A firsthand view on Prop. C debate
As San Francisco voters Tuesday consider Proposition C — the controversial ballot measure that would raise taxes on big businesses to fund homeless services — they may draw upon what they’ve heard from advocates, politicians, the Chamber of Commerce, billionaires bickering on Twitter and, yes, newspaper columnists.
But they haven’t heard much from homeless people themselves, or from those who’ve experienced homelessness and pulled themselves out of it.
Scores of homeless and formerly homeless people are among the campaign workers staffing phone banks — in the offices of nonprofits, at tables in the closed Turk and Larkin Deli, and even in Salesforce Tower — trying to persuade residents to cast their votes in favor of the measure. They’re paid $20 an hour, more than minimum wage and more than they can make panhandling.
One of those campaign workers is Anubis Daugherty, a 24-year-old San Francisco native who has finally secured a room in an SRO, after being homeless most of his life. I heard about him after he met Supervisor Rafael Mandelman when the politician toured Larkin Street Youth Services in August as part of a listening tour to better understand the city’s homeless crisis.
Mandelman was asking Daugherty questions when Daugherty shot back with one of his own.
“I asked him if I could work for him right in the middle of the interview,” Daugherty said.
There were several onlookers and
only one possible answer.
“I was like, ‘OK!’ ” Mandelman said with a laugh. “There are so many kids in the city and the world who are struggling and have been through so much. I was happy to give Anubis time to to spend in City Hall.”
I met with Daugherty the other day in those same Larkin Street Youth Services offices in the Tenderloin where he met Mandelman. I was curious about the homeless kid turned campaign worker and City Hall intern, the one who had opinions about Prop. C because of life experience, not because of what somebody else told him to think about it.
“It’s my least favorite thing, to tell my story,” Daugherty began.
That’s because it’s not a very happy one. Daugherty was born to a single mother with cerebral palsy who had a hard time supporting them on her disability check. They jumped from hotel room to hotel room, couch-surfed with friends or slept in their car.
Because of what Daughtery politely described as “unresolvable conflicts at home,” he ran away at age 16 and became one of those familiar Haight Street kids, alternately hanging out in the neighborhood near Golden Gate Park or hitchhiking and riding Greyhound buses up and down the West Coast and around the Southwest.
He hooked up with Larkin Street Youth Services to get toiletries, clothing and other basic needs. He slept on the sidewalk in a sleeping bag — never a tent, which was too hard to carry around all day. He panhandled, finding the Castro the most generous neighborhood and the Haight the most stingy.
Like many street kids, he coped by using drugs — LSD, mushrooms and weed. When he got so addled he couldn’t hold a normal conversation a few years ago, he kicked the drugs on his own, he said.
I asked him to name a common stereotype San Franciscans have about homeless people, and he came up with a long list.
“That we’re going to hurt people — rob them and beat them up. That we don’t care about anything,” he said. “Like we don’t care about life or society; we’re just dropouts. That we don’t want to provide for the general good.” And there was more. “That none of the homeless people are from here, which is very untrue,” he said, noting he met many homeless people, like himself, who are from the city.
He said he did meet two groups of people who weren’t San Franciscans: the kids just traveling through on some kind of adventure who have no desire for permanent housing in San Francisco, and the kids who’d been kicked out by their families after coming out as gay and came here for acceptance.
Another stereotype? That every homeless person who approaches you wants money.
“Like, if I’d go up to someone and ask the time or say, ‘Lovely weather we’re having’ or ‘How are you?’ they’d say, ‘I don’t have any money,’ ” he recalled.
“They’d just keep walking fast away from me,” he said, waving his hand as if to signal a brush-off. “They have those hand gestures that we’re just supposed to know.”
We’re all guilty of that in San Francisco, hardened to the ever-present homelessness around us and not thinking much about what it must be like to have passersby pretend you’re not there.
While most of the talk about homelessness in the city centers on the older, chronically homeless people so obvious on the sidewalks South of Market and in the Tenderloin, 20 percent of those found homeless in San Francisco’s last biannual count were unaccompanied youth younger than 25.
Sherilyn Adams, director of Larkin Street, which serves that population, said she’s glad the city is concentrating more on that less-visible population and praised Mayor London Breed’s commitment to cut youth homelessness in half by 2022.
She diplomatically said she backs the efforts of Breed, who opposes Prop. C because she’s not confident the current homeless funding is being well spent, and also backs the measure itself.
“There is an underinvestment in addressing the needs of young people experiencing homelessness,” Adams said. “With Prop. C’s passage, we would see an increase in opportunities for services.”
Services like Larkin Street’s Pathways program, which offers young people rental subsidies, furniture, and help with moving and signing a lease. That’s what finally got Daugherty a room in an SRO hotel two years ago.
He’s now a member of Larkin Street’s Youth Advisory Board, which gives him a stipend of $170 a week. He also receives a Supplemental Security Income check because of his bipolar diagnosis, which he said is getting better with treatment.
He’s interning — unpaid — in Mandelman’s office two days a week, greeting constituents and answering phones. He’s also going to City College and is debating between being a social worker and a paramedic.
Plus, for one more day, he’s phoning voters to tell them to vote for Prop. C.
“It’s weird to me that people against Prop. C don’t have faith in the government that they run,” Daugherty said. “We don’t need to reinvent the wheel — we just need more of what we’re doing.”