TODAY MARKS THE first anniversary of the full implementation of Care Not Cash. On this date a year ago, many of us gathered here to remind everyone that despite the fact that we had lost the battle to stop Care Not Cash, the issues affecting homelessness wouldn't be going away.

But this rally is not about Care Not Cash. It is about the forgotten ones. It is about the 80 percent of the homeless population for which the city has no plan and nothing to offer besides good words and media spin.

For a politician, when a problem can't be solved quickly enough – that is, before the next election – it becomes a priority to create the perception that the problem is actually being solved, while behind the curtains bureaucrats scramble to figure a way out of the mess. Thus, the Mayor's Office engaged in an unprecedented media campaign to convince the people of San Francisco that the administration had a plan to end homelessness and it was working.

Back in January, we saw the release of a homeless count that, despite not being backed by anything resembling a report, was fully swallowed by the major media outlets. To this day, no one outside of the administration has been able to see that report, if there is one, nor has anyone been able to offer an explanation of why all the agencies that provide services to poor and homeless people are seeing an increase, not a decrease, in their workload, or how come many neighborhoods are now receiving the homeless refugees that are being chased out of downtown. And yet the media still say there are 41 percent less homeless people in the streets of San Francisco.

The truth is that San Francisco lacks a plan to address homelessness as a whole. Care Not Cash, as even its architects at the Department of Human Services know, only deals with a very small fraction of the homeless population. Even the mayor, when campaigning on the back of his beloved piece of legislation, recognized that Care Not Cash would not come close to solving the huge problem we had in our hands.

Many of us who are here today joined the community effort to create a plan to deal with the so-called chronic homeless, what was to become the 10-year Plan to Abolish Chronic Homelessness. Overall, that is a good plan. But let's not forget that one of the reasons we had to create such a plan was that it was a requirement of the Bush administration, which had launched its own plans to address chronic homelessness with a few million bucks, while cutting billions more from other housing and welfare programs. The intent of the federal government was an obvious bait-and-switch tactic, but nevertheless we had to respond to it and create our own plan in order to obtain our share of very scarce, and disappearing, federal funds.

The 10-year plan recognizes on its very first page that only 20 percent of the homeless population of San Francisco fits the definition of "chronically homeless." What about the remaining 80 percent? Are we going to ask them to wait 10 years, until we are done dealing with the "chronic" cases?

The 10-year plan couldn't solve the funding issue either. It asked for 3,000 units of supportive housing for homeless individuals, which is a great goal. Half of those units would be newly built, but the city has not yet figured out a way to pay for them. By its own account, there is a $23,000,0000 funding gap that no one knows how to cover. The remaining 1,500 units would be leased from landlords for 10 years – which, by the way, puts us back on square one after the lease expires – but the only money available to pay for them would be the savings generated by Care Not Cash.

Every lucky individual who moves into a Care Not Cash unit does so because another three unlucky ones are warehoused in a shelter, working eight hours a week in exchange for $59. This is one of the reasons why the county welfare rolls have decreased so dramatically: many recipients of those benefits have simply dropped out because they have had their checks cut down for six or more months, and yet no one can tell when they will be obtaining the housing that has been promised to them. The DHS plans are clear about this, and they have made no attempt to deny it: there is no way to know when or if you will get housing; the only thing that is certain is that your benefits are being cut.

And when those same bureaucrats figured that this money wasn't enough to pay for what they promised, they moved to divert at least $3 million from existing fundamental services to pay for new housing projects. This money grab from programs that serve the poor came after the agencies that run those programs had already decided to take a voluntary cut of 10 percent on their nonhousing programs and offered to have $1 million directed to the permanent housing programs to make a gradual transition toward permanent housing without dismantling other much-needed programs.

This willingness of the service provider community to support the focus on providing housing was not enough for the city, and its representatives on the Local Homeless Coordinating Board rammed through the community process to apply for federal funds under the McKinney Act in order to attain their own funding goals, even if they did not have enough housing projects ready to meet the deadline. Nor did they care if their reckless sudden shift would mean the permanent loss of employment and training services that help homeless people in attaining financial self-sufficiency, legal assistance services that help homeless people obtain federal or state benefits (which on itself could save the city millions while at the same time significantly increasing the recipients' incomes), or even child care for homeless families that allows them to search for jobs or education opportunities.

Unfortunately, this administration has turned to robbing both Peter and Paul in order to pay for its own flawed plans. Poor people will be paying the bill with more cuts to programs and benefits, less employment and legal services, less health care and treatment.

Furthermore, the 10-year plan, for all its good intentions, still lacks the approval of the Board of Supervisors and therefore cannot replace the existing Continuum of Care plan of 2001. Legislative action is still needed, and we would like to see the Board of Supervisors come forward and enter the field. This is not the mayor's plan, as much as homelessness is not the mayor's issue. We need to make clear that any effort to reduce and hopefully end homelessness must not be a top-down affair, in which an elite that has no connection with the daily realities of homelessness makes all the decisions and ignores public input, legislative requirements, and above all, ignores the voice of those whose lives are at stake: homeless people themselves.

Today we are releasing a report titled "The Forgotten." Four out of five of San Francisco's homeless people are being left behind by this administration.

Pushing a housing-first model that is not applied to homeless families, immigrants, seniors, people with disabilities, and a long list of other homeless populations, the administration wants us to believe that by putting a few hundred homeless people in hotel rooms everything is going to be just fine and we will have no homeless people left soon.

Let's remind them that there is no housing first when Section 8 vouchers are being cut by the federal government to the tune of billions of dollars and we have no contingency plan to deal with the string of evictions that we can expect to result from thousands of poor San Franciscans losing their subsidies

There is no housing first when life-sustaining services are being drastically cut or terminated to add a few units of housing to be provided to the lucky ones.

There is no housing first when the city has no plans to create true affordable housing for the tens of thousands who are forced to pay more than what they could reasonably afford in order to keep a roof over their head.

There is no housing first when people who currently live in SRO hotels are being evicted to make room for those who will be moving in under Care Not Cash.

There is no housing first when we can't even guarantee equal access to the shelter system from which many immigrants and disabled homeless are being displaced, again, to make room for Care Not Cash clients.

There is no housing first when, of the 800 housing units released so far, not one was created for homeless families living in the shelters. Not a single one. Shouldn't the housing-first model be applied to families with children too?

There is no housing first when immigrants are not even part of the picture. Under the current policies, they are ignored and pushed deeper underground by fear and discrimination.

There is no housing first when police officers and DPW crews work together to promote a local version of socioeconomic cleansing that is putting more homeless people in jail or forcing them out of the central areas, or out of town altogether.

Instead, all we have is a spin-first model. Let's say we reduced street homelessness by 41 percent, even if we aren't sure of it. Let's say we have a plan when all we've got is Homeless Connect. Let's give the key to a room to one homeless guy when the cameras are rolling, and when no one is looking, we give citations that can lead to jail time for sleeping outdoors to 1,441 homeless persons, three times as many as in the last year of the previous administration.

We are here today to say that we don't want spin, we don't want propaganda, we don't want photo ops. We want to work together, as a community – homeless people, service providers, citizens, and city officials for true solutions.

We want a homeless plan that includes all homeless people, not just 20 percent of them. We want a plan for families, immigrants, working poor, disabled people, veterans, seniors, battered women, everyone.

We want city-owned surplus properties turned into housing for the homeless, as mandated by the law.

We want rent control to be expanded.

We want homelessness-prevention funds to be increased by 75 percent.

We want housing for families.

We want an end to police harassment of homeless people, as if there were not enough crimes in this city for the police to work on.

We want full amnesty for quality-of-life citations and a moratorium on those citations for as long as anyone is forced to live on the streets, because jailing someone for sleeping on the streets when there is no other option available certainly is a cruel and unusual punishment.

We want a real plan to deal with homelessness as a whole and provide housing, employment, and health care, because in the end, the main cause of homelessness is poverty, and we can only fight homelessness if we truly intend to reduce poverty. Everything else is just spin.