by David Bacon
NOTE FROM THE EDITOR:
The March 2 print edition of our front page story incorrectly identified the author of its story City Clears Out Homeless Encounter. The correct author of the piece is David Bacon. Bacon’s story was edited by Josh Wolf, who contributed additional reporting to focus the story on recent developments in San Francisco. El Reportero regrets the error.
Michael Lee started living on the streets of San Francisco last May. He had traveled to the city from Las Vegas to seek medical treatment. When he arrived, he searched for cheap, temporary housing in some of San Francisco’s most affordable neighborhoods, but he had seriously underestimated the cost of living in the nation’s most expensive city.
“I was under the impression the rent was $300 a month, and I brought the resources for sixty days,” he said in an interview. “I was going to go back to Las Vegas afterwards and go back to work. But the first place I walked into, they told me it was $300 a week. The next was $400 a week, and then $500. People were laughing at me – $300 a week is actually cheap on Skid Row. So I wound up living on the streets.”
Just before dawn on Tuesday, March 1, San Francisco officials moved forward with a plan to push out the people living in tents along a commercial thoroughfare near Highway 101. The homeless who have been camping along Division Street for months were notified a few days earlier of the plan to oust the encampment.
Some left when they heard the news of the city’s plan, others defied the orders to leave saying they had nowhere to go. While the city made plans to house people in a temporary encampment at Pier 80, its numerous rules combined with the remote location and barbed wire fences proved to be an unacceptable alternative for many of the city’s homeless.
A few of the city’s homeless residents have found stability through the nearby homeless navigation center, a new model for sheltering the homeless that drops the traditional paternalistic rules that leave many clients feeling disempowered. Other homeless residents, like Lee, have left San Francisco for other Bay Area communities.
After learning about a large encampment in Berkeley that homeless activists had set up to protest the US Postal Service’s plan to sell its historic downtown post office building, Lee moved across the bay to join the movement. He quickly became a leader of the Berkeley camp, and advocated for a plan to transform the old post office building into a community resource: “A homeless contact center run by homeless people,” he said.
“Why [were] homeless people the main defenders?” Lee asked rhetorically, referring to the post office. “Without community resources we can’t get a hand up. There’s just no place to go. This is where we live, unfortunately – on the sidewalks. We don’t want to live in a community where private developers, the One Percenters, have everything.
“We’re not going to be homeless forever,” Lee continued. “Eventually, we will recover from homelessness because we’re pretty determined individuals. That’s something that people with houses truly need to understand. We are going to be rejoining the community.
After a federal judge granted the City of Berkeley a temporary restraining order against the US Postal Service’s planned sale of the downtown post office, the USPS announced that it was shelving its plans to sell the building. Several months later, some of the people in the post office camp set up a larger homeless encampment, which became known as “Liberty City” or “Liberty Village.” They set this camp up a block away, on the lawn in front of Old City Hall, to protest a new city council plan to establish stricter rules targeting homeless people. During the holidays, Berkeley cleared out Liberty City, and the homeless people who had been part of it scattered to other spots in the city and to locations throughout the Bay Area. The post office camp, now more than four hundred days old, still remains.
Over the years, Berkeley, like most liberal communities, has been comfortable with the idea of the homeless being victims. But many Berkeley residents and business owners grow uneasy when homeless people organize and use the creative tactics of the labor and civil rights movements.
Last year, Berkeley’s homeless people did just that. They created what they called, “intentional communities,” or “occupations,” like Liberty City and the post office camp, not just as a protest tactic, but also as places where they could gain more control over their lives and implement their own ideas for dealing with homelessness.
Many drew on previous experience in other movements. “ A lot of us are older activists,” Lee explained. “Our ideas come out of the 1960s and even before, from the 1930s. Homeless people have always formed communities, whether we were considered hoboes or homeless people or just bums. Hobo jungles were intentional communities too, based on an unconscious understanding of the need for mutual aid and voluntary cooperation.
“People police themselves,” he added, in an interview while Liberty City was still operating. “I see people out there in the middle of the night with flashlights picking up trash. I see them chase off anti-social elements. If you want to talk about the solution to homelessness, all you have to do is walk down to Berkeley City Hall, and the post office. Is it a perfect solution? No. Housing is the permanent solution to homelessness. But this is a helluva good start.”
Nearly everyone agrees that the answer to homelessness is permanent housing. But the state and federal governments do not provide the funding needed to build permanent housing for homeless people. In fact, over the decades, national policies have eliminated housing for poor people and cost hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Local governments provide homeless shelters and services, but they are unable to meet the needs of the huge number of people living on the streets because of a lack of money. Berkeley alone has 1,200 homeless residents, according to city officials. Further, many homeless people don’t like shelters because they can’t bring their pets, or because most shelters require you to be inside by a certain hour in the evening and to leave during the day.
As a result, some cities, including Portland and Seattle, have approved the creation of tent cities as an alternative form of temporary housing for homeless people. And Berkeley’s experience with Liberty City revealed that a tent city has the potential to work in the East Bay as well.
Meanwhile, the homeless who had been living in San Francisco along Division Street have been pushed into the Potrero Hill Neighborhood, and it’s unclear how long the city will tolerate their presence. Tho 180 or so people who relocated to Pier 80 have a shelter for now, but that site was only scheduled to remain open until the end of the month. City officials are now looking to extend its usage for the coming months, but it is neither a permanent nor complete solution to the ongoing problem.
Mike Zint has been homeless since 2000. For many years, he lived out of his car, moving from town to town. He said that during the Occupy movement several years ago, he was in San Francisco when “police sent me to Occupy, thinking that I must be a drug addict. But they made a big mistake, because I began organizing.”
Zint said that after San Francisco police “crushed” the Occupy encampment, he and other homeless activists staged a series of protests, including one during the America’s Cup yacht race.
Zint said that, over the years, San Francisco has hardened its stance against marginalized people, like the homeless. Politicians “pass laws to get the homeless out of sight of the businesses, so shoppers don’t see them,” he said. “San Francisco has an image as a world class city, but there are no bathrooms. There are no shower facilities. They say there are only a few thousand homeless when there are twice as many. With the shuffle going on they just move them. One day this street looks good because they’ve cleared people out, and then they get rid of them somewhere else.”
