By Tim Redmond

WHEN PEOPLE ASK Brad Paul, a longtime San Francisco housing activist, to explain why there are so many homeless people in the city, he likes to tell the story of his father's friend Charlie.

Charlie was born in Fall River, Mass., in a rough, working-class neighborhood. His childhood buddies, including Paul's father, managed to escape the old hood and move to the suburbs to raise their families, but Charlie, who had a bad drinking problem, got left behind.

Charlie's exactly the sort of person Sup. Gavin Newsom wants to drive out of San Francisco, someone who would almost certainly be homeless, destitute, and panhandling for spare change in this wealthy city today.

But in 1955, in a decaying, poverty-stricken East Coast industrial town, Charlie was able to live something resembling a decent life. "He had three things going for him," Paul remembers. "My dad and his friends never forgot him, and they'd hire him to do odd jobs when he was sober. They checked up on him when he was sick and made sure he had enough to eat. So he had some income and a social service network.

"And he had a room he rented for $4 a month."

Granted, that was 1955 – but adjusting Charlie's rent for inflation, his monthly housing cost today would be about $27. In other words, in Fall River 50 years ago, you could be poor without being homeless. And, just as important, the cost of housing alone wouldn't send you into poverty.

Fall River is 3,000 miles and a cultural light-year away from San Francisco – but the odd thing is, back in 1955, Charlie would probably have made it here, too. There weren't any $4-a-month rooms around, but there were plenty for $30 a month. There were more than 10,000 people – in many cases, single men – living in the South of Market area in what the residents called a community and the wealthy real estate speculators with eyes on big future profits called a slum.

Now, where people like Charlie (and many people who were poor but not alcoholics or drug users) used to live, there's a giant convention center and high-rise hotels and office buildings. The people who ran the city in the 1950s and 1960s called it progress.

The people who run the city today still call it progress when neighborhoods are damaged to make developers rich. And they don't like to talk about the costs of that progress – they'd rather just complain about the homeless and try to find ways to drive those people out of town.

Since 1966 the Bay Guardian has been a proud opponent of that kind of civic progress.

• • •

When Bruce B. Brugmann and Jean Dibble, two Midwesterners who had immigrated to San Francisco, started the Bay Guardian 37 years ago, the battles over South of Market and Western Addition redevelopment were in full swing. The larger battle, over what Bruce came to call the "Manhattanization of San Francisco," was just beginning.

The lines in the fight were clearly marked: On one side were the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, the developers, the big hotels, and most of the downtown corporations, which were looking to turn the city into the financial headquarters for the Pacific Rim. On the other side were the people who happened to be in their way: the low-income residents of neighborhoods that would be bulldozed to make way for fancy office buildings, the working-class people who would be evicted from their homes to make way for new high-paid office workers, and the many, many residents who wanted their city to be a decent place to live, not just a place from which a few big businesses could extract wealth.

Bay Guardian headlines from the battlefront in 1970 announced, "Rats, Roaches and Repairs: Tenants Are Striking All Over" and "Yerba Buena: A Case Study in How S.F. Development Went Wrong." In 1971 the Bay Guardian published a book called The Ultimate Highrise, laying out the social and economic disaster of overbuilding. Later in the 1970s came stories like "Last Stand at the Goodman Building," describing the fight to save low-cost housing for artists, and numerous accounts of the battle over the International Hotel (and affordable housing for seniors in the old Manilatown). In the 1980s the paper took on redevelopment at India Basin (and more displacement of African Americans), the landlord attacks on rent control, and then-mayor Dianne Feinstein's runaway gentrification. By the 1990s, with Mayor Willie Brown trying to toss the homeless out of Golden Gate Park, we were telling City Hall to "Leave 'Em Alone!"

The Manhattanizers, Bruce liked to say, looked at the city from the top of the Transamerica Building down. The Bay Guardian looked at the city from the bottom up.

And from the start, the Bay Guardian insisted that issues like poverty and homelessness couldn't and shouldn't be addressed in isolation, as random social problems. Bruce, like former UC Berkeley journalism school dean Ben Bagdikian (see "The Secret of the Permanent Poor," page 32), never believed in the biblical maxim that "the poor ye will always have." There were specific policies that created these problems, and specific people who were responsible for those policies. It doesn't have to be this way.

That's one of the things this anniversary issue tries to point out.

• • •

San Francisco is a rich city. As we report on page 18 in this special anniversary issue, there are 11 billionaires in town, and 15 of the 400 richest people in the world live here. The percentage of people earning more than $100,000 a year has increased dramatically in the past 20 years.

It's also a city full of people who just can't survive on the money they have – and that situation is getting worse. In fact, the U.S. Census Bureau says the gap between the rich and the poor in San Francisco is the second worst of any county in California (after rural Modoc, which has a very different population and different problems).

And, the census figures show, a lot of people who are living in poverty today were doing OK – not great, but OK – just 20 years ago. There are reasons for that.

On the national level, a lot of powerful people in both political parties have promoted (with the help of the news media) what Bagdikian calls a terrible myth – the notion that Americans are suffering under a huge burden of taxes and that tight regulations on business hurt the economy. In fact, the wealthy in this country pay far less in taxes than their counterparts in most Western countries – and, not coincidentally, most of those countries lack the permanent underclass of the United States. In most countries we like to identify with, the government heavily subsidizes housing and health care and provides enough of a safety net that people who can't work don't wind up living in cardboard boxes and begging for change on street corners.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco a lot of powerful people (most of them allied with the Democratic Party, which runs this town) have made sure taxes on business are too low, that there are no effective controls on rents, that there are no strong anti-eviction laws, that there's far too little money for welfare programs like General Assistance and housing subsidies, that affordable housing isn't protected from the developer's wrecking ball.

So people who used to get a minimum wage that was adequate for providing food and housing now find they can't both eat and pay the rent in San Francisco. People on fixed incomes or disability or other government assistance have seen their purchasing power decline to the point where they have to choose between food and shelter.

Those are specific policy decisions – and the people who made them are directly responsible for the eminently preventable tragedies of persistent poverty and homelessness in one of the world's richest cities.

• • •

As we point out on page 18, the cost of housing is one of the major factors driving people into poverty in San Francisco, and there are plenty of ways to preserve existing low-cost housing and build new affordable units. For $133 million a year, San Francisco could build enough decent housing to get the entire existing homeless population off the streets in just seven years. Raising the minimum wage (vote yes on Proposition L!), increasing (not cutting) welfare grants, and linking all public assistance to the cost of housing would make a huge dent in the local poverty rate.

In the short term, there's plenty of space for decent shelter in this town, from empty Housing Authority units that ought to be cleaned up and rented immediately to vacant commercial and industrial buildings that could be temporarily converted to residences. There are hundreds of empty housing units in the Presidio. There's empty space where temporary homeless camps could be constructed (homeless people have done it themselves when the police have left them alone).

And all of that could be funded quite easily with a modest increase in taxes on the biggest and most profitable corporations in town.

In the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson talked about a "war on poverty." In 2003, Gavin Newsom is declaring war on the poor. That kind of attitude is exactly the reason San Francisco continues to have desperately poor people in the middle of fabulous wealth.