Nevius: check your facts

by Amanda Witherell

Last week SF Chronicle columnist C.W. Nevius waded back into one of his pet issues, homelessness, in a piece on the SF Streets and Neighborhoods workgroup. Convened by Mayor Gavin Newsom, the group is tasked with coming up with a few ideas to improve the street safety for a couple pilot projects centered around downtown. The group is stacked with local law enforcement officials, Newsom staffers, reps from the Chamber of Commerce and tourist groups, and a couple token homeless rights advocates, and the subtext of their mission seems to be implementing new quality of life laws, like a sit-lie ordinance, and double-strength enforcement zones that will further criminalize the already unfortunate condition of being homeless.

I reported on their last meeting here, a markedly different assessment than what Nevius penned.

Oh, where to start? How about the obvious: Nevius reported the wrong date of the next meeting. It’s actually going to be tomorrow, October 7 – though you wouldn’t necessarily know that since the group hasn’t posted its agenda. (Sunshine violation, anyone?) Anyway, Dariush Kayhan, the mayor’s homeless policy director, confirmed to me that the meeting is on Oct. 7, at 11 a.m., at St. Anthony Foundation’s offices at 150 Golden Gate.

Moving on: Nevius spins the group to make it sound like their work will be the first sip of a panacea long overdue – cooperation.

"Rather than the old routine of blame and argue, which has paralyzed discussion for 20 years or more, the Streets and Neighborhoods Workgroup is working to build consensus on a few neighborhood-specific pilot programs designed to discourage unwelcome behavior by street people,” Nevius wrote.

Actually, the group does not operate with a consensus model, whereby an issue is discussed and reviewed until everyone reaches a greater understanding, and hopefully, agreement. Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness, which has a seat on the workgroup, told me she’d specifically requested they operate with consensus – which the recent Shelter Standards workgroup used in order to develop effective, comprehensive legislation on homeless shelter health that was ultimately approved by the Board of Supervisors.

But this group decided against it and uses majority voting – which I witnessed several times at the meeting I attended, and which means that any minority voice is overwhelmed and squelched.

And, as Friedenbach told Nevius, the group is stacked. It’s so stacked, in fact, that Gary Koenig, the outside facilitator commented on it at the last meeting and commended the organizers for allowing Friedenbach in. “I’ve been in groups before where they very carefully eliminated the Jennifers,” he said, referring to Friedenbach’s role in the work group.

What I saw at that meeting was not exactly consensus building, but a lot of people trying to maintain civility with each other across the table while they pushed forward their different ideas for dealing with perennial issues typically associated with poor, mentally unstable, or homeless people that hang out in the streets. I saw some snickering. I saw one of the chairs of the group, Father John Hardin, deliberately suppress a publicly-available document that Friedenbach attempted to distribute to the others.

Hardin said the document hadn’t been approved for distribution (I, in fact, had a copy of the same document in my office, which I’d picked up at a monthly meeting of the Shelter Monitoring Committee. So it was out there. In fact, it’s so out there, here it is!)

Trent Rhorer, the director of the Human Services Agency, said it was out of context and inappropriate to distribute it at this meeting. (The document in question was a memo about the lack of beds available for reservation through the city’s homeless resource centers and was entirely germane to the workgroup’s discussion about people sleeping in the streets, camping out, and doing all the things they do in public because they’re homeless and have no place else to go -- like a shelter.)

Even if the group isn’t using consensus to arrive at a handful of suggestions for the mayor on how to improve street quality, Joe D’Alessandro of the SF Convention and Visitors Bureau told me, "Consensus is definitely the spirit of where we want to go," and he seemed eager to let this be the beginning of an ongoing conversation.

"My big message right now is we don't think they should come out with another divisive measure," Friedenbach told me about the future of the workgroup and it's suggestions for Newsom. "We agree on enough things that those things we agree on should be the focus."

I’d called D’Alessandro because he’d told Nevius that "…the most common complaint we get is about behavior on the street." I wanted to know what kind of polling the bureau did to reach that conclusion. But D’Alessandro said, “We don’t do polling of anything like that. It’s too expensive.” He said it was anecdotal evidence, and repeated the same story I’d heard him tell at the workgroup’s last meeting -- about a convention planner who got spit on during a tour of the city and subsequently decided to take his party elsewhere.

But the bureau does keep tabs on other things – like money. According to their statistics tourism and spending are up -- way up. After a noticeable and understandable dip in 2001 and 2002, visitors have increased every year in droves rivaling what they were in 1999. And those that are coming now are spending far more than they were in 1999 (possibly because the costs of things have increased.) Either way, if street conditions are driving tourists away, where’s the evidence?

I also asked D’Alessandro something else that I was curious about, and which doesn’t even get a mention in Nevius’s article: the mayor has committed no funding to implement the suggestions from the workgroup. This seemed to limit some of the conversation that I witnessed at the last meeting and steered it toward what are commonly considered no cost or low cost items, like new laws. Even some of the things that a broader coalition of the workgroup might end up agreeing on – like more public restrooms, more public seating areas and benches, and a 24-hour fully-staffed drop-in resource center for homeless people – all cost some amount of money, whether it’s a one-time upfront investment or a regular draw from the city budget.

Because the Convention and Visitors Bureau brings in so many people, and because organizations the Chamber of Commerce has such a robust membership and rich charitable foundation, I asked D’Alessandro about the likelihood of getting some private investment into some of these much needed city improvements. “Our foundation’s main purpose is education,” he said of the convention bureau's foundation, which funds schooling for people who want to get into the hotel and service industries. “But the bottom line is I do think the business community should provide. I don’t think the city should be off the hook, but I do think the business community can step in.”

Comments (1)

sanityplease:

This is the equivalent of a cripple fight. Between the Guardian's half baked Marxist ideological rant, and CW Nevius' bullshit, you two are meant for each other. No wonder the newspaper industry is going to hell. You people are idiots.

Posted by sanityplease | October 7, 2008 07:06 PM

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