'QUALITY OF LIFE " is a phrase we hear often these days, especially during elections. Already it's been raised in at least one supervisorial race. Mayor Gavin Newsom invoked it big-time when he pushed for the further criminalization of panhandling and a measure to rob the poor of their meager General Assistance checks. Although promising to improve the quality of life of middle-class white folks helped Newsom get elected, since he's been in office nothing has changed on the streets.

It's troubling that the racist and classist connotations of this phrase are always ignored. People who should know better use it as if it didn't originate in the desire of white, middle-class Americans for separation from those they don't like, specifically blacks and the poor.

In the 1950s improving one's quality of life meant moving from the inner cities to the suburbs, those pristine, lily-white pieces of the American dream where middle-class white families could escape people of color, poor folks, homos, and others. In the infamous social trend known as "white flight," whites fled from living a few blocks from blacks to prefabricated houses with white picket fences, perfectly groomed lawns, and spacious backyards that were next to other white families. They created enclaves where they didn't have to shop in ethnic markets where a foreign language was spoken, where their children didn't have to mix with poor kids, where they didn't have to see queers or prostitutes walking the streets at night cruising for sex or homeless folks on the sidewalks begging for change.

In Philadelphia in the late 1980s, "quality of life" was the rallying cry for neighborhoods opposing hospices for people with AIDS. Irrationality reigned supreme: People with AIDS would bring drugs, violence, and other urban blight into their respectable white neighborhoods. Children wouldn't be safe. Old people would be mugged. The real estate types had their own very effective fear tactic: plummeting property values.

In the Castro District a few years ago, when community activists pushed for a shelter for homeless queer youth, opponents employed a similar "quality of life" mantra. A shelter would bring down property values and destroy their standard of living. Crime would increase, as would drug use and trash. This in a neighborhood where hard drugs (like E, G, K, and meth) are no strangers and much of the litter is created by discarded club cards. But, hey, who's complaining about those things?

Some opponents even asked that the shelter be relocated to a more "appropriate" neighborhood such as the Tenderloin. After all, why should decent, middle-class white gay folks have to deal with poor or homeless kids, even if they're queer? If crime was going to result from this shelter, why not bring it to a neighborhood that was already crime-ridden? Forget about the quality of life of the homeless kids and the residents of the Tenderloin.

Of course we should be concerned about whether our streets are clean and people are pissing on the sidewalks. But let's recognize the difference between wanting streets free of hypodermic needles and not desiring to live near poor folks. Let's be clear that one can have a safe and clean environment that's shared by a diversity of people from various economic levels, including the homeless. The shelter operated in the Castro for years with no negative impact. None of the opponents' dire predictions materialized. Today the drug and litter situation in the Castro is the same. I suppose the next time we'll hear about quality of life in the gay mecca is when a new social service is proposed or some politician is running for office.

Quality of life should extend to everyone in this society: poor and rich alike. Obviously it never does.

Tommi Avicolli Mecca is a longtime southern Italian queer writer and activist who helped found the Castro homeless queer youth shelter.