get Angelique Mayweather housed agreed.
The counselor is barred by city rules from speaking for attribution. But he was happy to describe Mayweather with a street-help term for someone worn down by homelessness: “She’s cooked.”
And sure enough, when a bed popped open at the Navigation Center on June 12, she snapped up the offer.
“I’m trying to move out into my own housing now, a real place, but I’ll believe it when I see it,” Mayweather said. “This beats the tent for now.”
Terry Quinn spent years in jail and tent camps, but his life finally picked up when the Division Street camp was dismantled. He traded his campsite for a spot in the Mission Street Navigation Center — and in August, he wound up at the Henry Hotel supportive housing complex on Sixth Street. He’s been there ever since.
“Beats the hell out of sleeping on Division,” said Quinn, 55, whose street-exacerbated ailments — from drug addiction to a painful neuropathic nerve condition — have improved with life indoors. “I’m free of hepatitis C, I have my own roof, and I’m never going back.”
His sister, Tara Quinn of Hayfork (Trinity County), still marvels that Quinn went so far off the rails despite having a famous father — the late painter Noel Quinn, renowned in art circles as a protege of Pablo Picasso’s.
“After all these years he was so eager to finally get off the street, and it’s wonderful San Francisco was able to help,” Tara Quinn said. “It’s amazing he’s alive. He’s doing so much better now.”
Of all the people the city tried to prod and cajole away from Division Street, no one is more determined to stay right there than McKinney. He essentially never left.
From holes battered into walls to wind-whipped spots on thoroughfare dividers, McKinney has pitched his tent all over San Francisco since hitchhiking here from Iowa as a teenager, and for the past couple of years he’s stuck around Division.
Sometimes he works. Last year, he drove part-time for a mortuary. But McKinney can’t remember how many years it’s been since he rented a room.
“I’m not moving inside,” he said. “I can survive the wet and cold, but you know what I can’t survive? Someone taking my rights away, telling me what to do — that I have to be indoors.”
Among the dozens of people sleeping in vans and RVs along Division Street, few were more easygoing than Robert and Cassandra Brownell. The married couple have been using their weathered RV as a rolling retirement home for the past couple of years, moving it every time police ask them to, and they kept the sidewalk tidy around their parking spot.
When the sweep hit in 2016, they just rolled a few blocks away for a couple of
TERRY QUINN:
A room at the Henry Hotel supportive housing complex on Sixth Street provides Terry Quinn the comforts of home that he didn’t have during his years spent in jail and in tent camps. “I have my own roof, and I’m never going back,” Quinn says. weeks before returning. These days, they can’t park at their old spot on Division in front of Best Buy because of a new bicycle lane, so they slide in behind Office Depot on 14th Street, with the occasional stint in nearby alleys or on streets.
They say they’re just as relieved as local shopkeepers are to see the huge tent city gone.
“It’s so much better for us now,” said Cassandra Brownell, 65. “There were just too many people in all those camps. We’d have our stuff stolen, there were fights. It’s nicer now, and we still make sure never to bother anyone.”
Robert Brownell, 59, said the couple intend to stick it out in their RV until he’s 62. Then he can start pulling a Social Security check and a union pension from the floorinstalling career he had before a back ailment sidelined him.
“We would love to live more inside,” he said. “But we just can’t find a house on Cassandra’s Social Security check. So this is the best we can do for now.”
What happened to Gray, the Brownells and their street-mates after their tent city was dismantled in March 2016 was typical of 20 years of efforts to deal with chronic homelessness in San Francisco.
More than two-thirds of the 350 or so Division Street campers wound up in shelters or permanent housing, or were given bus tickets home to family or friends. The 100 or so others just moved their tents a few blocks away — and as people who ended up in shelters hit their maximum stays, scores of them tumbled back into street life as well.
Dealing with Division
KATHY GRAY:
Holding a cigarette as she sits in her room at the Winton Hotel on O’Farrell Street, Kathy Gray is among the fortunate few chronic homeless who find permanent housing. Street itself has also been a challenge for the city.
As recently as December, there were still scores of people camping around Division. But a major effort since then by the city’s street counselors moved around 75 of them into temporary shelters or onto buses heading home, city officials say. The most durable of the camps, two spreads filled with heroin addicts along Florida and Division streets behind Best Buy, were cleared out at the beginning of 2017.
“It’s been great here since the winter,” said Jason Huong, owner of the Folsom Auto Body Center at Folsom Street, whose business sits at the center of the old camping strip. “Sometimes there is a tent or two behind my shop, but the police have been paying good attention.”
At the height of the encampment crisis, Huong painted “No Camping, Blocking Business” in red letters in his driveway, but it made no difference. Tents stayed pitched in front of his door, and in one a hooker turned loud tricks in the evening, the noise at times punctuated by johns beating her. Needles and human feces were everpresent in front of the auto shop; every morning, Huong had to clean them up.
“I do feel terrible for the people who are homeless, but it really hurts small business,” Huong said. “The city really needs to give them places to live.”
Giving places to live is the fondest wish of Jeff Kositsky, who took on the job of directing the city’s new Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing in August 2016, several months after Division Street was cleared.
He can point to the creation of a team of counselors that tries to talk homeless people off the streets, the opening of two more Navigation Centers and a $100 million donation from the Tipping Point Community charity to work on alleviating chronic homelessness. But the bald fact remains that there is not enough housing to pull everyone off the sidewalks.
“If it was easy to solve this, somebody would have done it,” Kositsky said. “But we are making progress. This takes time.” San Francisco Chronicle staff photographer Lea Suzuki contributed to this report.