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Death, drugs and abandoned businesses all on display along san francisco ‘doom loop’ tour route.

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San Francisco’s ‘doom loop’ route really does give people a front row seat to the city’s descent into homelessness, drug use and urban decay.

Spurred by a local joker who has organized a tour of the California city’s most blighted areas , The Post walked the proposed route to see if the “worst of San Francisco” really was on offer.

Community activist JJ Smith generously acted as an ad-hoc tour guide for the “landmarks” on a 1.5-mile trip, which took in City Hall, Union Square, Mid-Market and the Tenderloin District — areas where a one bedroom apartment typically retails for $750,000 and upward.

The once bustling areas of Market Street and Union Square were homes to such esteemed stores as Nordstrom Rack and Old Navy until they recently left.

Floors and floors of completely vacant space in various storefronts are visible from the street, save a few lonely mannequins staring forlornly from windows.

Since January 2020, half of retailers have fled the downtown area because of sagging sales and lack of foot traffic and tourism. Of those that are left, even Ross Dress for Less now sports “enhanced security” in the form of bag checks and security guards stationed at all exits.

Market was also one of the only places along the route a couple of bored looking cops could be spied ambling along.

Homeless individuals have moved in to take advantage of the empty shell and sleep in front of the vacant shops, erecting a tent city on the sidewalk for most of the street.

Ironically, some encampments are in front of boarded blocks which used to be affordable apartments, now earmarked for destruction. Open drug use is commonplace at all hours, according to JJ, and people could be heard rustling and shuffling inside the tents just feet from the blaring mid-afternoon traffic.

Soon joining the urban emptiness could be the four-star Hilton San Francisco Union Square, where rooms are $450-a-night, and the Hilton Parc 55 hotel, where rooms are a little cheaper at $150-a-night. Their owner announced in June it would stop paying a $725m loan, which could potentially leave more than 3,000 rooms empty, although they were both still operational this week.

Crime has gotten so bad in the downtown area employees who work at the nearby Nancy Pelosi Federal Building were recently ordered to stay away and work from home “for the unforeseeable future” .

The building is a stone’s throw from the corner of Golden Gate Avenue and Hyde Street in the Tenderloin District, a hot-bed of drug deals once the sun goes down.

On any given night, dozens of individuals can be found shooting up or smoking fentanyl-laced drug concoctions from foil, JJ explained.

Smith said he has personally provided Narcan — which reverses opioid overdoses — to at least 50 people. Unfortunately, some of them could not be saved.

“It’s hard and really, it just makes me feel so sad,” Smith said.

“It’s gotten so bad that I stash Narcan on the streets when I walk my route. If I walk down the street, I know I stashed one near the store. And if I go down the other side, I know I have one in the next corner. I stash it all over for easy access because that’s how bad it gets around here.”

Smith said he saw officials with the San Francisco Medical Examiner’s Office recently take three bodies from one building where overdoses frequently occur. Multiple overdoses in just a span of hours are becoming ever more common, Smith said.

Many of the homeless addicts who collapse on the sidewalk overnight stay there until cleanup crews from local non-profits clear the streets every morning from 5 to 7 a.m.

In one video Smith showed The Post, which he shot, crew members from non-profit Urban Alchemy asked the addicts to pick up their belongings and stop using drugs as they try to sweep the sidewalk.

The video also showed Smith trying to wake up a man so high on drugs that he couldn’t open his eyes or move while being shaken.

“Come on fellas, it’s time,” said one worker holding a broom who tried to wake up a man passed out on drugs.

It’s a vicious cycle that keeps the doom loop going.

“They clean up the place early in the morning so people who have kids can walk around and take them to school, but once it gets dark, [the addicts] come right back, take drugs and pass out until the morning,” Smith said. “It never ends.”

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 A Communal

Response to, pb&j walking tours.

Welcome regularly takes groups on walking tours to learn about homelessness and poverty.  First, we make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches together while we get to know each other and learn about homelessness in San Francisco.  Then, we walk through the neighborhood handing out sandwiches and talking to homeless and hungry individuals while we stop at locations that help participants learn more about the issues affecting local poverty.  Walking tours occur in San Francisco's Polk Gulch, Tenderloin and Castro neighborhoods.

Groups interested in learning more about PB&J service projects should contact the Rev. Dr. Megan Rohrer: [email protected]

Your secure online donation will help us provide eye glasses, advocacy and support to the homeless in San Francisco.

Learn some tangible ways to make a real difference where you live.  Replicate our projects, volunteer and find DIY guides.

Welcome seeks to provide a faithful response to poverty and to improve the quality of life for individuals in our community through hospitality; the arts; education; food; and referrals.

One day, one city, no relief 24 hours inside San Francisco’s homelessness crisis

24 hours inside San Francisco’s homeless crisis

Published July 31, 2019

About this project:

For the fourth year, The San Francisco Chronicle is leading the SF Homeless Project, a consortium of media organizations focusing on the seemingly intractable problem of homelessness. The Chronicle's ongoing coverage, including stories, videos and interactive graphics, can be found at SFChronicle.com/homelessness .

Supported by

San Francisco spends more than $300 million a year fighting homelessness. Yet it’s not working – at least not enough. Amid a housing shortage, rampant drug addiction and a failing mental health care system, the everyday crisis on our streets has intensified.

On June 18, 36 Chronicle journalists spread across the city to document a typical 24-hour period in this epidemic, witnessing an unrelenting cycle of striving and suffering, of some people finding their footing and others falling through.

The day started just before dawn, along the Embarcadero.

The waterfront and a wheelchair

The Embarcadero is silent before dawn except for the whoosh of street cleaners. The loose band of meth-addicted homeless people who live near the waterfront have scattered, waiting to return at morning light. The techies and bankers who fill the Financial District towers above haven’t yet arrived.

Alex “Shorty” Pierson lurches awake from his off-and-on slumber in front of a nearby 7-Eleven.

Floyd and A.J. lie on the sidewalk beside Shorty’s battered wheelchair. The young men are there, in part, to help: Afflicted with osteogenesis imperfecta since birth, 36-year-old Shorty can’t walk and has limited use of his arms, so he’s dependent upon a couple dozen homeless friends to roll him where he wants to go.

He’s been living outside for much of the last 20 years, since he left his mother’s home because he was “hard-headed.” Shorty is what officials consider chronically homeless, having slept on the street for more than a year. He lives in the wheelchair with supplies stuffed behind his back. He hasn’t showered in two weeks.

A.J. rolls him across the street to a shopping center with an outdoor outlet to charge their phones. Shorty’s was stolen a couple of days before, and the replacement he bought for $10 on the street came uncharged. As it lights up, he punches in YouTube and gets Nipsey Hussle rapping “Racks in the Middle” at top volume.

Shorty sings along: “You can't imagine this s—!”

BART opens with a blitz

The gates open with a clang at Civic Center Station. BART is in “blitz” mode.

Cops and yellow-vested employees watch the entrances. Since April, the agency has sent extra workers downtown every day to bust fare evaders and discourage transients from using trains as quasi-homes, a problem that’s frustrated riders for years and prompted some to shun the system. The effort, politically fraught, casts BART in a second role: social service provider.

The crackdown is working, at least for now: Speakers play classical music over a walkway that used to be a hangout for slumped-over drug users and now has an antiseptic sheen.

An hour later, two BART police officers snap cuffs on their first fare evader of the day — a man with a bag of stuff slung around a wrist and a syringe in his pocket. He speaks no English, has no ID.

“Hey, do we have anyone who speaks Cantonese?” an officer asks.

Twenty-five minutes later, the cops release him with a citation for fare evasion, though they know such fines are rarely collected. Flustered, he spills the contents of his bag: an empty takeout box, crumpled napkins, a few dollar bills.

“Sir, you have to move on,” Officer Rodney Barrera says, as the man shields his face with a forearm and whimpers.

“Sir, do you need medical attention?”

Charie Pittman walks over. The 45-year-old security guard for a nearby building grew up blocks away in the Tenderloin and was once homeless herself. The problem is cyclical in Pittman’s family: Her mother lives in a tent in Berkeley.

She bends over to reach the man on the floor.

“C’mon sweetheart, let’s go enjoy the sun.”

They shuffle up the stairs. A minute later, the man is gone and Pittman crosses Market Street alone, wiping away tears.

‘It’s hard to know what success means’

Jeff Kositsky drives down Evans Avenue in the Bayview district, toward the water, chasing a report of a surge of occupied RVs.

This is the kind of thing Kositsky, head of the city's Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, does on his way into the office. He likes to stay in touch with the street. And this tip is especially relevant. Since 2017, the number of people living in RVs, cars and other vehicles has jumped by 45% to 1,794 — a growing crisis tagged to rising rents that the city is struggling to address.

Kositsky slows and peers out the window. The seven RVs parked along the street look relatively clean. Still, he says, it’s not humane to allow people to sleep in their vehicles. But what is the city to do when there isn’t enough housing to offer these people?

“Is success that they leave and don’t come back?” he asks. “Or is it just that they drive around the corner and move somewhere else? It’s hard to know what success means.”

‘There is something magical about our city’

“Wake up. Come on, let’s go.”

On a bicycle, San Francisco police Officer Shante Williams is clearing SFO’s international terminal ahead of the coming crowds. That means rousing the homeless. He circles Stephanie Gant, 56, who’s asleep on a bench, her body bending around an armrest.

On the intercom, the voice of Mayor London Breed plays on loop: “Whether you’re here for work, play or a little of both, there is something magical about our city.”

Gant has lived in freeway encampments, but fears them. She worries about “spies” watching her. So she’s here.

“You’re one of my regulars,” the officer says.

“I’m not yours. I’m one of God’s.”

Homeless on and off for years, Gant arrived at the airport at 3:20 a.m. on a bus. She likes the safety and the cushioned benches of the airport. Police encounters with homeless visitors to the airport have tripled in two years.

Squeezed into food court booths or prone on benches, the homeless sleep among stranded passengers. Many could pass for inconvenienced tourists.

Gant takes an escalator downstairs and settles onto a bus stop bench. She stubs out a cigarette, pulls out an inhaler for her chronic lung disease and sucks back a couple breaths. Then she grabs a bus to San Mateo, planning to crash out in a park.

“I’m exhausted,” she says, tearing up.

College life in an Econoline

Back from a run up Mount Davidson and a shower in his college gym, Jimmie Wu pours a bowl of Cheerios as another day gets going in his Ford Econoline van. A modest meal in a modest existence.

He’s deep into a video on van maintenance when his phone vibrates with a reminder. Wu, 29, snaps to like an Army sergeant giving a salute.

“Food bank!”

He slips out of the vehicle, passes another parked van and two trucks housing military veterans like him, and hustles through the City College of San Francisco campus where they all are enrolled. He likes to have first choice of the free groceries offered on Tuesdays.

It’s all part of the cost-benefit analysis that Wu, an eight-year Army vet, did when he picked his hometown San Francisco for his education. Veterans attending college in the city get more money from the GI Bill than anywhere else in the country: $4,398 a month, because of the high cost of living. This can be the nation’s most expensive city — unless you skip rent.

Wu, who studies computer science, collects about $45,000 a year from the GI Bill, federal grants and military disability income from back injuries and post-traumatic stress. Although tuition at the community college is free, he has to pay for living expenses, books and incidental educational costs, which add up to about $18,000 a year.

By keeping things tight, he’s built up a savings fund in the six figures. No one knows how many people living in vehicles in the city have made a similar choice.

The idea of blowing his income on rent, Wu says, “is really crazy to me.”

Tents pop up, and complaints follow

A line and a puff to start the day

Shorty is hurting. Like every day about this time, he needs his first hit of meth. He hasn’t eaten anything since the afternoon before, but his guts are so tight from the need for that hit, his nerves so jumpy, that he can’t eat. He sits with his homeless friends in his wheelchair under a palm tree across from the Ferry Building and fidgets.

“Hey, Zito, I need you to take care of me,” he tells 45-year-old James Zito.

Zito pulls out a little box of dope, rolls up a dollar bill, taps a line of speed onto a lottery ticket and takes a snort. Then he lays out a new line on the ticket and hands it to Shorty.

“That’s a winner,” Zito jokes.

“It’s like medicine,” Shorty says, tipping back his head and grinning at the sky. “Now the day can get going.”

There’s little danger of cops busting him. In San Francisco, they focus on the big dealers, not the users.

The grin fades in moments. Shorty rolls a few feet away and lights up a pipe bowl of pot.

“The drugs, the addiction, are a damper on my life,” he says quietly, and Zito nods, overhearing. “You think we want to depend on this stuff? No. Deep down, we really want normal lives.”

A job, a shelter, a hope

“Bye, baby, I love you,” Derelle Foster says to his 18-month-old daughter, Ellarose.

“Bye,” the girl mutters back, waving a few tiny fingers.

Foster, 27, recently lost his job at a marijuana grow house. He and his family have been in a shelter for several weeks, after stints at another shelter, in motels and in a van. They lost their studio in Oakland in February. The landlord didn’t like how many people were living in the unit and, without a job, Foster didn’t have the money for a new place.

The room at the shelter operated by Hamilton Families is tight. Foster and his wife sleep in one bed, Ellarose and 8-month-old Sandra are in cribs, and 3-year-old Juston shares a bunk bed with the family’s German shepherd, Clicquot. A communal bathroom is down the hall.

But it’s better than the shelter’s dorm-style quarters that they were in before. And now Foster has a job again. He’s headed to work at the Coalition on Homelessness, the advocacy group in the Tenderloin, which just hired him at $15 per hour for an office job. It’s temporary, but he hopes this is the beginning of the resurrection of his life, a step toward renting a real home again soon.

“I’m tired of my kids asking, ‘When am I going to go back home?’ ”

A call from the mayor

Jeff Kositsky’s cell phone blares. It’s Mayor London Breed.

Two people at a Lower Haight intersection have spread their belongings along the sidewalk, she says. They look like they need help.

The city’s homeless chief not only knows who Breed is talking about, he knows their first names. The two have been in and out of the city’s shelters for years. Sounds like they’re back on the streets.

“Can you help them?” Breed asks.

“We’re on it. Thanks, boss.”

He calls the Homeless Outreach Team, the roving counselors who connect street people with shelters, treatment, case managers. It’s Kositsky’s first message from the mayor on this day. It won’t be the last.

‘We have to leave him here’

People like Adam (video above) represent one of the biggest challenges for the police team focused on homelessness. He’s not doing anything illegal. And he doesn’t meet California’s standard for an involuntary psychiatric hold, a 5150, which could bring rest and medication. He’d have to be deemed gravely disabled or a danger to himself or others.

Even if he was placed on a hold, the city is short of the facilities it needs to help him. The city spends nearly $400 million a year to supply 2,000 beds, 100 of which were added in the past year, but there are still scores of street people who appear as lost as Adam.

Forcing mentally ill people in need of help into treatment is a decades-old hot-button issue with no end in sight. New city and state laws to make conservatorship easier don’t come close to answering the problem, or the debate: Is it more humane to lock people into facilities, or wait for them to come to treatment voluntarily?

The veterans of Home Depot

Jimmie Wu parks in the rooftop lot of a Home Depot in Colma. Within minutes, a shiny blue van and a graffitied white truck rumble in, driven by three fellow veteran-students.

The friends, who study at City College of San Francisco, are getting together to work on their wheeled homes, sharing equipment and expertise and sometimes running into the store to buy a tool or use the bathroom.

Wu fires up an electric jigsaw and slices through plywood to build a cabinet to fit above his mattress. He expects to live in his Econoline for at least two more years while he completes his studies. His parents oppose his van life. But Wu is proud of his strategy.

One spot over, the graffitied white box truck belies the elegance within, including a queen-size Murphy bed built by the ex-combat medic who uses it. Mark Chopot, 47, is also proud, not only of his retrofits but of beating back the PTSD nightmares that had led him to sleep beneath bridges and try suicide in the past.

“This is where I want to be,” he says.

A married couple live in the third vehicle. Mariel, 28, has a bachelor’s degree in industrial design and sells jewelry and graphic art online. John, 27, is a vet studying business. Last year, he persuaded Mariel to live in a van with him — and now they’re able to send money to their families in the Philippines.

A job that hits home

Derelle Foster, the father of three living in a shelter, sits in the proudly rumpled office of the Coalition on Homelessness. One of the many posters on the wall reads, “Housekeys not handcuffs.” He’s new on the job.

The coalition’s Street Sheet, a bimonthly tabloid newspaper on homelessness in San Francisco, is freshly printed and stacked in piles near Foster’s desk. His task is to provide the papers to people on the streets so they can sell them for $2 a copy.

“Some need the money for a hotel room,” he says. “Some need it to feed themselves.”

One person comes in for 10 papers, another asks for 100. In between Street Sheet duties, Foster helps out any way he can by sweeping up, answering phones, greeting visitors, whatever. His colleagues say he’s good at the job. Without a home himself, he can relate to the people stopping by.

Destination of last resort

Andy Anduha, 57, is about to be released back onto the street, four hours after he brought himself to San Francisco General Hospital’s emergency room for a head wound, or painful urination, or both. He’s a little unclear.

The ER is a destination of last resort for homeless people. No insurance, no residence, yes, but for medical care they have this — the hospital that must take them in. It’s a steady clientele.

Now, Anduha waits for a nurse to bring clean underwear from the ER’s collection of donations. He’ll wander off to find housing for the night, likely without success. He typically sleeps on the street in the Mission District, not far from the hospital.

Anduha is a regular visitor to the ER, according to the staff. How do they define a regular? “Honestly,” one nurse says, “if they’re here more than me.”

Sweeping up, sweeping out

David Martinez (video above) has been on the streets for more than a decade. It’s one thing to be moved every time he tries to set up a camp, he says, but what’s worse is always being so vulnerable. Someone tried to set his tent on fire recently, he says, pointing to a burn mark on the sidewalk. “It’s the second time it’s happened to me,” he says.

Concern over huge tent camps reached a peak when San Francisco hosted the 2016 Super Bowl and a shocked nation was introduced to the city’s biggest-ever sprawl — 350 people camped along Division Street. There’s been a crackdown ever since, and though city leaders say they’re mostly trying to move people indoors where it’s safer, advocates say trashing tents is cruel.

Martinez, 52, says he wants to move inside, but got kicked out of a Navigation Center after a counselor accused him of shooting heroin inside. He tells the cops clearing his camp he wants another chance, that he’s trying to stay clean.

781st in line for a bed

It’s like loading up for a hike. Filling plastic bags with toiletries, stocking up on energy bars. This is the morning ritual for Tommy Le and his fellow street counselors.

They’re on the San Francisco Homeless Outreach Team, or HOT team, and their job is to find as many street people as they can — dozens of them on a typical day — either taking them to shelters or chipping away at their reluctance, day after day, making them think about leaving the street.

Right away, they find Manuel Rochin on the stoop of a mint-colored Victorian in the Mission. A black backpack and a blue shopping bag stuffed with clothes are at his feet. This is where he feels safest.

“In this space, I don’t come across people who fight like in other places,” he tells the team in Spanish. “I don’t like violence.”

The 46-year-old Mexican immigrant became homeless less than two months earlier after leaving Bakersfield. He was picking pistachios there, but found he couldn’t get the kind of HIV treatment he’d been getting in San Francisco before he headed south for the job. So he came back.

Rochin is 781st in line for a 90-day bed at one of the city’s shelters. Bilingual outreach specialist Veronica Marin asks Rochin if he wants temporary shelter as he waits.

The team consults its housing coordinator, who scores Rochin a bed at the Multi-Service Center South shelter on Fifth Street. He is told to report to the shelter no later than 7 p.m. The team rolls on.

Unmoored, but tethered to GPS

As Faustina Alvarado Garcia walks downtown with her 11-year-old daughter, Madelin, she limps. Her GPS ankle monitor, issued by U.S. immigration agents, is tight and rubbing her skin red.

Garcia, 42, has just spent an hour sharing her circumstances with a case manager from Hamilton Families tasked with helping her find a home. She and Madelin, she says, fled Honduras in January after her brother was killed in a gang shooting and the killers told her family members they were next.

It took them two months to reach America on foot and by bus, through Mexico and across the border at a remote California crossing. Swiftly picked up by immigration authorities, the pair requested asylum and were released before making their way to San Francisco.

They lived briefly with Garcia’s sister before the landlord, citing occupancy limits, told them to leave. So now they are in an emergency shelter, sharing a bunk bed in a room with other families.

Homeless in a strange land, they are bombarded by contrasting images of wealth and despair — glitzy gowns in a department store window fronted by drug-addled, agitated vagrants on the sidewalk. Madelin stares at a woman carrying a box with a picture of an Apple monitor.

“Is that a television?” the girl asks. “Or is it a computer?”

Her mom doesn’t know. They debate what the item is as they trudge back to their shelter in the Tenderloin and another appointment with another case worker.

“I want one of those,” Madelin says.

“One day, when I can, I will buy you one.”

Feeding bodies, including pregnant ones

As lunch service begins at Glide Church, Curtis McGregor, 52, emerges from the kitchen and leans against a dining room pillar. Having supervised the prep, he’s now the maitre d’ for a meal in which roughly half the guests are homeless.

The room holds 60 and he must make sure diners in the first group have eaten and left before new folks take their place. If trouble breaks out, McGregor is often the first to spot it. He knows trouble because he was trouble when he first walked into Glide as a 14-year-old street tough from the Fillmore.

The Rev. Cecil Williams, Glide’s longtime pastor, told McGregor to come back when he was ready to accept a hand up — and that’s what he did, after he’d been to jail for selling crack.

“I could never have imagined in a million years that I would be down here working, giving back to the public,” he says.

Most people move on the second they are finished eating, but not Priscilla Rogers, 23. She is here, she says, “mainly because I’m pregnant.”

Rogers is not yet showing, but has gained 8 pounds because her doctor at San Francisco General told her to eat three meals a day. So she waits in line three times at Glide before lying down along Ellis Street. At 4 feet 11 and 111 pounds, Rogers can find a nook to curl up into, but she never gets more than three hours of sleep. Now, she’s heading off to the library to read books and listen to music until dinner time.

“I’m always moving,” she says.

A mother’s credo: ‘No me importa’

Eleven-year-old Madelin is hungry, but Faustina Alvarado Garcia has little money. So she and her daughter head to the Mexican restaurant next door to their family shelter.

“It’s cheap here,” the asylum-seeker from Honduras says, before ordering a carne asada taco for $2.99 and then counting nickels, dimes and quarters on a table, making sure she has bus fare to get to her sister’s home.

When the food comes, she yields a rare smile. “They gave us free chips,” she says.

They walk back into the shelter. They’re one day shy of the two-month limit for their emergency bed, and are supposed to leave tomorrow — a looming dilemma complicated by the fact that Madelin is a student, and studying is harder with less stability. But for today, they still have a roof. And now, lunch.

Madelin eats while Garcia charges her ICE ankle monitor, rubbing the sore spots under it. She sneaks a few chips, but otherwise doesn’t eat.

“No me importa,” she says. It doesn’t matter to me.

One way off the streets

There’s something up a tree on Willow Street, tucked among the leafy branches swaying in the breeze.

Sgt. Davin Cole peers up and is not surprised by what he sees: a homeless man who’s fashioned himself an unusual sleep situation, a hammock 15 feet up from the sidewalk in the alleyway.

“Hello?” Cole shouts repeatedly. Nothing. He shakes a branch. Nothing. The man in the white cocoon is either in a deep slumber or dead.

Cole pulls his SUV up and sounds the air horn. The man is so startled that he nearly leaps out of the hammock to flee.

“I’m just making sure you’re OK,” the officer tells him. “Don’t jump!”

Turns out, the perch is not only inventive but legal. But Cole likes to check on the man, named Jose Pacheco, from time to time, to make sure he’s OK.

“He’s not blocking the sidewalk. He’s not damaging the tree. He doesn’t have a structure,” he says. “Nothing about it is against the law.”

‘Down on my luck, please spare a buck’

An uneasy trip to Twitter HQ

“We got to go.”

Derelle Foster’s wife, Diana Cisnero, urges her family out of their shelter room and onto the Tenderloin streets, loading daughters Sandra and Ellarose into a double stroller and grabbing 3-year-old Juston by the hand.

Foster has taken the afternoon off work for an important appointment: an autism evaluation for Juston.

Cisnero, 22, steers her carriage past residential hotels, discarded needles, corner stores and what appears to be a bag of human feces. The family’s German shepherd helps carve a path through the crowds. Soon, they’re at the social services clinic — located in Twitter’s Market Street headquarters.

As people pass by with expensive cups of Blue Bottle coffee, the family heads up the elevator, hoping to get a grasp on at least one of the issues before them.

A bed and a new chance

There’s no booze here to drag Jacqueline Gonzalez down. No one waiting to beat her up on the sidewalk while she tries to sleep.

Unlike the usual spartan digs that come with an emergency bed, fountains bubble at the Bayshore Navigation Center, one of the city’s six multi-service shelters that offer intensive housing and counseling aid. Planters contain flowers as well as kale, mint, butter lettuce, radishes. Residents come and go 24-7, smoke and talk about life on the streets: shelters, rehab, case workers, doctor visits.

Mostly they talk about finding housing, and how this is one of the best places to get it. About half of the 4,500-plus people who have come through nav centers since 2015 have found a place to live.

Gonzales, 49, has been homeless on and off since her mom kicked her out of their Daly City home as a teen. But inside this place for the past two months, Gonzalez says, she is the best she has been in years. She goes to bed early, attends recovery meetings, scours the internet for housing. For the first time in years she is dealing with her health; a day earlier she went to the eye doctor.

“I want to stay here until I get my place,” she says. “I’m safe here. I sleep better here. I think better. I can take a shower. I can go to the dentist. I can look for a job. When I am out there on the street I start drinking, drinking, drinking. And my problems get real bad.”

‘Frequent flyers’

Lucinda Blue, 50, comes through the ER doors by ambulance. She forgot to take her insulin before going to bed, and when she got up in the middle of the night, she was woozy, stumbled and fell, breaking her shoulder. It’s her second fall this year; she broke her thumb in February.

Blue lives at Hope House, a transitional housing residence in the Bayview — crucial step-up housing between the street and a permanent apartment. She’s a “frequent flyer” in San Francisco’s network of emergency departments: someone who’s been to an ER somewhere in the city at least five times in the past 12 months.

But Blue says she doesn’t come as often as some. And she’s right. Just down the hall is a patient who’s been passed out in a bed for most of the day. He’d been to a San Francisco emergency room 43 times in the previous year.

Waiting for nothing

‘I don’t really feel like I have a home’

Ignacio “Navi” Vargas’ phone rings as he waits for a Muni train outside UCSF’s Parnassus campus. He answers and bursts into a smile.

“Yes, I’m free Tuesday,” he says.

Vargas had been waiting for this call since he arrived in San Francisco nearly two years ago. Finally, he has an appointment with a therapist.

“I really think I’m sad, mentally,” the 22-year-old says. “My person has been through a lot. I drank alone until I blacked out.”

When he was 17, his mother ordered him to leave their Sierra foothills home after she learned he is gay.

“If I come back from work and you’re still here, I’m calling the cops,” she said, in Vargas’ recollection.

His mother, a Mexican immigrant who works in the fields picking tomatoes and melons, had begun suspecting he was gay when Vargas joined his high school cheerleading squad and began experimenting with makeup.

After brief stays in Los Angeles, Seattle and Oregon, Vargas moved to LGBT-friendly San Francisco when he was 19. He lived in a homeless shelter for seven months before landing a transitional homeless housing unit at Larkin Street Youth Services two months ago.

“I still have my stuff packed up just in case anyone locks me out,” he says. “I don’t really feel like I have a home.”

A moment’s rest on the Mission bus

Bureaucracy and a bed check

Jeff Kositsky, the city’s homeless chief, takes a stroll outside to check on the HOT team’s Tenderloin operation, then heads back inside for a staff meeting about new policies coming from the Board of Supervisors.

Throughout the day, he’s been lamenting that the latest homeless count is up 17% since 2017. He’s frustrated that for every homeless person who gets housed, three more wind up in the street. But he sees hope in the city’s vast, and growing, supportive housing network, which keeps 9,500 people from falling into homelessness.

“It’s not like we’re not doing anything,” he says.

It’s a refrain he repeats over and over to those who say the city is falling short. And hanging with the HOT team, seeing its work, can offer a measure of relief compared with wrestling with thorny policy issues.

The contrast of street life and municipal bureaucracy can be jarring, but it’s at the heart of Kositsky’s job. The staff meeting drags on past 5:40 p.m., with people rubbing their eyes, when his phone lights up.

This time it’s not the mayor — who has by now contacted him a half-dozen times throughout the day with observations and requests. It’s a HOT team member who wants to know if there are any Navigation Center beds available for a homeless person he just met in the Tenderloin.

“Do we have any beds available?” Kositsky asks his staff.

Everyone in the room shakes a head. All of the Navigation Center beds in the city are full.

Revolving door at SF General

Charging up at Starbucks

‘I’m not asking for a mansion’

Larry Tolliver stands in line to get into the waiting area at the huge Multi-Service Center South shelter on Fifth Street. He and 69 others hope someone doesn’t show up to claim a bed, creating an opening for the night.

Tolliver is here because he had no home to return to after his shift as a maintenance worker at Clementina Towers, an affordable housing building. It’s been years since he lost the last home he had, an apartment in the Bayview, and he’s bounced around the city’s shelter system ever since.

He found an affordable single-room unit in Oakland early this year for $695 a month, but was turned away because of his bad credit.

“I just need a break,” he says. “I’m not asking for a mansion or anything. How about just a nice room, a place I can call home?”

Inside, Isabel Blanco has a bed, but also some bad luck. Her partner has been in the hospital since January, recovering from a car accident that broke her back and neck. Now strapped for cash after a series of misfortunes, Blanco is stuck in shelters while she waits for her partner to recover.

“I just lost all my savings, and that’s how I ended up here,” she says. “I’m out of money. Where do I go? Is there someone that can help me? What can I do with all my luggage? Am I really going to pull four suitcases over the street? So many questions.”

Inside, as she prepares to open the St. Vincent de Paul Society-run shelter, Director Lessie Benedith is clear-eyed about limitations. Not everyone who needs a bed will get one.

Northern California’s biggest shelter has 340 slots, but every night there is a citywide waiting list of more than 1,000 people. Benedith gestures to a sparsely furnished waiting area — dubbed “the chairs” — where up to 70 people at a time wait on a chance at a bed they may not get.

“It’s unfortunate that they have to remain in the chairs,” she says. But she adds: “We will not ask them to leave.”

Hungry, tired, but inside

For Derelle Foster, the plate of jambalaya over rice with green beans is a welcome way to end the day. He sits with his wife and three children in a booth in the dining room of their homeless shelter, their German shepherd waiting for scraps. The small cafeteria begins to fill up — couples and other families with kids.

“It’s like hot dogs,” Foster tells 3-year-old Juston, trying to get his son to eat chunks of sausage in the stew.

Foster is hungry and tired. And there is a lot on his mind. Will his son be diagnosed with autism? Will his family find a more permanent place to stay in three months, when they might have to leave the shelter? Will he make enough money to afford a move? None of that will be solved today.

“Let’s go,” his wife says. “Everyone needs to take a shower tonight.”

Anguish out in the open

‘How can you not give a guy like that some money?’

Shorty’s broke again. Time to panhandle. He needs to buy yet another cord for charging his phone, a cup of coffee and enough meth to get him through the night. The throngs of evening tourists coursing past the Ferry Building are a promising target.

A friend rolls Shorty in his wheelchair to the north edge of the building, and he starts his spiel — layering charm into the natural sympathy that comes from seeing a tiny, disabled person in a wheelchair.

Shorty calls out cheerily: “Hi!” Some stare straight ahead. Some shoot looks of revulsion. A few drop cash into the Starbucks cup he holds next to a cardboard sign reading, “Down on my luck, please spare a buck.” He’d considered “Need a hand up, I’m a little short,” but thought people wouldn’t get his grim humor.

Tourist Stu Allen, 33, of Denver, tosses $5 in the cup. “How can you not give a guy like that some money?” he says. He points at the skyscrapers across the street. “People who have utterly nothing when you’re standing around this? It’s one of the worst things in the country.”

In 45 minutes, Shorty has $17. He doesn’t like begging. “I was always taught to never let ‘em see you sweat, and that helps me stay positive out here,” he says. “And I need that. I’ve had guns put to my head out here, had my jaw broken because I wouldn’t give a guy $10, fell out of my chair and broke my leg earlier this year, but I always got a smile on my face.”

‘I don’t like it when people are afraid of me’

Chow time for the van vets.

Hot soup and thick Japanese noodles are the reward at the end of a long day for Jimmie Wu and his fellow vet-students. They’ve spent the day tinkering with their vans in a Home Depot parking lot, they’re hungry, and it’s time for their weekly dinner together.

Sometimes the group aims Wu’s film projector at Mark Chopot’s white truck — the side without graffiti — and enjoys a cheap night at the movies. But tonight, as a cold, wet fog blankets City College and the sun sinks, they’re opting for a nearby udon joint.

Nobody leaves the vans for the restaurant, though, until everyone has parked — no small feat. Street parking is tough until 9 p.m., when classes let out. And homeless students like Wu, Chopot and John aren’t allowed to park overnight in the college lots — a situation that could change if a bill in the Legislature, AB302, becomes law.

Wu pulls into a spot in front of CCSF. Soon, John and Mariel join him. They hear Chopot’s voice calling through the wind and fog, urging them to go eat without him. “I gotta park, dude!”  Chopot eventually emerges from the darkness, and all head to the udon eatery.

Dinner chat is about their day-to-day: How it helps to be small when you live in a vehicle. How mold creeps in when you cook in your van. How they miss their friends, other homeless student veterans away on summer travels. And, of course, how the proposed homeless-student parking law would help.

“I understand why the school might not want it,” Wu shrugs. “But it’s good for us.”

Readying for bed at the family shelter

Warding off the night chill

High priority, still no roof

“Shorty’s the boss, and he’s still here, so we are too,” Elias Cook dePena says, pushing Shorty’s wheelchair to the center of the narrow Embarcadero Plaza.

Their homeless pals have shown up with Chinese food, baloney and more that they either bought with panhandled cash or accepted from kind passersby. They’re trying to chow down fast because soon the park police will come and start shooing them away for the street cleaners.

The health care aide who was supposed to fetch Shorty to take him for a shower the previous week never showed up, so he’s been picking at his itchy, sweaty body. His hands are crusted with grime. He eats with them, having no other choice.

City outreach workers have Shorty on a high-priority list for a permanent supportive housing room. But they say he can be hard to find for necessary appointments since he hasn’t gone into a shelter — he prefers the safety and familiarity of his Embarcadero band. It can take up to two years of steady engagement by counselors for many chronically homeless people like Shorty to finally get pulled inside.

“I’m stuck, but I’m really ready to go inside,” Shorty insists.

“Shorty is a doll, super nice,” Kristie Fairchild, head of the North Beach Citizens homeless aid center, says later. She’d been setting up aid and housing appointments for Shorty in conjunction with intensive efforts by the HOT team. “We had one place all set up last fall, but when the van showed up, one of his friends said, ‘Shorty, don’t go, we’ll take care of you.’ So he didn’t.”

Shorty gets a disability check of several hundred dollars a month, and some of his friends on the street exploit it to buy drugs. Overall, members of the group are caring, pushing him everywhere and keeping him safe — but street life is never really safe.

Fairchild sighs: “I’m just hoping everything gets aligned for him. He really needs to not be on the street.”

Desperation station

Methodically walking through each railcar, BART police Sgt. Nick Mavrakis and Officer Youn Seraypheap remind everyone aboard that this will be the end of the line — literally. The train is headed to San Francisco International Airport from Powell Street, with no train returning to the city.

The officers are looking for homeless people. They find one in DeShawn Evans, who is sprawled across the seats.

“You gotta get up, sir,” Mavrakis says. “You can’t take up two seats. Sit up, please.”

Evans, 24, slowly rises. When the cops leave, he slumps back down.

Seats all around him have been flipped over onto the floor of the train. As they are every night.

“People looking for stuff,” Evans explains. “People look for credit cards, money, dope. Anything. Anything anybody drops.”

Evans moved to San Francisco from Louisiana six years ago to take nursing classes at City College, he says, but lost his housing when he broke up with his girlfriend. He’s been homeless ever since. He hasn’t talked to family in almost that long. He rides BART most of the day.

“Nothing better to do,” he says. “It’s warm. And it’s safer. There’s people around. They’re not going to let somebody random just come up to you and start taking your s— and walk away.”

Last call on the Embarcadero

“OK, guys, sorry, but it’s time to go.”

That’s the order from a city park ranger who’s approached Shorty and his friends on the Embarcadero. Street cleaners are on their way.

“You need the HOT team, Shorty?” the ranger asks. Shorty shakes his head.

At the end of the plaza, one woman screeches, “F— you, pigs!” before stumbling away. Most pack up quietly.

“It’s all right, (the cleaners) gotta do what they gotta do,” Shorty tells the ranger, while Zito rolls him to a spot along the bay.

“We’re not sleepers anyway,” Zito says. “We’re nappers.”

Zito tucks a satin comforter around Shorty and fires up a “torch.” Cooking the residue in his meth pipe, he gives Shorty a hit. It doesn’t get either one high, just cuts the jitters.

Shorty tips his head back to face the blinking stars and closes his eyes.

The bus back to the beginning

“C’mon, it’s time to go, sir. C’mon now.”

The No. 292 SamTrans bus is at its last stop, in downtown San Francisco at the foot of the $1.1 billion Salesforce Tower. DeShawn Evans, who’d ridden BART’s last train to the airport, now lies across four seats in the last row of the bus, unresponsive to driver Kim Herbert’s pleas to leave. He’s been there since being shooed onto the bus by airport cops.

Herbert reaches behind her seat, pulls out a 12-inch-long piece of wood as thick as a chair leg, and starts banging on the bus’ metal poles. Evans doesn’t budge.

“OK,” Herbert says. “I’ve got to call the police.” She flags down officers on the street and they come on board.

“The bus driver asked you to get off,” one says, “so it’s time to get off.”

Evans sits up petulantly, stomps off the bus and walks a half block up Fremont Street, where he curls up in a doorway next to a parking garage for the Salesforce West building. Less than 10 minutes later, a flashlight is pointed his way.

Evans jabs his leg at the private security guard’s shin.

“Don’t you kick me!” the guard says, and calls the cops. Fifteen minutes later, two officers show up.

“Sir, it’s the Police Department. Wake up.” Nothing. “Sir, if you don’t sit up on your own we’re going to grab you.”

Suddenly, Evans begins demanding they call an ambulance. “Call the f— ambulance, what the f—?” he says.

He stands up, cursing the cops and spitting at them. He moves off toward Powell Street BART Station. He’ll wait for it to open at 5 a.m. so he can get on a train and go back to sleep.

The guard watches him leave. “It’s like this every night.”

‘Something to be proud of’

Washing away another day

Behind the Ferry Building in the near-silence just before dawn, Shorty snores. Tucked into his wheelchair beneath a blanket, a chilly breeze makes his face twitch as he sleeps.

Across the street, a city cleaning crew begins blasting the homeless colony’s palm-tree plaza with power washers. The mounds of garbage Shorty and his friends have left behind — paper plates, bottles, soggy clothing, a broken meth pipe and more — are blown into a giant truck vacuum cleaner, leaving the pavement shiny and clean.

“It’s like a Band-Aid,” says the worker manning the truck, sighing. “We try hard, but every morning it’s the same mess.”

As 5 a.m. ticks over, the crews finish. The truck rumbles off.

Shorty wakes up, rolls over to the palm trees with his pal Zito. They sit alone, waiting for their small society to filter back for hanging out, copping dope, eating, sleeping — their cycle of daily desperation.

The hosed pavement smells fresh. Like after a rain.

After Derelle Foster’s temporary job at the homeless coalition ended, he started a job-training program in hopes of finding long-term employment. He and his family remain in the shelter, and his son Juston’s autism evaluation is still not completed.

Faustina Alvarado Garcia was granted an extended stay in her family shelter. She’s still seeking asylum.

Shorty was placed in a supportive housing complex in late June by the HOT team, and he now uses a motorized wheelchair instead of the battered manual one he had on the street. He says he’s working to battle his addictions.

Bay Area homelessness: 89 answers to your questions

SF Homeless Project

Letter from the editor: Everything you need to know

Lead writer

Kevin Fagan

Kurtis Alexander Erin Allday Nanette Asimov J.K. Dineen Dominic Fracassa Matthias Gafni Joe Garofoli Justin Phillips Sarah Ravani Tatiana Sanchez Evan Sernoffsky Rachel Swan Otis Taylor Trisha Thadani Jill Tucker Sam Whiting

Demian Bulwa

Copy Editors

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Emily Fancher

Todd Trumbull

Illustrations

John Blanchard

Music and Video Design

Daymond Gascon

Director of Photography

Nicole Frugé

Video and Multimedia Editor

Photography and Videography

Lacy Atkins Noah Berger Paul Chinn Jessica Christian Preston Gannaway Carlos Avila Gonzalez Liz Hafalia Yalonda M. James Stephen Lam Gabrielle Lurie Santiago Mejia Josie Norris Amy Osborne Nick Otto Scott Strazzante Lea Suzuki Manjula Varghese

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Data Sources

San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, Veterans Administration, Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, San Francisco Public Health Department, 2019 San Francisco Point in Time Count Report, San Francisco Mayor’s Budget, San Francisco Unified School District, Glide Church, Rent Jungle, San Francisco Healthy Streets Operation Center, Chronicle research

‘Where do they expect us to go?’ Life at one Bay Area encampment before eviction

For many unhoused Californians, disabilities make life at a temporary shelter nearly impossible

“I just don’t know where to go.”

Sarah sighed as she looked past her tent off the I-80 highway, at the edge of the San Francisco Bay.

Sarah and her partner, Kevin, both 55, have lived in the scattered encampments along this stretch of busy highway in Berkeley, California , for years now. They’ve had to pack up several times, moving from one camp to the next as authorities cleared plot after plot.

Last month, a federal judge ruled officials could remove the last remaining tents by 4 May. And Sarah, whose last name the Guardian is withholding because she could face legal barriers to housing, has had to draw on every particle of poise she possesses to keep from falling apart.

In many ways, the plight of this encampment is the story of homelessness in California.

Its residents have been evicted several times over the past years, disassembling and reassembling their lives each time. Of the dozen or so remaining residents, nearly everyone has health issues that make staying at a temporary shelter difficult or impossible. Many have spent years on waitlists for subsidized apartments but are nowhere near to landing a stable home, often getting lost trying to navigate the labyrinth of social service and health systems available to them.

“It’s impossible, even for me,” said Sarah, who briefly worked as a caseworker for unhoused people before she ended up in the encampment herself. “So when they say we have to relocate, where do they expect us to go?”

‘So much goes into survival’

More than 150 people once lived in this cluster of camps along the grey-blue waters of the bay.

Over the years, tents and tarps came to dot the islands of dirt in between the highway on- and off-ramps that vibrate with the passing traffic. To access drinking water and electricity, residents make daily, perilous journeys around the tangle of roads. The camps on one side of the freeway have access to a portable toilet, but those on the other don’t.

“There’s so much that just goes into, like, survival out here,” Sarah said, squinting through her rectangular, rimless glasses at the spread of camps. She relies on her experience with the Peace Corps, advising her neighbours on how to stay warm and tend to wounds, she said: “Out here, you just feel like you’re hanging on by your fingernails.”

Last summer, the state transportation agency, CalTrans, and local authorities began evicting the encampments, first to make way for the construction of an apartment complex, then arguing the remaining tents and their inhabitants were a risk to drivers.

When the agency cleared out the camps beneath the underpass in August, the California governor, Gavin Newsom, showed up. Wearing gardening gloves, he dug through the debris alongside CalTrans cleanup crews. “What you see here is unacceptable,” Newsom told news cameras. “This is a high safety risk, a public health risk. There are hundreds and hundreds of rats running around. People should not live in conditions like this and we’ve accepted it too long.”

Newsom’s office said that the state was moving people out of the area and into safer housing. About a third of encampment residents moved into shelters or housing, according to the non-profit Where Do We Go Berkeley, which advocated for Sarah and her neighbours in the case against Caltrans. But several residents said they had never heard from caseworkers. And for many of those who did, their disabilities made it all but impossible to live in the congregate shelters or motels that officials were offering.

Kevin , who has been unhoused for more than two decades and whose legal name the Guardian is withholding so as not to jeopardise his chance for housing, was offered a place in the emergency shelter near the encampment – a warehouse lined with small tents where individuals and couples could sleep – but he couldn’t accept, he said. He has depressive disorder and other mental health issues including agoraphobia and claustrophobia.

“I can’t even get into an elevator if there’s more than two people in it. Being packed in, shoulder to shoulder, with 50 other people would send me into a complete meltdown,” he said. “I get panic attacks. It makes me extremely nervous.”

He had been honourably discharged from the navy decades ago, in part due to his mental health issues, but his conditions were exacerbated when his wife died in the mid-90s, he said. “After that, I had no desire to get back into society,” he continued. “Until I met Sarah,” he added.

After Kevin declined a spot at the shelter, the couple scarcely heard from local housing services again, Sarah said. So they gathered up what they could carry and moved across the highway on to a secluded patch of land by the Berkeley Marina. Now, they are being evicted again. “They can’t push us any further out of town without us getting our feet wet in the bay,” Kevin said.

Alhondro Meyers, 44, who lives next to the couple, said he’d rather struggle at the encampment than struggle with his mental health in a shelter. After he spent four and a half years in prison, where Meyers said faced daily violence from guards, the bunk-style sleeping arrangements and curfew rules at shelters trigger memories from the worst years of his life. “It would be the worst place for me to be,” he said.

Out by the marina, Meyers said, he is able to soothe his trauma with long walks or bike trips and by listening to Jill Scott in his headphones.

Terry Walker Jr, 45, who had been camping off the I-80 for six years, recently traded in his double mattress set up off the marina for a tiny tent and sparse bedding at the shelter. Sleeping on the floor hurts his broken jaw, and the crowded quarters aggravate his anxiety disorder – making it impossible for him to sleep through the night.

‘Shelters don’t have the resources’

All across California, people are facing challenges similar to those of the I-80 campers. The state’s estimated 161,000 unhoused people are disproportionately likely to have physical and mental disabilities – and vice versa . A 2019 report by the University of California, Los Angeles, found that unsheltered people are more than four times as likely as sheltered people to report a physical health condition and nearly one and a half times as likely to report a mental health condition. Across the US, 84% of unsheltered people reported physical health issues, and 78% reported mental health issues.

For those with mental health conditions, crowded shelters designed to fit in as many people as possible are often infeasible. Others with physical disabilities and chronic illness may not be able to comfortably navigate or sleep at makeshift congregate facilities.

Most temporary housing and shelters across the Bay Area and California are “truly inaccessible to many”, said Margot Kushel, a professor of medicine at UC San Francisco and director of the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative.

Kushel said that she often hears from shelter operators that the buildings they occupy tend to be older, built before ADA rules were enacted – leaving older, disabled people, including those using walkers and wheelchairs, struggling to navigate the space. Staff at shelters are also often untrained and unaware of the best ways to support people with a range of mental, physical or substance use conditions. “And for many who have been in the justice system, going to a shelter can feel like going back to jail,” she said.

“Shelter operators are doing their best, but they don’t really have the resources to provide for people with multiple disabilities,” she said. “They don’t have the physical space, or the staffing.”

Even so, housing someone at a shelter costs about $100 a night, or $3,000 a month, she noted. Government agencies also spend millions evicting and clearing encampments. For the 2021-2022 fiscal year, CalTrans was allocated $25m to “clean up encampments”, $20.6m for the removal of hazardous materials from encampments, and an additional $2.7m for “encampment relocation coordination”.

“We continue to invest in criminalising homelessness, funding interim measures like shelters, rather than getting to the root of this problem – which is lack of housing,” Kushel said .

The governor’s office referred questions to CalTrans.

When governments instead invest in shelters and solutions designed more for “people with housing who don’t want to look at the suffering around them, than for those who are actually suffering, we can’t be shocked with the problem isn’t solved,” she added.

Project Roomkey

Encampment residents who were assigned a room via Project Roomkey, a state program launched at the start of the pandemic to get motel rooms for unhoused people, said that regulations at the facilities made it difficult to stay there.

Detroit Rodriguez, 46, got a spot at the Rodeway Inn, a Roomkey motel specially designated for people who were “medically fragile” amid the Covid-19 pandemic. But he hardly spends any time there, he said, only stopping in for 30 minutes each day to shower.

Rodriguez, who was shot point-blank in the hand and stomach a year and a half ago, has had to use a colostomy bag ever since. On several occasions, especially when he has been out at night diving through dumpsters to collect glass and metals he can trade in for cash at recycling facilities, the bag has ripped open – leaching stomach acids all over his abdomen. “It is excruciating pain,” he said.

But the Project Roomkey facility has a strict curfew, and staff has repeatedly refused to allow him back inside after hours, he said, even to clean himself up or get a replacement bag, he said. The leaks have caused skin irritation and infections, which in turn have forced Rodriguez’s doctors to delay his colostomy reversal surgery by months, he said.

“They just have no compassion or sympathy over there,” he said.

The Alameda county office of homeless care and coordination, which oversees the Roomkey motels, said that it follows up “in all cases where complaints are filed through the hotel or through the providers, including working with management on special accommodations”. Noemy Mena-Miles, a spokesperson for the office, said that the “top priorities for Project Roomkey residents include bridging medical care, linkages to services, and referrals to care in a safe, non-congregate setting”.

For Rodriguez, who has also experienced bouts of debilitating depression and post-traumatic stress after being diagnosed with a brain tumour, being isolated from his friends and community at the encampments wasn’t ideal either. Gesturing toward the collection of tents, he added: “Really, you got all these people out here who just hit hard times. And when you fall down, sometimes it’s hard to get back up.”

Clashes with the state

Since last year, only a fraction of encampment residents have found housing.

Despite local and state programs that prioritise disabled and medically vulnerable people for housing, it can take years for unhoused people to find a place in a state with a staggering shortage of affordable homes.

Kevin has been on a list to receive permanent supportive housing for years. And Sarah, who also has depressive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and an intestinal condition, is considered among the most vulnerable to complications from Covid-19. But even after more than a decade of living on the streets, neither has gotten any closer to finding a safe, indoor place to live.

For some of their former neighbours who have found an apartment or room at a suitable shelter, the process has often boiled down to luck and tireless advocacy by local non-profits and lawyers. “It takes a lot of time to find accommodations and services,” said Andrea Henson, a lawyer with East Bay Community Law Center representing the encampment residents. “And when you do evictions and disperse an encampment, that causes even more delays because it can be hard for us and for caseworkers to find everyone again.”

That’s what Henson and other lawyers working with Where Do We Go Berkeley argued in order to secure a preliminary injunction last October, which prevented CalTrans from evicting residents for six months. Many of those living in the area, including disabled and chronically ill people who were at heightened risk for complications from Covid-19, had already been struggling for years to secure housing, the non-profit argued. Pushing people away from their friends and community, and scattering them across the region, would make it even more difficult for them to stay safe and access the health and social services they need.

Newsom personally defended the transport authority, arguing the lawsuit had been “preventing CalTrans from delivering on important efforts aimed at revitalising California’s streets and public spaces through litter abatement and local beautification projects”.

This April, a federal judge ultimately ruled that the transit agency could carry out the eviction. The unhoused residents living there “are already experiencing homelessness”, the US district court judge Edward Chen ruled. CalTrans “would not be making them homeless through the closure of the encampments”.

In a statement last week, CalTrans said it was grateful for the ruling, which would allow it to “maintain the state’s roadway infrastructure for [the] safety of travellers and to ensure people experiencing homelessness are not in unsafe and unhealthy encampments”.

Janis Mara, a spokesperson for the agency, also said that CalTrans would continue its work with city and county agencies “to move people out of dangerous encampments and into housing and services” but did not elaborate on how.

Encampment residents told the Guardian that they had not received any new offers for suitable shelter ahead of the 4 May eviction.

Meanwhile, California lawmakers and the governor are proposing court-ordered treatment for mental health and substance abuse issues as part of the state’s solution to the homelessness crisis. The plan is facing scathing opposition from disability and civil rights groups, who say that the money and resources allocated to such a program should be redirected to providing people with disabilities access to affordable housing.

Days before crews were due to clear out their camp, Sarah said she was teetering between tears and rage. She had barely begun to pack all the gear that they had salvaged and accumulated over months and years to survive out by the marina, or think through how the couple might Tetris their bed, their tent, their small solar panel and pots and pans on to the backs of their bikes.

“How do I get motivated to pack when I don’t even know where we’re moving?” she said. “I’m just exhausted.”

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San Francisco's New 'Street to Home' Program Expedites Housing People and Reduces Vacancies in City Funded Homeless Housing

San Francisco, CA -- Mayor London N. Breed today announced that Street to Home, a new innovative initiative, is expediting the process of providing housing for people experiencing unsheltered homelessness in San Francisco and maximizing the use of existing vacant units in the City’s Homelessness Response System. The new program, in partnership with Delivering Innovation in Supportive Housing (DISH), is part of the City’s ongoing commitment to bring people inside and connect them to a wide range of existing services and placements.

San Francisco's Five-year Strategic Homeless Plan,  Home By the Bay , sets a goal of cutting unsheltered homelessness in half over the next five years. This builds on the 15% reduction in unsheltered homelessness San Francisco has seen since 2019. The Mayor has directed the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH) to bring forward and implement new initiatives as part of these efforts. By leveraging vacant units within HSH’s portfolio, this program will streamline the process of transitioning individuals from the streets to permanent housing, ensuring a more efficient and compassionate approach.

“Street to Home is all about removing the barriers that slow us from making a real difference for our City and for people living on our streets,”  said Mayor London Breed . “We have to be creative and not let barriers and bureaucracy get in the way of helping people. To build on the success of this pilot, we are advocating to relax federal rules so we can bring this program to more of our buildings across the City.”

HSH has recently piloted Street to Home in June, successfully placing 12 people over a three-week pilot period and in total 18 highly vulnerable people have been moved off the streets into long term housing.

The success of the pilot demonstrates that people living unsheltered are interested in long-term solutions to their homelessness, that housing placements can be expedited, and reducing the number of PSH vacancies in our community is possible by employing creative ideas and getting rid of bureaucracy in the housing placement process.  

“We believe that everyone deserves a safe and stable place to call home,”  said Shireen McSpadden San Francisco Director of Homelessness and Supportive Housing . “With Street to Home, we are taking a proactive approach to addressing street homelessness and creating a low barrier way to get people from the street into housing. This pilot program is a testament to our commitment to finding innovative solutions to the challenges our city faces.”

As part of Street to Home, the San Francisco Homeless Outreach Team (SFHOT) and the Housing Placement Team will first allocate units and then identify eligible individuals living on the streets. Those who are eligible will be shown a designated available room with the option to sign a lease and move in on the same day. In the interest of moving people more rapidly from the street, documentation will follow this process within 90 days of placement; there will no longer be a requirement to make the initial placement.

Currently Street to Home can only be implemented on locally funded projects due to requirements at the federal level that the City cannot waive. However, the Mayor has requested from HUD that these requirements be waived to allow direct placements into federal projects in order to extend the reach and impact of Street to Home.

“At DISH our number one priority is welcoming people home,”  said Lauren Hall, executive director, Delivering Innovation in Supportive Housing (DiSH) . “We are thrilled to partner with the City to ensure that our supportive housing programs truly meet people where they are. With this pilot we can cut through processes that can unintentionally leave people on the streets and provide a true solution to being unhoused--a dignified safe place of their own.”

The Street to Home program will prioritize individuals who have been living on the street for an extended period and those who are most vulnerable. By providing direct placement into housing units, the program aims to reduce the trauma and instability associated with homelessness with a path toward stability.

In addition to Street to Home, HSH is engaging in process improvement and bureaucratic reforms to reduce the barriers to rapid housing placement by:

• Making significant budget investments in property management for quicker unit turnover and higher unit quality.
• Creating a Housing Placement team within HSH to improve the housing placement process for tenants and housing providers.
• Instituting updated protocols for unit refusals and participation, coupled with increase in referrals.
• Piloting a referral pipeline for clients who are “engaged” and have high level of documentation, including unsheltered people.
• Continuing to refine pre-referral review process, including Continuum of Care (CoC) eligibility.
• Establishing self-certification for placements as permitted under U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) regulations.
• Expanding document-readiness role of shelter case managers.
• Implementing monthly review of vacancies from provider reports to improve data quality and inform the work.

For more information on San Francisco’s five-year strategic strategy to address homelessness, visit   https://hsh.sfgov.org/about/research-and-reports/home-by-the-bay /.  

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Inside a Navigation Center: An Up-Close Look at San Francisco's New Kind of Homeless Shelter

A debate that's divided a neighborhood centers around a new kind of temporary homeless shelter, invented in san francisco, and billed as a bridge into permanent housing, by jonathan bloom • published may 2, 2019 • updated on may 2, 2019 at 5:12 pm, what to know.

• Navigation centers are a new kind of homeless shelter that San Francisco began opening in 2015
• The new shelters focus on helping people transition from the streets to living indoors, then helping them find housing
• San Francisco's Port Commission has approved the largest navigation center yet, on a lot facing The Embarcadero

On a sidewalk facing San Francisco's iconic Embarcadero, in the shadow of the Bay Bridge, sits a tent, a bicycle and a neatly-stacked pile of belongings.

Seated in front of the small camp are Shilo Pierce and Kerry Hagan. Pierce is still suffering from injuries he sustained when he barely survived a train wreck three years ago. Hagan just found out she has cancer. Both are homeless.

"It's scary being out here," Hagan said.

From the spot where they just spent the night, Pierce and Hagan can see into the lot where a new city shelter could soon bring them what they've been hoping for: a place to come indoors, have a warm meal, and meet with case workers who could help them find permanent housing. The facility is called a "navigation center," and it's San Francisco's answer to helping people end their homelessness.

"I like to think of navigation centers as shelters as they should be," said Jeff Kositsky, director of San Francisco's Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing . "They have 24/7 access, they're smaller, they're better designed physically."

Kositsky said navigation centers, which the city began opening in 2015, are designed to address shortcomings of the old shelter system. Neighbors won't see people lined up or panhandling outside a navigation center, he said, because they don't accept walk-ins, and guests aren't kicked out onto the street every morning. Homeless outreach workers invite people into navigation centers for 30 to 90 days, with a goal of finding them permanent housing before that time is up.

"This is just one part of the puzzle," said Supervisor Matt Haney, whose district includes the Embarcadero navigation center site. "We need navigation centers all across the city, we need more housing, especially supportive housing, so people have exits from homelessness."

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Mayor London Breed has promised to build 5,000 new housing units per year while in office, and to add shelter capacity for 1,000 individuals on a nightly basis. Critics of the Embarcadero shelter plan have accused the mayor of circumventing due process to fast-track the new center despite their objections.

"The mayor, in pursuit of a political goal, has been ignoring laws and regulations designed to protect the public," said Wallace Lee, an organizer for Safe Embarcadero, the neighborhood group that's raised over $100,000 for a legal fight against the city.

A competing fundraiser has also raised six figures, including a contribution from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, and plans to donate its proceeds to the Coalition on Homelessness . The Coalition held a rally in favor of the new navigation center on the day San Francisco's Port Commission voted to approve a lease on the property for two years, with a two-year extension if things go well.

The Embarcadero navigation center will look physically similar to the one at Division Circle, the round piece of property tucked into a freeway on-ramp on South Van Ness Avenue. That center is built out of semi-permanent tents manufactured by Sprung Structures, and has restrooms and showers in separate modular buildings.

Unlike a traditional shelter, navigation centers have ample community space — both indoor and outdoor — and allow guests to sleep at any time of the day or night.

"When you're sleeping outside for 5, 10, 15 years, you're sleeping when it's safe to sleep," said Abigail Stewart-Kahn, a spokesperson for Homelessness and Supportive Housing who gave us a tour of the Division Circle center. "And so when they come inside, sometimes people just need to sleep for days to let their systems re-establish themselves."

Stewart-Kahn said navigation centers aim to put the humanity back into daily life by allowing simple freedoms like choosing when to eat.

"People can get meals when they're hungry, just like you or I can at home from our refrigerator," she said.

People living in navigation centers are called "guests" — a term meant to underscore the temporary nature of their stay. The ultimate goal for all 126 guests at Division Circle is to find permanent housing, whether it's with family, with rent assistance, or in one of the city's supportive housing programs. Case managers have on-site offices with windows into the center's common areas, and meet with their clients at tables in the community room.

"When people are outside for a really long time," Stewart-Kahn said, "Society turns away from them, and they are treated by those of us who are housed as less than human. And so navigation centers are all about rebuilding and helping to see people's humanity. Rebuilding trust day after day with a case manager is part of that process."

Because people who are homeless may already distrust the shelter system — or have tried it and given up — navigation centers are designed to lower the barriers.

"People are allowed to come in with their pets, their partners and their possessions," Kositsky said.

In addition to men's and women's dormitories, the Division Circle center has a dorm for couples that includes double beds. Except for the low-profile beds designed for guests with disabilities, most beds have room underneath for a pet carrier, and each bed is assigned a locker on a nearby wall. Larger possessions can be stored in containers outside the main structure.

With all the freedom afforded to navigation center guests, Shilo Pierce told us his 2016 stay in the very first navigation center at 16th and Mission was a little too unsupervised.

"You could pretty much do what you want — and that includes getting stole from, and drugs being in the center," he said.

But three years later, Pierce and Hagan said they believe the current crop of navigation centers is well run, and both are hoping for a spot in the new one that's slated to open as soon as September.

Kositsky said the city is moving forward with its plans for construction, despite word from concerned neighbors that a lawsuit is coming.

After the vote, Port Commission vice president Willie Adams conceded, "This is something that I know probably will be settled in the courts."

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Homeless Residents Got One-Way Tickets Out of Town. Many Returned to the Streets.

As cities offer transportation passes to get homeless people to a more stable destination, some worry whether they are sending people to insecurity in a new place.

By Mike Baker

SEATTLE — The solution is cheap and simple: As cities see their homeless populations grow, many are buying one-way bus tickets to send people to a more promising destination, where family or friends can help get them back on their feet.

San Francisco’s “Homeward Bound” program, started more than a decade ago when Gov. Gavin Newsom of California was the city’s mayor, transports hundreds of people a year. Smaller cities around the country — Myrtle Beach, S.C., and Medford, Ore., among them — have recently committed funding to the idea.

And in Seattle this past week, a member of the King County Council proposed a major investment into the region’s busing efforts, fearing that the city was on the receiving end of homeless busing programs from too many other cities.

But do these transport programs actually help people find stable housing? For many of those offered a bus ticket, they do not.

In San Francisco, city officials checking on people in the month after busing them out of town found that while many had found a place to live, others were unreachable, missing, in jail or had already returned to homelessness. Within a year, the city found that one out of every eight bus ticket recipients had returned and sought services in San Francisco once again.

In Portland, Ore., a city that has spent three years sending hundreds of its homeless residents around the country, the numbers were worse. Officials found that three months after the departures, nearly half of those transported who could be reached had lost their promised housing.

“That’s a pretty high failure rate,” said Nan Roman, who leads the National Alliance to End Homelessness. “If we were housing people, I don’t think saying 50 percent of them returned to homelessness after a housing intervention would be acceptable.”

Busing programs have been a staple response to homelessness for years, but in the past, Ms. Roman said, some cities seemed to use them as a way to export their troubles.

The newer programs, she said, are designed to provide homeless people a critical path to stability by linking them with familiar support systems. But she said cities may need to do a better job of screening what is realistically waiting at a new destination and to hand travelers off to services near their new homes.

Jeff Kositsky, the head of San Francisco’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, said he considered that city’s program a success and would do so even if the city’s outcome numbers were worse. He said it was an effort that cost the city little in comparison to other housing services, it helped many people and it freed up resources to assist others.

Portland began its program in 2016. Not wanting to send a troubled person into a place with no support, organizers put protocols in place: Providers must first call ahead to make sure there is a legitimate housing option. Some clients receive luggage to help retain their possessions. For those who might have difficulty on a long bus trip, a plane ticket is also an option.

The city sent away 383 people in the most recent fiscal year, with the top destinations since the start of the program being Las Vegas (29 people), Seattle (17) and Phoenix (12). Fifty-eight percent of those who could be reached after three months remained housed, but most were unreachable.

“It’s not a panacea,” conceded Denis Theriault, a spokesman for Multnomah County’s Joint Office of Homeless Services. But the city is sticking with the program, he said, noting that it is allowing some vulnerable people to go from homelessness to stability.

Seattle has taken a less formal approach to relocation, with no dedicated program for busing.

Seattle offers bus and other transportation help as part of a larger bucket of flexible, one-time financial assistance that can be used in a variety of ways , such as paying parking tickets so someone can regain access to a vehicle, or helping a person with unsightly scars get a wig during the pursuit of a job.

“Our approach is to find the best thing, and that clearly is not always a bus ticket,” said Meg Olberding, a spokeswoman with Seattle’s Human Services Department.

Citing programs in San Francisco and elsewhere, a member of the King County Council, Reagan Dunn, recently proposed a large expansion of the region’s bus-ticket programs, arguing that it has taken on too much of the burden.

“Seattle has become a dead-end street for the nation’s homeless population,” said Mr. Dunn, who has proposed $1 million for an effort to expand the county’s transportation option .

But surveys in King County, which includes Seattle , show the problem is largely homegrown. Sixteen percent of the city’s homeless population became homeless outside the county, and 5 percent reported being outside of Washington State when they lost their housing.

Some of those who might be potential clients in any expanded program said transport can be helpful — in some cases. Kyle Calitri, 36, who was lying on a red mat outside a shelter in downtown Seattle on Friday afternoon, said he has largely lived on the streets since he was a teenager. More than a decade ago, while living homeless in Tennessee, a church helped him get back to family in Florida with a bus ticket. That was a vital opportunity that gave him some temporary stability, he said, though he has continued to live a transient life in recent years.

With the possibility of new funding, he said, he was going to look into the option to help his wife.

Various nonprofits in the Seattle area have already provided some bus tickets. The Seattle-area United Way funded about 116 trips outside the region last year, said Lauren McGowan, senior director for Ending Homelessness and Poverty at United Way of King County.

But Ms. McGowan said the idea of committing more money to such programs might be counterproductive when there were so many other urgent needs. She said most people the nonprofit works with are from the Seattle area, where their personal and professional networks are centered, and she worries that spending money on bus tickets to advance a narrative of “reunification” may be an excuse to simply encourage homeless people to go away.

In some cases, she said, people have arrived in Seattle on bus passes from other regions without any housing support lined up.

“Just shipping someone out of town to experience homelessness somewhere else is furthering the trauma that person experiences,” she said, “and furthering this crisis that we have all over the country.”

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Homeward Bound

Effective June 1 st 2022, Homeward Bound will be sunsetting as a stand-alone program. Travel and relocation services will be fully integrated into HSH’s community-based Access Points. Any household experiencing homelessness who may need travel and relocation assistance to reunite or reconnect with a support system outside of San Francisco, will be able to access services through the Problem Solving Program at any of the HSH Access Points listed here .

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Family that fled El Salvador struggles to find housing in San Francisco

By Sara Donchey

Updated on: April 1, 2024 / 7:42 PM PDT / CBS San Francisco

Homelessness is often a serious consequence for immigrant families, especially those who come to San Francisco because of its designation as a sanctuary city.

On some afternoons, Karla Margarita Solito Sorto spends hours in a 24-hour laundromat in San Francisco's Mission District, washing load after load for her family of six. It would be a daunting task for anyone, but for her it is something of a respite.

"I know that sometimes it's really hard to go up and down in the cold. Here, I am a little safer," Solito Sorto said as she folded stacks of her twin daughter's clothes.

Her family fled El Salvador some six months ago and came to San Francisco, where they were attracted by the promise of protection under the city's designation as a sanctuary city. But her four children and her husband had nowhere to go, and have been homeless since they arrived. They sought help from the city, and were placed in homeless shelter for families inside Buena Vista Horace Mann K-8 Community School.

"It's an emergency shelter. It isn't meant to be long term," Solito Sorto said. "I've been here with my family for six months. I've looked for every way to get out of here, but there's nothing."

Even though the shelter is more appealing than sleeping with her four children on the streets, it isn't without major challenges. Every day, families must leave at 6 a.m. to accommodate the school's staff and students. They aren't allowed back in until the evening and are provided with one meal a day and quick access to shower.

Solito Sorto's children attend school, but often fall asleep in class. She has looked for work cleaning homes and her husband has tried to pick up construction jobs in Oakland, but she said opportunities are few and far between.

Spending the daytime hours on the street means using public parks as a place to lay down and rest, or walking a few blocks to a local church in hopes that they can use their restrooms.

Recently, Solito Sorto said multiple people inside the shelter got very sick, including her own daughter who ended up hospitalized with an infection. The family was terrified to return afterward for fear of the illness spreading to the rest of the children.

"It as really difficult because while my daughter was in the hospital and I was with her, my husband was with our other three kids," she explained. "They had to ask a man from the church for help and who let them stay in a van because the kids were scared to go back to the shelter."

Solito Sorto said she's tried to find more suitable housing through the city without any luck, and advocates like Matt Alexander of Faith In Action say they are not alone.

"What we're seeing is that families are going to the access point and they're being told there's no resources. We can't help you," Alexander said. "I mean they're left on the street. That's happened over and over again."

Space in the city's designated family shelters is limited, and the city's Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing pointed to a strain on the system because of increased demand.

"HSH is preparing to expand our emergency hotel vouchers so that we have more to offer families while they wait for a spot in our family shelters. We are also expanding housing assistance for families so that they can move out of shelter more efficiently, end their homelessness and make space for families on the waiting list," said the department, in a statement to KPIX. 

Alexander and others say the system is difficult to navigate, particularly for immigrant families that have fewer resources.

"You go through this 90-minute intake process and at the end of the time they said to the families you haven't been homeless for long enough. You don't have enough points in the system. Here are some Muni tokens. Good luck."

A little luck is what Solito Sorto is hoping for, along with some help from the city.

"I would just ask a sanctuary city like this -- because that's why we came here, to be more protected -- just for a place for us and for a little support," she said.

• Immigration
• Homelessness
• Affordable Housing
• Housing Crisis
• San Francisco

Sara Donchey has returned to where it all began. After college, Sara worked as production assistant for KPIX 5 and now she has returned to the station to anchor the 3 pm and 5 pm newscasts.

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United flight to San Francisco returns to Frankfurt airport after toilet mishap

From sleeping on floor at SFO to venture capital founder: Meet the inspiring Arlan Hamilton

F or most people, the airport is the last place on earth they want to spend time in. For Arlan Hamilton, taking a stroll around San Francisco International Airport is a homecoming of sorts.

"This is where I would spend a lot of time in 2015 when I was homeless. I was out here in San Francisco and Silicon Valley trying to raise my venture fund Backstage Capital," said Arlan Hamilton, founder of the company.

MORE: SF man says perseverance, tenacity pushed him to become 1 of just 4 Black sommeliers in the world

Hamilton spent countless nights living inside SFO.

"I would talk to my mom on the phone. I would talk to my aunt until and it would just suck," said Hamilton.

By day, Hamilton would be busy with meetings in Silicon Valley, hopeful she would crack into the venture capital industry - dominated by white men.

By night, she would pack those dreams back into her carry-on bag and come back to SFO to make her home for the evening.

"I would take a pair of the jeans out, I would roll it up and I would lay it on the floor. That would be my pillow," Hamilton recalled. "I wouldn't stay in one place too long. And I always thought I might wake up to someone tapping me on the shoulder saying, 'Hey, get up and leave.' Thankfully, that never happened."

The days of being unhoused would turn to weeks, the weeks to months. And with that came boredom. Hamilton would help puzzled passengers figure out their flights to keep busy.

MORE: The story of pioneering Black flight attendant Patricia Banks-Edmiston

"One day a family came in and they were not speaking English. After watching them kind of fumble around a little bit I just said, 'what else do I have to do?' So I saw their tickets and I just walked them to the international terminal," she said.

Today, those sleepless nights feel like a distant memory for Hamilton who is wildly successful as a venture capitalist.

"I essentially launched Backstage Capital while I was homeless," she said.

Hamilton's company Backstage Capital has raised $30 million since 2015. And with that money, she's invested in 200 startups founded by women, people of color, and those identifying as LGBTQ+ - all identities that Hamilton holds.

She's providing a life-changing investment to the folks who are often overlooked.

"What would happen if there were a venture fund where everyone who was a woman starting a company, or a Black person starting a company, or Latinx, etc., they all knew that they could go there and have a fair chance? Could that change everything? So I set out to start Backstage Capital," Hamilton said.

MORE: Los Angeles couple launches premier Black LGBTQ+ wedding magazine: 'We exist. This is validation'

It was another woman who made the first investment in Hamilton. She met Susan Christie, who had retired early because of her business success, at an event in Silicon Valley.

"After a few weeks of knowing each other, she said to me, 'I don't know what you're going to do, but I know you're going to do something really important;" said Hamilton. "She gave me $25,000 to invest in someone else to make my first major investment, and $25,000 to set up shop."

Hamilton's story has gone on to inspire countless people who've heard it. She's the author of two books: "It's About Damn Time" and most recently "Your First Million."

She also has a podcast of the same name and now a live event.

"'Your First Million Live' is where current and future millionaires convene. It's where we get together and we learn from each other. We network, we build, and we get inspired," she said.

Hamilton does this work with her mother by her side.

MORE: Oakland boutique McMullen celebrates 15 years, launches program for emerging fashion designers

"Being on this trip has been a journey, with Arlan. We've had our highs and lows," said Earline Sims, Arlan's mother.

"To go from sleeping on the floor of the San Francisco International Airport to now - everything has changed. The mission has stayed the same," she said.

That mission is to invest and inspire. She reminds us all of what's possible when you hold on to your dreams no matter how out of reach they seem.

"The thing that kept me going the most during this time was I thought to myself as I had for years leading up to this, 'What if I can pull this off?'"

Hamilton is hosting her first "Your First Million Live" event in Los Angeles. The event runs next week April 9-12.

For more information including tickets go to YourFirstMillion.Live

SiR Announces “The Bad Karma Tour” Across North America

18-CITY TOUR TO KICK OFF IN JUNe

Special guest zacari to join on all dates, new album heavy out now.

2x Grammy-nominated artist and R&B virtuoso SiR has announced “The Bad Karma Tour”, a 18-city tour, produced by Live Nation, in support of his recently released, critically acclaimed album Heavy. Kicking off Tuesday, July 23 in Silver Spring, MD at The Fillmore, the tour will make stops in Brooklyn, Toronto, Austin, San Francisco, and more before wrapping up with a hometown performance in Los Angeles, CA at the Hollywood Palladium. Special guest Zacari will join on all dates.

TICKETS: Tickets for his North American tour dates will be available starting Thursday, April 4 with presales. The general onsale begins Friday, April 5 at 10 AM local time at inglewoodsir.com.

VIP: Fans can also purchase VIP Packages, which may include general admission tickets with priority access to the floor, a meet & greet and photo op with SiR, an exclusive VIP merchandise item and more. VIP package contents vary based on the offer selected. For more information, visit vipnation.com.

Released March 22nd, Heavy delves deep into SiR’s intrinsic journey, serving as a poignant reflection of his recovery, mental health and physical transformation. The album, which features Ty Dolla $ign, Isaiah Rashad, Ab-Soul, Anderson .Paak, and Scribz Riley, received acclaim and support from the likes of Rolling Stone, NPR, Billboard, Men’s Health, Essence and so much more. He made his solo TV debut with “You” from the album via Jimmy Kimmel Live! this past Monday. Watch the performance HERE.

THE BAD KARMA 2024 TOUR DATES: Tue Jul 23 – Silver Spring, MD – The Fillmore Silver Spring Wed Jul 24 – Philadelphia, PA – The Fillmore Philadelphia Thu Jul 25 – Baltimore, MD – Baltimore Soundstage Sat Jul 27 – Boston, MA – Citizens House of Blues Boston Mon Jul 29 – Brooklyn, NY – Brooklyn Paramount Tue Jul 30 – Toronto, ON – HISTORY Fri Aug 02 – Detroit, MI – The Fillmore Detroit Tue Aug 06 – Nashville, TN – Marathon Music Works Wed Aug 07 – Raleigh, NC – The Ritz Thu Aug 08 – Atlanta, GA – Tabernacle Sat Aug 10 – Houston, TX – House of Blues Houston Sun Aug 11 – Austin, TX – Emo’s Austin Tue Aug 13 – Denver, CO – Summit Thu Aug 15 – Phoenix, AZ – The Van Buren Fri Aug 16 – Anaheim, CA – House of Blues Anaheim Sat Aug 17 – San Diego, CA – SOMA Tue Aug 20 – San Francisco, CA – The Masonic Wed Aug 21 – Los Angeles, CA – Hollywood Palladium

About Live Nation Entertainment Live Nation Entertainment (NYSE: LYV) is the world’s leading live entertainment company comprised of global market leaders: Ticketmaster, Live Nation Concerts, and Live Nation Sponsorship. For additional information, visit www.livenationentertainment.com.

For press inquiries contact: Ryan Cunningham / [email protected] & Niquita Tamar / [email protected]

Live Nation Concerts Monique Sowinski | [email protected] Maya Sarin | [email protected]

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Chesa Boudin, homeless activists decry possible U.S. Supreme Court decision: ‘draconian’

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The debate over a forthcoming U.S. Supreme Court ruling that could have far-reaching implications for homelessness in West Coast cities heated up on Tuesday after former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin and a wide range of social service nonprofits warned the highly anticipated decision could cause drastic harm to those living on the streets.

In an amicus brief, or “friend of the court” filing submitted this week, a broad swath of the city’s homelessness advocates, officials in the Public Defender’s Office and labor unions asserted that the possible reversal of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in Johnson v. Grants Pass would criminalize poor and vulnerable residents.

The legal battle centers on the Ninth Circuit’s ruling that homeless residents have the right to camp outside if shelter space is unavailable. In January, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review the appellate decision, and oral arguments are set for later this month. A decision is expected in late June.

The filing comes in direct opposition to the City of San Francisco and Gov. Gavin Newsom’s position on the ruling—both of whom say local governments need to have more flexibility when dealing with homelessness. In March, City Attorney David Chiu submitted his own amicus brief , arguing San Francisco officials needed to balance the billions spent combating homelessness with the ability to clear encampments in public spaces like sidewalks. 

On Tuesday, Boudin appeared to predict how the decision would unfold at the high court, which has leaned conservative for years on issues like abortion. Legal observers believe it’s likely the Supreme Court could overturn or reverse key aspects of the Ninth Circuit’s positions on homelessness. 

“The stakes are extremely high in the case pending before the Supreme Court,” said Boudin, who was recalled in 2022, at a virtual press conference. “We all know what the likely outcome is supposed to be.”

The 51-page amicus brief filed by advocates paints a long history of California cities repeatedly failing to address poverty and housing shortages while treating the issue of homelessness with disregard for individuals’ constitutional rights.

“California cities intend to cleanse themselves of their own hardworking residents rather than take accountability for a housing crisis they created,” the filing states. “This form of public banishment harkens the draconian penalties of Ancient Greece and was repudiated across the United States long ago.”

Others who signed the brief include San Francisco Public Defender Mano Raju, the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, the San Francisco Tenants Union and Larkin Street Youth Services.

The outcome of the high court’s decision comes as San Francisco deals with its own legal battles with homelessness advocates. In 2022, the Coalition on Homelessness filed a lawsuit against the city, arguing that local officials had illegally destroyed homelessness encampments without providing an alternative shelter option.

In February, a federal magistrate judge agreed to pause the legal case until the Supreme Court’s ruling is made. However, a temporary injunction issued against the city that limits it from enforcing sitting, lying or lodging in the street stays in place.

Gabe Greschler can be reached at [email protected]

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