Cruel intentions
City sweeps homeless camp but offers no real assistance

By Julian Foley

The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission's Channel Pump Station sits in a forlorn corner of the city, near Seventh and Berry Streets, sandwiched between train tracks and the expanse of dusty, littered land beneath the freeway's massive cement ramps. Even the eucalyptus trees that decorate its brown front yard are haggard, their trunks thin and stooped.

Despite the pleasant view of downtown, and the site's proximity to the new ballpark, this is not exactly prime San Francisco real estate. But until last week, this was what about 100 homeless people called home. Some had been living next to the pump station for nearly a year, others only a few weeks, but by most accounts this was a clean, safe, and well-organized community of tents, shopping carts, sleeping bags, and bikes, filling in one of the city's dead spaces.

Now the area is barren again, closed off by an imposing chain-link fence, yellow police-line tape still flapping in the breeze. The camp was "swept" in an early-morning July 27 raid, and its onetime inhabitants can now be found milling around the city in search of new places to park their carts.

Although there are no houses nearby, only a handful of warehouses, the camp was considered a nuisance to nearby businesses and people parking for ball games, said George Smith III, director of the Mayor's Office on Homelessness. It simply had to go. But where to?

"We try to provide reasonable accommodation for folks," Smith said, referring to the emergency shelter space that was made available, "but no one took us up on it." The temporary shelter would have been available for only one night, homeless advocates said.

The incongruity between what the homeless population wants or needs and what services are actually available is at the crux of the debate over Sup. Gavin Newsom's Care Not Cash initiative, and now Sup. Tom Ammiano's alternate plan (see Hall Monitor, below). Christine Hansen, a shy 27-year-old who is living on a sidewalk near the old camp, said she won't go to shelters, citing drugs, violence, and close quarters with untrustworthy strangers. Mikel Augusta and his fiancé, who lived together on the edge of the encampment, won't either because it would mean splitting up. There are separate shelters for men and women, even if they are married.

Hansen and Augusta want long-term solutions, not a night on a cot. They aren't alone. In the days before the sweep, 20 of the camp's residents filled out applications for the Shelter Plus Care program, which provides longer-term rental and supportive services for people with disabilities, but there were already twice as many applicants on the waiting list as there are housing units. Mobile Outreach Support and Treatment, a service for mentally ill homeless people, had only one space in its program to offer. There isn't nearly enough permanent, or even transitional, housing to meet the needs of San Francisco's homeless, something that any reform plan will have to address.

The city's current policy of sweeping and arresting the homeless, Mara Raider of the Coalition on Homelessness said, only serves to perpetuate the cycle. "Unless poor people have someplace to go, this will keep happening," she told us. "They are not going to disintegrate."

The coalition had been working at the pump station, helping the community figure out its options in preparation for the inevitable. The camp had grown significantly larger in previous weeks, thanks, according to one former resident, to sweeps in other parts of the city, and there were some complaints from pump employees. Residents and service providers had been warned that people would be kicked off the site, but it happened sooner than anyone had expected or was ready for.

Around three on Saturday morning a squad car pulled up to the sleeping tent village, and an officer barked into a megaphone that the residents had to leave. The groggy scramble began, people sorting through and packing up belongings, deciding what to keep and what to leave behind. Hansen reduced her five shopping carts to three in anticipation of a return to mobile living. Just after 6 a.m., a line of squad cars and Mobile Assistance Patrol vans arrived, accompanied by a tractor to clear out anything left behind. By 11 a.m. the site was empty.

Everyone living there knew that the community couldn't last, but the residents were proud of it while it did. "This camp would have worked," said Jesse James Jr., part of the core group that started it. "We showed we could do it. The thing we had here was good." James is now living between a fence and a freeway pillar, where he'll stay until someone notices and moves him on.

"The mayor keeps telling homeless people to hide," Raider said. "And now they are getting kicked out of their hiding places."

E-mail Julian Foley at julian@sfbg.com.