Homeless days
While politicians spar in the headlines, life on the streets just gets tougher

By Rachel Brahinsky

Despite the cold and blustery weather May 14, almost two dozen wind-whipped demonstrators picketed for hours in the stone courtyard of the city's Department of Human Services building on Otis Street. In the middle of the courtyard someone had piled up a green couch with random personal belongings – including a lamp, a plant, and a sack of clothes.

From his perch on the couch, a man with a bullhorn chanted slogans condemning Proposition N, Sup. Gavin Newsom's Care Not Cash program, which has brought the homeless question to the forefront of city talk. The May 8 court ruling nullifying about half of the measure has thrown city hall into a swirling sort of fit: everyone's wondering what to do to help the homeless – and how to save his or her own political hide.

Yet while homeless policy – in the abstract, legal, and political sense – has been center stage, the realities faced by people on the streets have largely been shunted aside.

Mario Morales dressed for the DHS rally in a gray hooded sweatshirt and a baseball cap. Morales, who has been homeless for more than a year, told me in Spanish that the nation's leaders have their priorities backward. "This is a country that has money," he said. "If they can use it to go bomb other countries, they could use it to build housing."

Morales, a Guatemalan immigrant, could no longer afford his room in a residential hotel after the economy went sour in 2001, when his previously steady work as a day laborer for a roofing company grew sparse.

Since then, he has applied for supportive housing through a nonprofit group. In the meantime he either sleeps in the streets or plays the lottery for a bed in a city shelter. His situation became even less secure May 2, he said, when a shelter staffer announced a new way of assigning beds. She "came and said in English that people without G.A. [General Assistance] would lose their places," Morales recalled. "She said we had to go and register every day at 8 a.m. But I have to get up at 5 a.m. to look for work."

Morales said he was told that soon he would have to go to the center each morning to ask for a bed for the night; in the past he was often able to secure a seven-day contract for shelter.

Changes in the shelter rules – which DHS says are still being formulated – will be central to Care Not Cash if it's reinstated. Before the court ruling, the city was beginning to ask shelter seekers to step aside to make way for welfare recipients targeted by the measure – with plans to offer beds only when welfare clients didn't need or want them.

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Across town the next day, mayoral candidate Angela Alioto unveiled her alternative, a plan called San Francisco Cares. Alioto is calling for closing the shelters completely and using the money that saves to fund successful housing programs and other services.

The glaring omission of the plan, announced before television cameras on the lawn in front of City Hall, was the math. Alioto proposes closing inefficient clinics and slashing bloated executive salaries to fund counseling and housing for the needy but hasn't yet shown how it will work. Still, Alioto's convinced the numbers will ultimately add up: "If you had $110 million," she asked, "couldn't you help 5,000 [homeless] people?"

Organizers at the Coalition on Homelessness hadn't seen the plan yet when we called, but director Paul Boden had this to say: "Until we develop a community plan – a plan that comes from those who live and work with the homeless – and until we hear from providers what's working, and until we get state and federal representatives together to demand [coherent] national policy, we are not going to change anything."

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