BART’s struggles with homelessness
Carrots, sticks: Crisis intervention trainer deploys disparate strategies to address different people
When it comes to the homeless population on BART, there are three categories of people, says Armando Sandoval, BART’s homeless outreach worker and crisis intervention trainer:
• those willing to accept help,
• those who refuse it and
• those whose mental state leaves them unable to decide either way.
On any given day, he and BART police encounter each, he says. And, as homelessness rises in some parts of the Bay Area — Santa Clara and Alameda counties in particular — Sandoval said the agency is experiencing an influx of people using the system as a shelter. To manage the tide, he said they must deploy tools to address all three categories. That means more carrots, more partnerships and, in some cases, more sticks.
On a recent Wednesday night at San Francisco International Airport, when BART shut down
“The issue is societal. It’s not BART, it’s not SFPD, it’s not the justice system, it’s not the public health or mental health departments. It’s everything.”
— Armando Sandoval, BART outreach worker
for the night, fewer than a dozen people streamed out of the nearly empty train. And when they did, they were met with a cadre of San Francisco police officers, who handed those without plane tickets a bus token to ride SamTrans, instead.
“San Francisco or Palo Alto,” asked Officer Albie Esparza before doling out the metal coins. The San Mateo bus agency operates overnight lines heading both north and south. Patrons can choose where they go, but they can’t stay at the airport without a plane ticket, said airport spokesman Doug Yakel.
San Jose native Timothy Gatts was a first-timer, hoping to sleep in the warm, dry confines of the airport. He works as a security guard at various venues in San Francisco and Oakland, but work has been light, he said. When he was handed a three-day eviction notice from his room in San Francisco just a couple of weeks ago, he had nowhere to turn.
“I had a friend who said he used to (sleep at the airport),” he said. “I didn’t realize you couldn’t do it.”
The airport has provided tokens for years to anyone stranded at the end of the line, Yakel said. But, for the past seven or eight months, airport officials have been noticing an uptick in the number of homeless people with nowhere left to go when BART closes for the night. BART spokesman Chris Filipe said the agency has been conducting “pre-sweeps” of trains before they reach SFO, but San Francisco officers say that rarely happens.
Sometimes, when there are rooms available at a nearby shelter, the officers offer to connect the stragglers to those services, Esparza said. But there were none, so Gatts took the token and got on the bus back to San Francisco.
It’s unclear whether there are more homeless people left at other end-of-the-line stations on BART because no one tracks that data. But, commuters on BART have seen it firsthand.
BART is limited
Pleasanton resident Dan Allari said he’s noticed an uptick in the homeless population on BART in general since the winter. Though he said it distresses him to witness someone struggling through a particularly acute mental health crisis on the train, he recognizes BART is limited in what they can do.
“This is not a BART problem,” Allari said. “BART is a regional transportation system, and the problem of homelessness on BART is a regional problem.”
Homelessness has been on the rise in some parts of the Bay Area, according to the 2017 point-in-time counts released recently by each county. The biennial census attempts to quantify the sheltered and unsheltered people experiencing homelessness in every county, a requirement for receiving funds from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
In Santa Clara County, for instance, there was a 13 percent increase in the number of homeless people living in shelters or outside compared to 2015. San Francisco saw a 1 percent decrease. In San Mateo and Contra Costa counties, the homeless population actually dropped 15.5 percent and 7 percent, respectively.
Alameda County, on the other hand, saw a 39 percent increase. Part of that can be attributed to a change in the way the county collected its data this year, using street teams to walk block by block and physically count people sleeping outside, said Elaine de Coligny, the executive director of EveryOne Home, the nonprofit that conducts the count for the county. But part of that can also be attributed to a real increase in homelessness, something she said is evident in the number of encampments cropping up, particularly along the Interstate 880 corridor that parallels BART tracks.
“What people see, we think is true, and the data does appear to back it up,” she said. “The explosion in the housing crisis is pushing more people into homelessness.”
Over the years, BART has attempted a number of strategies to address homelessness on its system. In 2014, the agency came under fire from homeless advocates when it started enforcing a little-known law prohibiting people from blocking hallways on transit systems, which the advocates said only served to criminalize people for being poor.
The agency also started using prohibition orders in mid-2013, which are essentially 30- to 180-day stayaway orders from BART issued to people caught breaking the law. But they’ve increasingly been used for people who police identified as homeless or as having a mental illness. According to data compiled by the agency, the number of people with mental illness who were issued a prohibition order grew from nine in 2014 to 27 in 2016. And the number of homeless people issued stay-away orders jumped from 35 in 2014 to 67 in 2016.
Less punitive
BART has also tried less punitive approaches. In 2012, it hired Sandoval as a crisis intervention trainer, one of the recommendations from an independent audit of BART police following the shooting death of Oscar Grant. He was also tasked with serving as a liaison to the homeless community throughout the system.
Sandoval focuses most of his time on the district’s downtown San Francisco stations, where the homeless population is most concentrated. He walks through stations, looking to connect people to services that might help them, and he works closely with police to help them learn how to better act as outreach workers, too. There’s no real data to show whether the strategy is working, something Sandoval says he plans to remedy within the next few weeks.
But Tracy Benedict, who has been living outside in San Francisco for more than two years and often sleeps at BART stations, said it’s working for at least two officers who patrol Civic Center station. They have gone above and beyond their role of enforcing laws to help her connect with her family and access substance abuse recovery programs, she said.
“If one day I wanted to get clean, I know they would do anything in their power to help me,” she said.
The problem is too big for BART, though, Sandoval said, and he’s looking at partnerships with other cities to help. In San Francisco, BART and Muni both contributed $125,000 to the city’s Homeless Outreach Team, which will dedicate two outreach workers to focus on the stations shared by both agencies. The program will likely start in September once the outreach workers are hired, Sandoval said.
At the same time, BART is making efforts to improve its image and make downtown stations cleaner, said BART spokeswoman Alicia Trost. The agency’s budget, which began on July 1, dedicates $400,000 to hiring four community service officers to assist regular BART police officers in the downtown San Francisco stations, and $800,000 to improve the station environment, with the biggest focus on cleaning.
The problems are frustrating for both the agency and its patrons, and require a more integrative approach, Sandoval said. BART is limited in what it can do for those who want help, those who don’t and those who cannot access help themselves.
“The issue is societal,” Sandoval said. “It’s not BART, it’s not SFPD, it’s not the justice system, it’s not the public health or mental health departments. It’s everything.”
He continued, “When you’re dealing with these three categories, you have to be creative. … It does take some work, but we want to make the system safe for everyone.”