Several city departments are changing procedures in response to complaints from those living in encampments and their advocates, and from residential and commercial neighbors.

Here are some key changes:

• Berkeley will increase trash pickups to several times a week and do more frequent street cleaning to improve overall sanitation and living conditions.
• The city auditor is reviewing the effectiveness of the city’s homelessness services.
• The police department is reducing its involvement at encampment abatement operations.
• The fire department is providing unhoused people with basic fire safety guidelines.
• The city manager’s Homeless Response Team has taken steps to improve communication with residents at the largest encampments in West Berkeley through community meetings and new “Good Neighbor Guidelines” that explain what conditions would trigger a city intervention.
• The city has also applied to the state for an Encampment Resolution Funding Grant Award to lease a motel that it would use to provide temporary shelter.

In my capacity as a professional journalist, I reported for the Public Press on the aggressive October encampment cleaning that upended the lives of more than 50 people living near Eighth and Harrison streets and brought the city’s response to homelessness under scrutiny.

I was able to document and photograph the 12-hour encounter because it affected me, too. I am part of a community of people living in tents and vehicles who have been displaced from other encampments around the city, including the Berkeley Marina, the Gilman Underpass, Seabreeze, Ashby Shellmound, People’s Park, the Grayson Street Shelter, Here/There Camp, Shattuck Avenue and the Second Street camps. 

In the wake of photographic evidence from the October encampment cleaning, which exposed the city’s poor communication, lack of transparency, and failure to provide adequate shelter and support to unhoused people, city departments are under review.

Berkeley Senior Auditor Caitlin Palmer wrote in an email that, “We plan to work on the audit in the fall and hope to issue it sometime next year.”

The Berkeley city manager in July concluded an investigation of Berkeley police officers involved in the October encampment sweep who sent text messages that the Berkeley Police Accountability Board said showed “anti-homeless and racist remarks.” The city manager’s office, which hired an independent company to conduct the investigation, issued a report that the investigation found no wrongdoing. But the office has indicated that it will not release further details from the investigation, which it deems confidential.

Aiming for Clearer Communication

Peter Radu, assistant to the city manager, said the city acknowledged that it had mishandled encampment cleanings and used “overhanded” measures that included the destruction of personal property and giving vague, sometimes conflicting instructions to encampment residents. He acknowledged his own role in those events and said that he and the city wanted to work with unhoused people and homeless advocates to rectify the situation.

“I am genuinely sorry,” Radu said to community members gathered at Eighth and Harrison streets. “We’re trying to start something new, and work more with you as opposed to against you moving forward.”

On July 10, dozens of people gathered under and around a gray shade structure at Eighth and Harrison streets. Radu addressed the crowd of outreach workers and encampment residents to tell them that the City Council would soon approve a new shelter, referring to the planned motel conversion. He did not say whether the city would close the encampment, noting that Berkeley has more unhoused people than available shelter spaces, but said that residents in the area would be prioritized. The city has not announced a date for when it plans to begin operating the motel as a shelter.

“Call it a ‘closure’ or call it something else,” Radu wrote in an email asking for clarification about future plans for the encampment. “We do have (1) an opportunity to move people inside with a new resource, and (2) we do have infrastructure repair and construction needs in the area. People cannot live in construction zones.”

Radu’s efforts to establish trust have been met with mixed reactions from people living in the camp and their advocates. While some said they appreciated this newfound willingness to cooperate, others remained skeptical.

“You had consequences from your actions and now you are here,” said Chloe Madison, a camp resident on Eighth Street. “I’ve seen this side of you before, and I’ve also seen the guy who steals people’s homes.”

Many unhoused people say they continue to feel harassed no matter how much they do to avoid residential neighborhoods, because Berkeley staffers have shuffled them around the city with repeated encampment cleanups and closures.

“Just in the past few months, like Seabreeze. I’ve had like 10 camps in the last couple of years,” said Ron, a resident from the Second Street encampment. “You have herded us here.”

To address such grievances, Radu began working with two of the largest encampments in Berkeley, located near the intersections of Second and Page streets and Eighth and Harrison streets. He said the city and residents needed to find middle ground and take a collaborative approach to addressing the sanitation issues on the streets.

“There’s a competing need for space,” Radu said at an Eighth and Harrison streets community meeting. “So, we’re just trying to find a solution that keeps everybody safe and that allows the community to kind of have a shared use of this public space.”

In April, Radu held the first of three community meetings and presented a report to people living at the Second Street encampment, and said that if residents addressed safety concerns voluntarily, the city would not enter anyone’s vehicles or tents. He said that because of fire risk, residents would not be allowed to live in other kinds of makeshift structures.

Residents who attended the meeting said they were willing to work with the city, but many also shared their experiences of repeated property loss due to previous sweeps. Ron, who gave only his first name, recounted how he lost his belongings when he arrived late during the last cleaning at Second and Page streets. He said he jumped on the back of the garbage truck to salvage his personal belongings. He was able to save a few items.

“I was five minutes late, five minutes late, and I lost everything,” Ron said at the community meeting. “I had things that I carried from town to town. I had things in there for years.”

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Alice Barbee, who lives in the unhoused community at Eighth and Harrison streets, said the city previously gave instructions, which residents followed, and then discarded their possessions anyway.

“You say to get it all across the street if you want to keep it safe,” Barbee said. “But you come and you take that stuff, too. All of it and then call it trash?”

In May, residents of both communities asked for reassurance that no one would enter their households and throw away their possessions.

“We have not been as transparent and communicative as you guys would have liked and as we could have been,” Radu said to a gathering of Second Street residents. “I just want to acknowledge there were clearly misunderstandings and miscommunications on our account.”

In May, Radu tried collaborative cleaning at both encampments, asking residents to voluntarily address safety concerns highlighted in his reports. He deemed those events a success.

“We schedule a deep cleaning together and, voluntarily, give us what you don’t want,” Radu said to Eighth and Harrison residents, noting that the city staff had hauled away 11 tons of debris the previous week from the community living near Second and Page streets. “It was all voluntary. None of it was forcefully taken from anybody. We didn’t enter any tents.”

But the city does not have a policy for preserving the belongings of someone who is not on site when it conducts a cleaning operation. This means that residents living in tents or makeshift shelters risk losing their possessions when they leave their homes.

The city has also made agreements with surrounding businesses to keep people from camping on their sidewalks. Public notices are issued to residents camping outside of designated zones along Seventh and Eighth streets citing the city’s sidewalk ordinance and prohibition of bulky items in commercial corridors. The notices direct people to a shelter that closed in December and is no longer in operation.

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Sharing Public Space

In an effort to get everyone on the same page, Radu asked a few homeless advocates to give him feedback on a draft of unofficial guidelines to maintain general cleanliness in the neighborhood and improve interactions with the surrounding business community.

Radu said he hopes the “Good Neighbor Guidelines” will help establish a better working relationship between encampment residents and the city staff. He is seeking additional community input on the draft.

But the new procedures are challenging for a few residents who sleep on the open sidewalk and struggle with mental health issues. They are in survival mode and have trouble following rules about storing their belongings and discarding food scraps to avoid attracting vermin. And so, they are constantly at risk of having their possessions thrown away during weekly street cleanings.

“The Guidelines are rules the City wants people to follow. The guidelines say ‘Please,’ but behind that ‘please’ is the threat that if they are not followed, eviction, arrest, or a citation will result,” wrote Osha Neumann, a Berkeley civil rights attorney, in an email seeking his comment on the guidelines. “The City needs to realize that a great number of the people out there have significant disabilities, mental and physical, which make following rules difficult.”

The Public Press asked for reactions to the guidelines from Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguín and all of the City Council members, about half of whom replied by email. Councilmembers Sophie Hahn, Ben Barlett, Rigel Robinson, and Mark Humbert declined to comment on the city’s response to homelessness despite multiple requests.

“These are temporary, common sense guidelines specifically for this neighborhood during the transition to the Super 8 motel,” Elgstrand wrote on behalf of the mayor. “These guidelines will help ensure the safety and security of encampment residents and neighbors.”

Councilwoman Susan Wengraf wrote that she agrees with what Berkeley city staff is doing and that “Berkeley is moving in the right direction.”

Councilwoman Kate Harrison wrote that “it is critically important that while the City makes these requests of unhoused and housed people in our community, it simultaneously provides the necessary facilities and services that allow people to follow them.”

Councilman Terry Taplin has already promulgated a version of these unofficial rules on his website as his district also grapples with homelessness. “The Good Neighbor policy both increases transparency around what triggers a city intervention and provides recommendations to better manage the public right of way better and improve traffic and fire safety,” he wrote, adding that the city could take further steps to improve encampment sanitation.

“Conditions can be improved by waste pump-out services,” he wrote, also noting that the city’s Homelessness Services Panel of Experts has also recommended expediting the search for a new parking lot for the safe parking program. But no money was earmarked for it on this budget cycle, according to Radu.

Harrison and Taplin agree that the city needs to implement other changes, such as providing more permanent supportive housing and transitional housing programs citywide, in addition to resolving sanitation issues.

The state grant would allow the city to lease the motel for two years, and the city hopes funds from Berkeley’s Measure P, which passed in 2019, would pay for three additional years.

“We are working with the County and our nonprofit service providers in finding solutions that enable us to provide access to shelter and services beyond the Super 8 motel,” Elgstrand wrote. “Even if this one location reaches full occupancy, we will continue to do everything we can to target resources to the residents of this encampment.”

Looking for Representatives to Show Up

Despite recent developments, some encampment residents said they felt frustrated and abandoned by Berkeley city officials. They wondered why City Council members and the mayor attended a recent Gilman District Business Summit to talk with business owners but had not attended any of the encampment community meetings.

“As long as you ostracize people, and their issues are not as important as others, then anger and resentment starts to come in,” Merced Dominguez said at an Eighth and Harrison community meeting, adding that she wanted to see the Gilman District’s Councilwoman Rashi Kesarwani attend a future meeting. “We just want to have a dialogue with her to work something out. This is what she was voted in to do.”

Kesarwani replied to a request for comment with a general statement but did not directly answer questions about recent policy changes and how Berkeley staff is responding to homelessness in her district despite multiple requests.

Madison, another encampment resident, expressed her frustrations over email, writing that she hadn’t heard about the business summit and questioned the timing of that meeting, which portrayed unhoused people disparagingly, blaming them for criminal behavior and causing others in the neighborhood to feel fearful.

“For you to attempt to approach us in good faith only days later is super skeevy,” she wrote to Radu. “Super cool how we’re all lumped into being scary crime doers when all I do all day is attempt to further my career in a way that works with my mental and physical health.” She added that “excluding us from that meeting allows those narratives to perpetuate.”

Radu responded to Madison that he had recommended including encampment members and community advocates at the meeting with business owners, but that the decision was not up to him.

“You’ll understand that I don’t get to make all those decisions, but since then I HAVE recommended to the business leaders that they reach out to you and try to have conversations,” he wrote, adding that “I agree completely with you that the format of the business meeting was not conducive to such trust.”

Some encampment residents are accepting, cautiously, what appear to be goodwill gestures.

“For a long time, I think it was a big battle. You guys don’t want to talk to us or work with us,” said Sarah Teague, a Second Street encampment resident, at one of the recent meetings.

“But you guys are making the initiative to come down here and talk to us personally. That’s a huge breakthrough,” she said. “I think it’s a big giant leap of faith for everybody.”

Full disclosure: Radu asked for Yesica Prado’s feedback on the Good Neighbor Guidelines and accepted a few suggestions to clarify wording but did not incorporate her other recommendations.

The post Berkeley Says It Was Aggressive in Homeless Encampment Sweeps, Promises Reforms appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

These tragedies were disproportionately suffered by marginalized groups. The biggest increase in deaths occurred among those who lacked housing. People listed as having “no fixed address” accounted for 61 overdose deaths in the first quarter, up from 26 during the same period in 2022. Black residents accounted for 33% of fatal overdoses in the first quarter this year, despite representing only 5% of the city’s population.

Addiction experts say the recent increase in overdose deaths could be linked to the closure of the Tenderloin Linkage Center, a temporary facility that operated in United Nations Plaza from January to December 2022 to help drug users and people without housing access supportive services.

Gary McCoy is vice president of policy and public affairs for HealthRight 360, the organization that ran health services for the Tenderloin site. The center also became an unofficial overdose prevention center, and McCoy connects the rise in overdoses to its closure.

“When TLC was open, and we had a safe place for folks to go, the numbers went down,” McCoy said. “So yeah, it’s pretty telling data.”

Department of Public Health statistics showed that from January to November 2022, the center received 100,000 visits and reversed 300 overdoses. Despite those results, the city shut down the site a month earlier than planned in part due to complaints from business owners and residents who said that drug use and dealing increased after the center opened.

City officials planned to open more supervised consumption sites as part of San Francisco’s 2022 overdose prevention plan, but City Attorney David Chiu advised against this since state and federal laws prohibit them.

Five days after the medical examiner’s report was released, Gov. Gavin Newsom made an unannounced tour of the Tenderloin with state Attorney General Rob Bonta. In a video posted online Wednesday, Twitter user JJ Smith approached Newsom as he strode down Ellis Street, asking him what he was doing about the fentanyl crisis.

“That’s why we’re here. You tell me what to do,” Newsom said as he continued walking.

The health department did not address questions about a link between the closure of the Tenderloin Center and a rise in deaths. Instead it emailed a response pointing to measures the city is taking to address the overdose crisis, including distributing more than 5,000 kits of the overdose reversal drug naloxone and the recent opening of a 70-bed residential facility at Treasure Island for people transitioning out of treatment programs.

State legislators passed a bill last June that would have allowed supervised consumption sites in San Francisco, Oakland and Los Angeles, but Newsom vetoed it in August, saying he would not back such a move “without strong, engaged local leadership and well-documented, vetted, and thoughtful operational and sustainability plans.”

Alex Kral, an epidemiologist with independent research institute RTI International who has been studying harm reduction programs and supervised consumption sites for more than 30 years, called Newsom’s decision “disappointing.” In recent years, Kral provided expert testimony on their effectiveness in public hearings at City Hall and in Sacramento. 

“A couple of years before that, when he was campaigning, he said he would sign such a law,” Kral said. “And then he went back on it. And, you know, that was really a shame. And it’s really set us back.”

Kral said he provided San Francisco’s heath department with results of his study of the Tenderloin Center, which showed that it did not increase public drug use or the prevalence of discarded paraphernalia, but that it did reduce drug-related emergency department visits.

Nevertheless, Mayor London Breed expressed disappointment in the Tenderloin Center because fewer than 1% of its clients were provided opportunities to enter treatment.

In December 2021, Breed declared a “state of emergency” authorizing a crackdown on drugs in the Tenderloin. A few months leading up to the linkage center’s closure, police began leaning into a more punitive approach, which Breed lauded in a recent blog post, noting statistics showed that from Oct. 1, 2022, to April 6, 2023, police made 379 arrests for drug possession or sale in the Tenderloin.

But McCoy said the subsequent rise in overdose deaths shows that cracking down on possession is not an effective method for reducing drug use or the harm it causes.

“We’ve increased enforcement, police officers have been arresting and citing people for using drugs and having paraphernalia, the district attorney has increased her punitive efforts,” McCoy said. “And the rates of cases charged for people who use drugs, and our numbers, are going up.”

Furthermore, he said, focusing on the number of people who enter treatment is not an accurate measure of success.

“It takes consistent contact and communication to have those conversations,” he said. “It’s not overnight, although it could be sometimes, but it’s often not.”

During the last days the center was open, people who had been placed in housing and received services returned to express their gratitude.

“They were coming in on the last day, and bringing us flowers and thank you cards,” McCoy said. “It was very emotional.” He said some of those who received assistance were, “upset that what had helped them is no longer going to exist for other people.”

Former client Adriel Cota said the center helped by giving him clean drug consumption supplies. Staff were on hand to reverse overdoses should the need arise. But Cota said he was acutely aware of the perception caused by all the medical emergency activity at the center.

“I know there were a lot of ODs here,” he said. “Paramedics were here almost on the daily but, you know, that’s kind of what this was for. Out of all the ODs I know, everyone survived.”

Cota, who does not have housing, said the center provided him with services that were unavailable elsewhere, were located far away or limited access to once or twice a week.

“Here, every day they had food,” Cota said. “If you would take a shower, they’d wash your clothes, and before you go, get out of the shower, your clothes will be ready. Now, I’ll have to figure it out as best as I can.”

This article is part of a series on San Francisco’s overdose crisis and prevention efforts, underwritten by a California Health Equity Fellowship grant from the Annenberg Center for Health Journalism at the University of Southern California.

The post With Overdose Deaths Surging, Critics Chide City, State for Curbing Safe Consumption Centers appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

San Francisco took steps to get ahead of the crisis: A spokesperson from the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing said the agency increased street outreach and the number of shelter beds available in anticipation of the storms. But as of a week ago, some people said they were having a hard time accessing shelter beds and other resources to protect them from the rain.

We talked with more than two dozen people about the challenges of finding shelter in eight San Francisco neighborhoods over three days during the storms at a time when several shelters were close to capacity, according to the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing’s dashboard. We talked to many people in vulnerable situations who did not have the ability to search online to figure out where shelters were or how to get to them. Also, the city’s shelter dashboard does not explain clearly which shelters have beds available in real time.

For several weeks, intense rain and wind caused power outages, downed trees, and led to flooding and mudslides. From Dec. 26 to Jan. 18, there were 1,711 reports of flooding to San Francisco’s 311 service center, as well as 1,125 reports of damaged or fallen trees, excluding trees that were vandalized. An additional 1,355 reports were generated about tents or vehicle dwellings, and were coded as “Encampment Cleanups” in a Department of Public Works database. About 60% of these reports were duplicates.

“We have set inclement weather protocols,” Denny Machuca-Grebe, a public information officer at the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, wrote in an email. “Once we see a forecast of less than ideal weather conditions, we put the protocols into action.”

“We are increasing wellness checks, looking throughout our shelter system to flex some capacity where available, discuss with our city partners as to whether a pop-up shelter would be needed, and staff up to support these operations,” Machuca-Grebe wrote in a follow-up email. He also noted that the Homeless Outreach Team deployed extra workers encouraging people exposed to the elements to come inside.

But while we were out reporting, we came across one man in the Tenderloin who had been shivering under the rain for at least an hour before we called the Street Crisis Response Team, which sent representatives to check his vital signs and take him to a shelter. During an early-morning break between storms, we also saw city workers clearing an encampment in the Mission where residents were offered shelter. Those who declined the offer were asked to pack up and move all their possessions — many moved around the corner or across the street — so the Department of Public Works could clean the sidewalk before the next day’s rain.

The department “sheltered an additional 100+ people every night throughout the storm activation,” Machuca-Grebe wrote. He said that extra beds are available during storms on a walk-in, first-come first-served basis for one-night stays Monday through Thursday, and for three-night stays for those who arrive on Fridays.

The Department of Emergency Management also reported that the city’s Healthy Streets Operation Center, a group focused on coordinating efforts among city agencies to address homelessness and street health, had engaged with 160 people living outside in various neighborhoods between Dec. 29 and Jan. 14. Less than half of those people accepted offers of shelter. The department also said that staff from several city agencies transported a total of 410 people to winter shelters.

SEEKING FOOD AND SHELTER 

Friday, Jan. 13 

10:58 a.m. Inside St. Anthony Foundation, a social services hub for low-income San Franciscans, dozens of people are eating hot meals and warming up in the dining room. Outside, a 58-year-old man named Tim says that he doesn’t know where he will sleep tonight. His belongings are gathered in a duffel bag and a suitcase, which later will fall open as he boards the No. 7 Muni bus heading toward the Haight and Outer Sunset neighborhoods.

When asked what the city could be doing to better support people like him, Tim answers quickly: “We’re not getting housing over here. Been waiting a long time.”

11:30 a.m. Down the block at St. Boniface Catholic Church, nonprofit employees help people identify their belongings with numbered tags so they can retrieve them later from the canopy outside. The church welcomes those seeking a place to rest every day until 3 p.m., giving them a break from the elements and a place to wait their turn to take a shower or do their laundry at St. Anthony’s across the street. Two police officers stand inside the doorway, serving as security.

“There are a lot more people because it’s raining. People are trying to get out of the rain,” says a St. Anthony Foundation employee standing outside the church.

11:45 a.m. Back at St. Anthony’s dining room, many older people are coming and going –– some of them appear to be residents of the senior housing on the buildings’ upper floors. People continue to leave their property at the entrance. They leave bikes and shopping carts covered with umbrellas and sleeping bags, attempting to shield belongings from the rain, but most of their property is already wet.

One man who commuted from his home near San Francisco International Airport for a meal says that 20 years ago he volunteered at Glide Memorial Church helping feed people experiencing homelessness, and laments that “now things are so damn expensive.” He says he isn’t homeless, but relishes the spinach and other food he can pick up from the foundation.

12:11 p.m. At Hyde and Turk streets, the “urban oasis” park is mostly empty during a light drizzle. Urban Alchemy employees, who manage the oasis, sit under canopies and play music. Department of Public Works employees sit in another area of the park, gazing at their phones.

12:15 p.m. On the way to our car, we see a man in drenched clothing, shaking uncontrollably under an emergency blanket. We guess that he has been there for at least an hour, as we passed him on our way to St. Anthony’s. It is no longer pouring rain, but when we speak to him, he can only muster a few words, sharing his first name and that he is cold. We go to the car and grab socks, a towel, a sweater and a tent, and return to offer these to the shivering man. But he can’t stop shaking from the cold, and we think he needs a more serious intervention.

12:37 p.m. We have trouble finding the right phone number. When we call a number that we find on the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing website, we reach an answering machine. Next, we call 311 and are transferred to the non-emergency police line, where we finally reach a dispatcher. She asks a series of questions about the man’s physical appearance and his demeanor. Does he seem violent? Does he have a weapon? We answer “no” to both. We tell her that he is cold and wet.

1:04 p.m. The Street Crisis Response Team arrives in a red van with three passengers. Two paramedics prepare to take the man’s vital signs. “I can shake him and have him get up, but he’ll be pissed,” one of them says after asking the man several questions: Does he know what city he’s in? San Francisco. When did he last use drugs? Three hours ago — fentanyl. Does he want to go to shelter, or stay where he is? Shelter. One of the paramedics calls SoMa Rise, a program that connects people with substance use issues to services — such as medical care and housing — to find out if they had room for the night. Now the man is standing, and his breath turns to steam as it leaves his mouth. The paramedics bring him a gray women’s jacket that is slightly too small, two large blankets and a dry pair of pants for him to change into in the van.

Eventually, the paramedics pack up the dry clothes and blankets they brought in a plastic bag, help the man into the back of their van and take off.

3:36 p.m. We drive to the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood to visit the Vehicle Triage Center, a city-run parking lot where people living in recreational vehicles can park and access showers, bathrooms and social workers who offer case management. At the entrance, we meet James, a new RV resident. James says he’s turning 65 in a week. After the Hunters Point Expressway flooded, James and other vehicle residents who had parked near there were welcomed to move into the lot, he says. James moved into his RV after losing his job in 2020 during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic. He describes his new living quarters as “better than nothing” and “better than getting towed.” He says he believes the program staff are “doing the best they can,” while also providing breakfast and dinner. Propane tanks and generators for heating and cooking are not allowed at the triage center, and so the city stores them for RV owners at the back of the lot. James hopes the program will connect him to permanent housing. “I am just waiting for them to call if they are going to give me a house,” he says.

4:29 p.m. A van is in two feet of water at Hunters View Expressway next to Candlestick Point State Recreation Area. Vehicle residents lived along this roadway for years before it was flooded during the recent atmospheric river storms. Sewage has leaked into the San Francisco Bay after storm drains overflowed here and around the Bay Area.

4:35 p.m. The Vehicle Triage Center is surrounded by water, with the bay on one side and flooded streets in other directions. It is windy here and feels a lot colder than other parts of the city. On a stretch of gravel, we meet Rafaela, a resident of the Candlestick RV Park, a private park next to the city’s Vehicle Triage Center. Rafaela is 30 years old and works at San Francisco International Airport. On rainy days, she finds it challenging, even scary, to drive to work. “I drive at 25 or 30,” miles per hour, she says. On the worst days, she has not been able to drive to work. During this dry spell, Rafaela is out walking her dog, Coco, and doing her best to avoid the flooded park.

4:57 p.m. At the United Council of Human Services — aka Mother Brown’s — a dining room, shelter and city-sanctioned campsite at Jennings Street and Van Dyke Avenue in the Bayview, people are queuing up for tonight’s 5 p.m. meal: bread, fish and rice.

“We are definitely hitting capacity,” said Quincy Carr, a Mother Brown’s employee who used to stay at the shelter himself. St. Anthony Foundation and sometimes even nearby hospitals will drop people off at this shelter, which has a capacity of about 50, to stay for the night. Though people do sleep there, it does not have beds, only tables and chairs. Sometimes people sleep in a portable toilet outside the building. People can bring in service animals or personal items, but no mattresses or bedding are allowed to avoid a bed bug infestation, Carr says.

5:46 p.m. We meet Javon while he is standing in line for a meal. He came to San Francisco after Hurricane Katrina decimated his home town of New Orleans in 2005. Mother Brown’s Dining Room is a resource hub to him and people in the neighborhood, but Javon thinks “it needs to be fixed up and remodeled.” He says he has had trouble finding a job while living outside and says that it’s hard to keep himself clean and presentable for the workday. He lived at the sanctioned tent encampment next to Mother Brown’s building, where tents are raised on platforms a few inches off the ground, but the street still floods. He says he is grateful for shelter, but the rules are strict. “We gotta follow rules, but they start being abusive,” Javon said. “It’s mental abuse.”

Javon says being a black man experiencing homelessness presents bigger challenges. “We are the only race that has to keep starting over,” he says, adding his feelings about local government and elected officials in San Francisco: “They don’t value life. There’s no equality. Some people can just eat and go to school, but I can’t.”

8:58 p.m. We arrive at St. Mary’s Cathedral just before the shelter there stops its official intake for the evening. The church functions as an emergency shelter at night during San Francisco’s rainy season as part of the Interfaith Winter Shelter program. The church infamously made headlines in 2015 for periodically using automatic sprinklers to spray people who slept on its steps.

But the entrance to the shelter is hard to find. We walk all the way around the church and try two locked gated doors before someone inside spots us. The site supervisor, Regina, estimates that about 60 people will spend the night and leave by 7:30 a.m. Two weeks ago during a storm, there was a blackout at the site, but she says the shelter was able to get its hands on lamps, a generator and other supplies to stay open. Regina says that a family stopped by earlier today and told her they were having a hard time finding a shelter, but they were unable to stay at St. Mary’s as the cathedral shelter does not allow children.

In his email responding to our questions about shelter availability, Machuca-Grebe wrote: “For families with children and young adults, they can visit one of the Access Points in the community to request placement into an emergency shelter. Families may also access shelter at Buena Vista Horace Mann by calling or walking up to the program. Additionally, pregnant persons may access family congregate shelter through calling Hamilton Family Emergency Shelter.”

WEATHERING THE STORM

Saturday, Jan. 14 

9:54 a.m. More than a dozen people wait just outside the doors on all sides of the Main Library near Civic Center before it opens at 10 a.m. Near one entrance, we meet a woman who has lived outside without a tent for over a year. She says she went to a shelter last night for the first time as she had no bedding and felt sick with a cold. “It’s hard for women to get in’’ a shelter, she says. “There are more beds available for men.” She says she prefers to keep to herself, but her personal items were stolen a week ago, including a bag with her social security card and birth certificate. She tells us that she filed a police report at the Tenderloin station but didn’t receive any response.

10:24 a.m. Once the doors open, the woman and others rush in. Inside the library where it is warm, people who spent the previous night outside now surf the internet, sort through their belongings in quiet corners and hunker down at the desks among the bookshelves.

10:46 a.m. A Street Crisis Response Team and Sheriff’s van pull up outside the library. Later, a Homeless Outreach Team van drives by a man covered in a sleeping bag and emergency blanket sitting in the Muni bus stop. We stop to talk with him. He says his name is Michael and that he is hungry. We offer him some food; he smiles and softly murmurs to us to have a good day.

12:34 p.m. At 24th and Mission streets, Isolina is smoking cannabis out of a 7-Up can. Several other people take shelter from the drizzle under the eaves of the McDonald’s building. Though Isolina expresses interest in staying in a shelter, she says she does not have a phone or know where the nearest shelters are. We write down the address of the nearest walk-in shelter for her — the Dolores Shelter Program —and call the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing’s hotline to leave a message telling them where she is standing and that she has expressed interest in going to a shelter. We do this even though the chances are slim that this will lead to her getting help, as the website notes that calls made on behalf of people experiencing homelessness will not be returned.

Damian Pierce, 26, approaches us after seeing us speak with Isolina. Weathering the storms “sucks and it’s f—ing freezing,” he says. “I wake up all wet and it’s miserable.” Though he is 6 feet 7 inches tall, he says he only eats three times a week, and most of his meals consist of fruit that he resorts to stealing. He doesn’t have a phone and for the past week has been sleeping in a tent outside of a building that’s for sale. “I try my best to keep, like, prim and proper and what not,” he says. “I just need a safe, not wet place to sleep.”

Pierce says he has struggled to find long-term aftercare for his alcoholism and has been searching for over a year. He says he was able to get sober during a three-day treatment in Santa Rosa, but he was immediately put back on the street and found it hard to avoid drinking and suicidal thoughts.

2:07 p.m. We stop at an encampment next to a PG&E facility in the Mission District. Some camp residents are tidying up around their tents and makeshift shelters. On a fence nearby, blue city posters in Spanish and English discourage people from pitching tents near doorways, fire hydrants or public restrooms, and from occupying more than a few feet of the sidewalk. PG&E has also posted signs on its fence, more clearly stating, no camping allowed. A paper notice stapled to an electricity pole announces that there will be an “encampment resolution” at 7 a.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 17.

3:31 p.m. A dry spell that lasted for a few hours breaks when rain and hail start coming down. In Hayes Valley, while pedestrians seek cover, a woman kneels and washes her head with rain water from the street. She splashes her face a few times before getting up, and searches for food in a green compost bin outside a café. She doesn’t find anything she wants and leaves visibly upset.

3:46 p.m. A dog stands in the rain near Larch and Franklin streets in the Fillmore District. After a short smoke break, his owner ducks back under their makeshift shelter of plastic tablecloths, cardboard and a set of metal rails typically used for crowd control.

3:51 p.m. A few blocks away, a man stands under the pouring rain wrapped up in a plastic bag, waiting for the traffic signal to change at Eddy and Franklin streets. His two-person tent and personal belongings are drenched. The slope of Franklin Street carries a stream of water toward the corner where he is camping.

4:16 p.m. It’s after 4 p.m. and staff at St. Anthony’s Foundation are done serving meals for the day. Across the street, people seek shelter from the rain. They appear to be cold and wet as they carry their belongings in plastic bags and small suitcases. The warming center at St. Boniface and laundry services nearby are also closed for the day.

4:34 p.m. The rain stops for a few minutes. Behind the Best Buy store in the Mission District, Kevin secures a rainfly cover over his tent to prevent water from leaking inside his sleeping quarters. He uses garbage bags to cover up any openings. The winds have been so strong that “it feels like everything is going to be blown away,” he says. People at this encampment have been using sandbags from nearby businesses to prevent the wind from flipping their tents over. After his last camping site was flooded, Kevin moved to this area. He had lost almost everything in the previous rainstorm, including his bedding. “I was all soaked inside my tent like a wet puppy,” he says.

5:13 p.m. A man sits outside his tent on a plastic bucket and chats with his partner on Cedar Street in the Lower Nob Hill neighborhood. They share a laugh and the man raises his drink to make a toast. He takes a drink and hands her the bottle. Before it starts raining again, he stretches the top cover on their tent, shaking off the pooled water and throwing another layer of clear plastic over the structure.

5:21 p.m. As rain continues, people stand outside the Next Door Shelter on Polk Street in the Lower Nob Hill neighborhood, waiting for intake to start. Those seeking a place to stay need to line up early as shelter beds are offered on a first-come, first-served basis.

5:28 p.m. Across the street from the Next Door Shelter, four people take cover from the rain at a construction site as they wait for the doors to open. A man huddles in a plastic poncho he received from St. Anthony’s Foundation, trying to keep warm. A woman sits on her electric wheelchair, keeping her service dog close.

5:30 p.m. The rain continues on and off for the rest of the night. A person rests inside a soaked tent on Cedar Street, leaving a grocery cart outside with their finds of the day: a pair of Converse shoes, some clothes and a few plastic bottles to recycle.

STARTING OVER BEFORE THE RAIN 

Tuesday, Jan. 17

A police squad car pulls onto 19th Street from Harrison Street as a group of city employees rounds the corner. One woman wears a black jacket that reads “Homeless Outreach Team,” and three men wear beige vests with “Encampment Resolution Team” emblazoned on the back. At least two police officers and a fire department captain are also part of the group. They are later joined by more police officers, a social worker from the Healthy Streets Operation Center and at least one observer from the City Attorney’s Office. The fire captain is often the first to approach tents.

“Are you interested in going inside today?” is typically his first question as the group reaches each tent, sometimes preceded by “they are gonna clear all this out today. We have to clean the sidewalk.” Some encampment residents are not near their tents or belongings and their neighbors try to explain where they are, such as one man who is at court. The fire department captain shakes the tents from the outside, sometimes moving makeshift tarps to peer inside and see if anyone is there.

The team approaches a two-person tent where the man inside speaks little English. Bobby, a worker from the Encampment Resolution Team, speaks to him in Spanish. He asks, “do you want to go to a shelter or a navigation center? It’s still raining.” The man chooses neither, indicating that he doesn’t trust city employees. Bobby later meets Armando and helps him put a wrap around his hand after Armando says that he thinks he has a broken wrist and might need a cast.

Though it is dry today, members of the city team say they are trying to clean up the area before the last wave of predicted showers arrives tomorrow. The Homeless Outreach Team has been conducting encampment cleanups throughout the storms with advocates stating in court that the city continued to remove people from the street without providing shelter, violating a Dec. 23, 2022, injunction issued by a federal court as part of an ongoing lawsuit between individuals experiencing homelessness and San Francisco, though officials say the city is complying with the order.

One encampment resident, Dwayne, says that the mood among members of the Homeless Outreach Team has been more tense since the injunction was issued. In the past, his belongings have been thrown out by the team, he says. Three months ago, a pregnant woman staying in a tent next to him was at a doctor’s appointment when city workers arrived and prepared to throw away her belongings. “They let me grab what I could, like maybe five bags,” he says, “and they threw the rest away. It’s ridiculous.” Starting over without anything is hard, Dwayne says, which is why he is hesitant to go to a navigation center, where he says his belongings were once thrown out when he missed a check.

Although the city is not allowed to force people to move their dwellings, it “may continue to ensure sidewalks are not obstructed and are usable for everyone. And, the City may still ask unhoused people to move temporarily for cleaning activities,” Jen Kwart, director of communications and media relations at the City Attorney’s Office wrote in an email.

During ensuing hours the morning of Jan. 17, camp residents ask what shelter options are available today, but city employees are vague. The Departments of Emergency Management and Homelessness and Supportive Housing did not respond to our questions sent by email asking how many people were offered shelter and the number of shelter spaces available Jan. 17. A representative from the Department of Emergency Management wrote in an email that 10 people accepted shelter offers that day.

Most camp residents choose to stay in the area. They gather their possessions and move across the street or around the block while seven Department of Public Works employees use rakes and shovels to scoop up items left on the sidewalk. A ski, an old television, a garbage can filled with black tubing and a torn foam mattress cover sit among the articles that have been sifted through by residents and are now being tossed into the Department of Public Works dump trucks.

Once the tents have been moved, the streets nearby get a power wash ahead of the last of the atmospheric rivers expected to roll through the next day.

The post Facing Brutal Storms, Homeless People Encountered Hurdles to Finding Shelter appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

The post Public Records Referenced in Oct. 4 Berkeley Encampment Sweep Article appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

While some operable cars and RVs were allowed to remain in the neighborhood, and people without vehicles who chose to stay were offered two-person tents, the overall effect of the sweep was that dozens of unhoused people had their belongings taken and their daily existence turned upside down. 

Two camp residents ended up in the hospital, and one in jail for three days. Many people experienced panic attacks, and fire department paramedics came to check on Alice Barbee, who was suffering from heart palpitations. But she refused to go to the hospital because she was worried about losing her tent and belongings. Barbee stayed to fight but still lost most of her things — and ended up in the hospital the next day because anxiety exacerbated her high blood pressure and asthma.

I know what happened that day, because I was there. Since 2017, I have lived in my RV. I have parked in a few locations around the city, searching for safe parking. I do my best to be a good neighbor by keeping garbage in trash cans, and keeping the sidewalk clear for pedestrians. 

I am part of a community of people who, for various reasons, have been evicted from their prior camping areas around the city and along the I-80 freeway exits in Berkeley. City staff call our make-shift encampment the “Harrison Corridor.” Some newer residents are physically and mentally disabled, and others struggle with substance use and mental illness. 

Jump to Yesica Prado’s photo essay and detailed narrative of the Oct. 4 encampment sweep at Harrison and Eighth streets in Berkeley.

HOW WE GOT HERE

I have lived at Eighth and Harrison, since 2018 when the vehicle community I was living with was displaced from the Berkeley Marina. We parked together for safety, and we supported each other with mutual aid and chores, which was especially critical during the pandemic. We were welcoming to people who pitched tents; they needed a safe place to sleep and keep their belongings, too.

We talked regularly with some of our commercial neighbors so we wouldn’t disrupt their activities. Urban Amadah, a nonprofit community farm, has been generous, sharing free food through a dry pantry and a community fridge where we can store perishables. Other businesses in the Gilman District have provided us with plastic bags and trash bins.

In October 2021, our numbers dwindled to about 13 vehicle homes from 54, after the city opened its first safe parking lot program and offered a place to park off-street. The program wouldn’t lead to housing, but it would provide minimal amenities like a water tank, portable toilets, a strip cord for a charging station and a dumpster. Various nonprofits were already providing these basic amenities and food to us at Eighth and Harrison, where we also had plenty of choices for affordable meals. 

Many RV residents agreed to move to Berkeley’s sanctioned parking lot. Some motorhomes were inoperable, and they were likely to get ticketed if they remained in the area once the city launched a four-hour parking pilot program to reduce the number of vehicles parked in the Gilman District. I had lived at this intersection for years — some of my neighbors had lived there for as long as a decade. We shuffled our parking spaces to comply with the long standing 72-hour parking ordinance.

There were not enough parking spaces for every vehicle resident in the city’s sanctioned parking lot, and it was not feasible to some people due to vehicle size and family restrictions. So, some of my neighbors and I stayed together for safety where we were as the city began issuing more citations.

When alternatives are not available, the city uses parking enforcement to keep people moving and satisfy complaints.  

“This annoyance can be enough to send a message that people are watching and not appreciating what’s going on,” Beth Garstein, legal aide to Councilwoman Rashi Kaserwani, wrote to a constituent in an email. “Please feel free to share the phone number and have people call as many times as it takes to get parking enforcement involved, and involved frequently.” 

I can drive my RV, but not very far due to mechanical issues, and there are not many places in Berkeley where I can park for more than a few hours at a time. West Berkeley has been an easier place to park because it’s a light industrial area with few residences. But there is a lot of construction on this side of the city these days, so there are fewer parking spots available. Many people had been displaced already from encampments on Second Street, at Aquatic Park and in the Grayson Street area to make way for a new road, a temporary shelter and a research and development center.

In February, the city made another attempt to move everyone away from Eighth and Harrison streets. People living in tents were offered 28-day hotel vouchers to stay at the Berkeley Inn. When the program ended, they found themselves back on the streets. 

After those people returned, the city decided that it “would de-prioritize the encampment for closure IF the residents could meet basic standards for neighborliness,” city spokesperson Matthai Chakko wrote in a recent email to me explaining how the city had responded to the encampment over time.  

HOW TRASH BECOMES A PROBLEM

We had managed the trash in our neighborhood effectively until everyone started sheltering in place during the pandemic. Parking enforcement ceased, so most of us stopped moving our vehicles, and things started piling up on the sidewalk. Some camp residents took this time to repair their vehicles and build house structures.

In late 2020, Shallon Allen, former supervisor of the Homeless Response Team, approached us about trash accumulation and asked camp residents to pile trash at the corner of Eighth and Harrison streets, next to the Berkeley Repertory warehouse. The pile attracted rodents and illegal dumping by people not associated with our camp. 

We asked for help with a dumpster and individual trash cans assigned to each of our households. But it took the city nearly two years to place the dumpster. By then, the rodent problem was out of control.

Now, garbage pickups are scheduled nearly once a week, but the dumpster often overflows. Illegal dumpers fill it with furniture, and businesses also use it to discard tree clippings and bulky trash. The overflow is left on the ground as the city does not pay for this extra service. Without consistent sanitation services, the conditions at the encampment have persistently deteriorated, “warranting this summary nuisance abatement,” Chakko wrote in his email to me.

ORCHESTRATING A SWEEP

The Oct. 4 sweep operation was organized by Assistant to the City Manager Peter Radu, lead supervisor of the Homeless Response Team. On Sept. 26, Radu submitted an internal report to his boss, Dee-Williams Ridley. The 40-page memo outlined reasons for authorizing a deep cleaning at a long-standing encampment at Eighth and Harrison streets. The report focused on violations of four municipal codes, all dealing with one issue: what the city calls rodent harborage conditions.

Four days later, Radu posted copies of a public notice around the neighborhood. In bold letters, it read: “Notice of Imminent Health Hazard and Emergency Abatement Beginning October 3.” 

That day he came to post notices. Through my windshield, I could see and hear Radu speaking with my next door neighbor, Dante, who had been sick all night vomiting. He looked ill and exhausted. Radu handed him a copy and told him to clean up his area or his motorhome would be at risk of towing. With low energy, Dante reassured him.

Next, it was my turn. Radu approached my motorhome and stood outside. He didn’t knock or call my name — he knows who I am — but I could hear the sound of masking tape. I opened the screen door.

Radu raised his stack of paper, and said, “We are doing a deep cleaning.” He pointed at the paper notice he had taped to my kitchen window and raised his phone to his chest height, taking a photo of me and the notice. I smiled for the camera.

The notice was posted on a Friday afternoon. People cleaned up through the weekend and made piles of items on the road for the upcoming deep cleaning. I shared plastic bags with my neighbors. 

Monday came and went — and no one from the city showed up. We were not surprised. We had no idea when the trucks would appear.

We had seen notices like this one before — a similar one had been issued to residents in the camp on June 30 and July 28. Although personal property was discarded and items on the roadway were removed, shelters were not destroyed. 

But I noticed two new lines on this public notice: “Vehicles may be subject to tow and impound if authorized by the Vehicle Code and caretaking needs.” There was no vehicle code section listed nor any explanation of “caretaking needs,” which was not a phrase I had ever seen the city use. Nothing in the notice indicated that we were being asked to leave.

The notice stated that people in our area had created a public nuisance and violated Berkeley municipal codes concerning rodent harborage. It also said we were in violation of various ordinances against blocking sidewalks.

“This was the most intensive intervention option the Berkeley Municipal Code affords us,” Radu wrote to a Gilman District business in an email a week after the Oct. 4 sweep. “But you can see that our codes were not designed to contemplate this kind of situation.” Another abatement is not possible without building up another case, “which ironically requires that the conditions deteriorate sufficiently.”

City staff encourages business owners to call the police, which helps them build a case for the abatement of encampments.

“If you or your staff are ever threatened, please do call BPD right away and they will prioritize accordingly,” Radu wrote to a business owner in an email. “It helps them to receive these calls for service and helps us build a record/case for moving towards enforcement.”

Radu also shared his reasons with homeless advocates and wrote in an email: “As I look at it, unsheltered homelessness is the new normal (as unacceptable as that is, it is true), which means it is incumbent upon all of us (government and the community together) to devise a new social contract that recognizes and creates rules around this new normal.”

THE ABUSE IN SWEEPS

I understand that some Berkeley residents might think sweeping encampments is necessary. But what happened in October when the city cleaned the streets where we lived — offering vague warnings, unclear instructions for compliance and meager assistance — was unnecessarily disruptive, cruel and inhumane, my neighbors said. 

“When you consistently lose your stuff in this manner, you begin to lose your mind,” said Eren, a camp resident. “All the stuff that reminds you of yourself and all your memories are lost. Everything is gone, and you become more lost.”

The uncertainty about when and how this might happen is unsettling and leaves residents feeling that they don’t have control over their daily circumstances. Fear and anxiety crawl up on you — even in your sleep.  

People who lack housing have a hard time adhering to these ordinances. If a person lies down in public to rest, they are breaking the sidewalk ordinance against occupying more than 9 square feet. 

“We’re trying to work within the spirit of our sidewalk policy. There’s not a tent out there that is three by three,” describing the dimensions in feet technically allowed, said Radu, the day of the abatement. “We’re going to allow them because they have nowhere else to go to have a slightly bigger tent, but we got to maintain some respect for sidewalk policies.”

The morning after the encampment sweep, city workers came while residents were still sleeping, and everything outside people’s tents was thrown into the garbage truck again, including working bikes, wagons, scooters and pet supplies.

“If you want to remain unsheltered, you are going to have to play by our rules,” Radu said to a camp resident who was asking for his property back.

Many people wonder why unhoused residents would decline the city’s offers for services and persist living on the street. The truth is, the offers of shelter are often temporary and less attractive than living in an RV or a tent. Privacy is key. And there are not even enough shelter beds or hotel rooms in Berkeley to offer people to prevent encampments from reappearing. 

The city offered some of my neighbors spots in the Old City Hall emergency winter shelter, which is usually open only six months a year, and will close in April. It is a congregate shelter with 19 beds, as COVID-19 restrictions slashed capacity in half. Another alternative was a room for five days at the Berkeley Inn motel, but that option wasn’t offered to everyone, and only one couple stayed there.

“So, obviously more people than beds, which is why we’re not asking everyone to leave,” Radu said during the abatement.

But short-term solutions eventually expire. As Berkeleyside recently reported, the safe parking lot is closing on Dec. 31, and every RV parked there will be returning to the streets. As of this week, there are no shelter spaces available in Berkeley or Alameda County. 

The abatement operation didn’t improve much for people living at the encampment or for nearby businesses. Camp residents lost valuable and irreplaceable belongings like their medication, family heirlooms and personal paperwork. Business owners expressed their frustrations, again. “The campers are returning and spreading out. I have not seen any police presence this week or end of last week to enforce the Public Notice,” wrote Mark Morrisette, facilities director of the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, in an email to Radu a week after the Oct. 4 sweep. 

In response, Radu in several emails has directed business owners to Alameda County to request “substance abuse resources and permanent housing resources to address the people living at this encampment.”

Residents who live outside, in tents or in vehicles are at the mercy of city administrators, who might decide at any time that they need to downsize their footprint or be moved. That’s what happened in the Gilman District on Tuesday, Oct. 4.

Here’s how that chaotic day unfolded.

PART ONE: AN AMBUSH

6:20 a.m. I wake up to the sound of heavy machinery. But it isn’t the forklift at the construction company next door or a tow truck unloading Teslas for repair. I open my eyes, and on the ceiling I see blue and red lights. I quickly jump out of bed. 

When I open my door, I see two Berkeley police officers, Kacalek and Pickett, standing by the cabin of my vehicle overseeing the seizure of my neighbor’s possessions. Two more officers, Valle and Johnson, stand behind them. Dante is not allowed inside his vehicle. I ask to help him, but they will not allow me to pass. 

So I go on the other side of my RV, and that’s when I see the size of this operation. There are dozens of people: cops, city staff and workers in orange vests, walking up and down Harrison Street — it is nothing like I have ever seen before. The streets that lead to our intersection are closed. The Tesla mechanics watch from the sidelines, some filming with their phones.

6:40 a.m. Staff from the Department of Public Works are going after Clarence Galtney’s massive recycling bags. Galtney has lived in an RV in the neighborhood since 2019. He earns money collecting bottles and cans around Berkeley, which he redeems for cash. One, two, three, four, five bulging bags, each one nearly five feet across and just as tall, are tossed into the garbage truck parked across from his home. They fill a whole truck with Galtney’s recycling. Weeks and weeks of work go straight into the trash.

Outreach workers Eve Ahmed, Tony Alcutt and Okeya Vance stand on the sidelines, watching from across the street. All of Galtney’s belongings — tool boxes, wagons, grocery carts, barbecues, cookware, shoes, bags of clothes and kitchen appliances — are being thrown into the middle of the street to be scooped up with a backhoe.

6:43 a.m. I return to my RV to see what is happening with Dante, and find Peter Radu standing on the roof of Dante’s RV sweeping everything that he had stored up there to the ground. Below, public works employees pick up the now-broken items, pieces of plastic and shattered glass sprayed across the pavement.

Five public works employees and seven police officers surround Dante’s RV to clear his property around his vehicle. They bring in a crane to scoop it up.

6:47 a.m. Dante packs any essentials he can find outside his home. He starts with tools he uses for his work as a handyman. Dante’s breakfast is still on the stove, grilled onions sizzling in the pan. He was about to put them on his morning burgers when officers surrounded his vehicle home. 

6:49 a.m. Public Works employees take Dante’s recycling bags, which he had just sorted out into cans and plastics, the night before. Next, they take his clothing and supplies for his dog, Cookie. Everything is crushed by the garbage compactor. 

7 a.m. A parking enforcement officer arrives to start issuing tickets. 

7:15 a.m. Eight public works employees finish consolidating all of Galtney’s items in the roadway. The backhoe’s scooper scrapes the pavement as it takes the last pile. 

7:18 a.m. An officer stands blocking Dante’s door. More public works employees pick up plastic containers that he had just packed with his dishes and bicycle parts he was trying to keep.

The garbage truck is parked right in front of Dante’s home. He now notices all his possessions in the truck, and pulls back his shower tent from the scooper. Essential items all thrown out: car batteries, tools, carts, wagons, water containers, clothes and the pressure washer that he uses for work.

7:25 a.m. Time is running out for Dante. Radu tells him that his RV is about to get towed. Radu won’t let Dante back inside, but says he can get a few items out of his vehicle for him. Dante asks Radu for his wallet and phone to begin with, but Radu cannot find either of them, and he won’t let Dante keep his mom’s flat cooktop, which is plugged into a propane tank.

7:35 a.m. A Berry Bros. truck arrives to tow Dante’s vehicle. Dante bargains with the cops to get his ice chest out of his RV. Radu says he “gave him a year” to get his vehicle into the safe parking program. But that’s not entirely true. I tried to help Dante. In late February, I called Tony Alcutt, the only Berkeley outreach worker who officially places people in shelters, multiple times to try to help Dante get into the city sanctioned lot, because Dante had no phone at the time. Alcutt denied Dante a space because the lot was full.

7:41 a.m. Everyone else down Eighth Street is still sleeping. Dante tries to grab some of his belongings, but Radu won’t let him. Radu throws Dante’s shoes back into the RV through the broken windshield and does a final check before towing the vehicle. 

Along Harrison Street between Seventh and Eighth, Public Works staff remove possessions along with garbage. This is where Chris and Jennifer park their easy-up shade structure next to Galtney’s RV. Mike and Angel are also on that curbside. In the background are 11 tarps and two canopies, which are later destroyed by Public Works. 

7:44 a.m. After Dante pleads with Radu and the police, two public works employees pull his pressure washer out of the garbage truck and return it to him. 

7:52 a.m. Police officers talk among themselves about being short staffed and comment about the unnecessary force present here today. “This job could have been done with two police officers,” says one of the officers.

8:04 a.m. Dante’s RV is towed away.

8:11 a.m. Dante sits on his red ice chest to rest. It has been a stressful morning for him. He tends to his knee injury that is bandaged up. City staff have reduced his property to a couple of plastic bags, a few tools and a bike. 

8:24 a.m. Andrew Vanderzyl stands outside his van wearing brown overalls and a red shirt, but only one shoe. Police knocked on his van five minutes earlier and asked him to come out. He puts his hands in his pocket and waits for someone to speak to him. Sgt. Bejarano tells him, “There’s somebody we are gonna hook you up with. They are gonna get you taken care of.” 

8:25 a.m. Radu is talking with Vanderzyl now. “So, we spoke on Friday,” Radu says. 

“Yeah, and I got it all cleaned up. I just have a bike trailer,” Vanderzyl says, and briefly pauses. “But you guys can take that if you want.” Vanderzyl swings his arms in defeat. 

“I advise you to get your valuables,” Radu says. “This vehicle has been declared a health hazard.” 

“No, I … there are no rodents in there, sir,” Vanderzyl says. “I swear. There are no rodents.” 

“I hear what you are saying, but we are past the point of arguing that,” Radu says. “It’s been declared a public health hazard. We are going to take the vehicle.”

Thomas tries to negotiate. “Can I roll it out? Can I roll it down the street?” he asks. 

“No, you can’t roll it down the street,” Radu says. 

“Can I have somebody tow it?” asks Vanderzyl. “Where would your destination be?” asks Radu. “To a friend’s driveway in El Cerrito,” Vanderzyl replies. He waits for an answer. “Please man, this is all I have.” 

8:28 a.m. Vanderzyl begs for a reprieve. “Please don’t, please don’t take my vehicle. I’ll have this thing moved. I’ll have this thing moved today,” Vanderzyl says. “Please, sir. It’s my, it’s my home.”

Radu tells Vanderzyl the city can take him to a shelter, but Vanderzyl says he wants to stay in his van. He explains that he has a minor electrical problem that is stopping him from driving away, but he promises to move his vehicle today if they let him. But Radu isn’t budging.

8:30 a.m. Chloe tells Radu she wants to know the specific citations they’re using to clear the encampment. Radu pulls out a document. This is the first time we see the report curated for the city manager. Radu points to a photo as evidence for why they will tow Vanderzyl’s van. But there is nothing we can see in the report that specifies which vehicles are hazards. 

8:31 a.m. “Would you like to be taken to shelter? We can take you there right now,” Radu says to Vanderzyl.

“But the health hazard has been abated. You have removed all the trash. So like I said, you don’t need to take the van,” Chloe says. 

Radu tells Chloe she can file an appeal. She and Radu argue about whether the report condemning Vanderzyl’s van was legally sufficient. 

PART TWO: DESTROYING SHELTERS

8:54 a.m. Radu and three Berkeley police officers begin announcing to the people on Eighth Street that their tents and other items will be removed. They ask them to take any valuable possessions to the other side of the street. 

8:55 a.m. Radu speaks to Shawna Garcia and gives her a 20-minute warning. She tells him that her service dogs take more room than the two-person tent the city will provide. Garcia turns down shelter out of fear of being sexually assaulted. Radu tells her that everything that doesn’t fit in the new tent will be thrown away. 

8:59 a.m. Ian Morales, an outreach worker from the Homeless Action Center, tells Radu that he is violating the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable search and seizure. Radu says the city will not store “big bulky” items.

9:02 a.m. Radu speaks to Alice Barbee and Mackie. Barbee says she and others were not adequately informed of the extent of the abatement. She says they thought the city was only coming through to do a cleaning. Mackie is distraught that his brand new tent will be taken away. 

9:04 a.m. Radu says the city only allows two-person tents that are 7 feet by 5 feet. He offers them shelter at the Old City Hall, saying that Barbee’s dog would be allowed there. Barbee says she doesn’t want to give up her belongings, because then she would have nothing.

9:06 a.m. Vanderzyl’s van is taken away to Avenue Berkeley Towing. The vehicle is damaged when it’s taken up the ramp. 

9:07 a.m. Radu talks to Sherif, a disabled veteran from the former Ashby Shellmound encampment. Sherif says his tent area is clean and that he will be unable to move things because of his physical disabilities. When he tells a Berkeley police officer that he needs help, no accommodation is offered.

9:20 a.m. Thomas Barnett sweeps around his van. His electric scooter, cans, clothes, food and copper wiring for recycling were confiscated and thrown out. He still has his vehicle, but the majority of his property was trashed.

9:32 a.m. Jennifer tries to pack up her belongings, but the workers throw them away, picking up everything in their path. Workers dismantle her bed and toss it into the garbage truck.

9:33 a.m. All the structures at Eighth and Harrison have been demolished, including the one in which Chris was living. “It was sturdy and strong,” he says. “I will make the next one stronger.”

10:04 a.m. Angel stands on Seventh Street with her bedding, a few clothes and a stuffed tiger. She’s keeping her friend’s bike safe, so the city will not also seize it.

10:10 a.m. RJ is sitting outside his tent. He is not wearing any pants. City staff woke him up to tell him to get out of his tent, but they have not offered him any help.  

10:11 a.m. Shawna Garcia is asking for help. She feels threatened, and fears being pushed back to Second Street, where the city was allowing people to live in tents and makeshift structures — but that was also where her abusive ex-boyfriend was living. (On Nov. 22, the city posted notices that part of the Second Street encampment would be dismantled and vehicles parked in that area would be towed.)

10:16 a.m. Outreach worker Tony Alcutt sends a text to Bay Area Community Services to inquire about an assessment for Garcia, but there is no guarantee she will receive help. 

Ian Morales, an outreach worker from the Homeless Action Center, finds out later that no one informed Bay Area Community Services — the organization responsible for navigating people into shelters — ahead of the encampment sweep.

10:18 a.m. Shawman is clearly in distress. After city employees take her tent, she scrounges in the roadway trying to save whatever food she can gather. 

10:20 a.m. Down the street, Okeya Vance, supervisor of the Homeless Response Team, is cracking jokes with Officer Hartley and other police officers. Boone walks past them with all his recycling on a stroller. He leans on the stroller as his left foot is fractured. He says he is going to cash it in down on Third Street and come back for the rest of his belongings. But minutes later, it’s all thrown away. 

10:33 a.m. Workers throw everything that is left into the middle of the street to be scooped up by the bulldozer.

10:34 a.m. People stand around in shock. They salvage anything they can and drag it across the street.

10:35 a.m. Shawman watches Public Works clear her remaining possessions. She sits shoeless, wearing unmatched socks, guarding her friend’s bikes and skateboard.

10:36 a.m. The canopy structures have been torn down. A chest of drawers is half open after residents rushed to empty it out, leaving behind other essential items like a portable heater, batteries and tarps. 

10:53 a.m. Clarence Galtney rushes to move items across the street, hoping to save them. Alice Barbee is having a hard time breathing. She has asthma and cannot find her inhaler. Radu is closing in on her, raking her belongings on the ground. Eight police officers surround her area, watching her in distress.

10:58 a.m. Barbee tries to reach for one of her tennis shoes and catches it before it is swept away. She asks Radu to give her time to gather the rest of her belongings, but he ignores her. Barbee asks police officers watching if they could keep Radu away from her. The officers look at each other in confusion — they don’t seem to know whether they are allowed to step in and help. 

11 a.m. Sgt. Kleppe steps in from the crowd and tells Barbee she has a few minutes to gather the rest of her belongings, or she could be arrested for “obstruction of an officer’s duty.” Galtney rushes back and forth across the street, helping her carry bags of household items.

11:15 a.m. Public Works reaches Heather, the last person on the sidewalk. Her friend is helping her gather her clothing. They have taken the mattress where she slept. Heather wraps her clothes inside a net that she had used as a wall to protect her space. 

11:17 a.m. I spot Officer White, Berkeley Police’s public information officer, and I want to ask him why Berkeley Police is here en masse. But he says today he is not here in a communications capacity, and instead is providing “security” to city staff because the police department is short staffed.

11:18 a.m. Alice Barbee is no longer allowed to retrieve any items. Everything remaining on her spot will be discarded. 

11:19 a.m. Felix Torres sits on the stairs of the Berkeley Repertory Theatre building and begins to play his guitar, bringing some relief in the chaos. He sings, “How would you survive another day? They are crushing us.”

11:20 a.m. Barbee’s clean clothes get scooped up from the sidewalk and thrown into a garbage truck. All her sweaters and winter jackets disappear.

11:38 a.m. Some residents sleep next to the items they were allowed to save while Public Works finishes clearing the sidewalk.

11:39 a.m. Rob, a veteran, packs all his property into a laundry wagon. He has been promised social services for months, but Vance tells him that he has to follow up on his own because his team doesn’t work with the Veterans Affairs agency. Rob had been living in a tiny home he built with wood pallets for the floor and plywood walls, using the skeleton of an easy-up shade structure for support, and an umbrella and a tarp for the roof. 

11:41 a.m. Six police officers surround Shawna Garcia to get her to move the rest of her things, but she only has a small wagon. Officer Hartley suggests asking other neighbors to help move her stuff out.  

11:48 a.m. I step in to help. I dash inside Garcia’s tent to grab anything I can save. I see plastic bags on her bed that she has already started packing. Through her window, I see the scooper crushing the wood pallets and the umbrella from Rob’s tiny home. 

12:01 p.m. Outreach worker Eve Ahmed does not want me there while she assesses RJ, but he is persistent and says he wants me to stay. Ahmed is looking into a hotel room for RJ at the Berkeley Inn. But he’s not able to acquire a room there without an I.D. Two rooms have ADA accommodations, which he needs. Without identification, RJ cannot get into the motel tonight. He has two options: accept the two-person tent the city offers him or a shelter bed at Old City Hall. He chooses the tent. 

Ahmed says, “let him be in the tent and put him on the list. We’ll accommodate him later if something else comes up.” RJ is left on the sidewalk with no pants on. 

12:14 p.m. Radu proceeds to trash RJ’s tent because he says, “it’s covered in feces,” even though I had just cleaned out the tent after RJ stepped out. The tent was new — the Lifelong Medical Street Team gave it to him last week. RJ leaves to panhandle at the McDonald’s down the street on San Pablo after his possessions are thrown away.

12:46 p.m. After everyone has been forcibly moved across the street, a city worker pressure washes the sidewalk.

12:49 p.m. The city is cleaning at Harrison and Sixth streets in front of Urban Amadah where Jeff and his wife Eren, Garth and his elderly friend Dominique had all been living. Public works employees and cops pile together their belongings and say it’s all trash. Dominique tries to stop them, but he’s pushed out of the way by one of the workers. 

12:50 p.m. Garth is arguing with the police. He says he has tried to keep his area clean to avoid having his belongings taken. He says the warning notice was not specific enough. Police are threatening to arrest Garth, if he doesn’t give up his belongings.

“I want simple instructions on how I can save my property,” he says. “Nobody deserves this.”

12:54 p.m. Garth runs across the street to pick more items from the pile. Eren watches over his shoulder and suggests what to dig out. Dominique stands in front of the scooper to buy his friends more time to search. 

12:57 p.m. Garth is being detained, says one officer, because he has been “delaying and obstructing.” Radu says Garth has to move east of Seventh Street. He has to leave the Harrison Corridor if he wants to save his property, Radu says.

“Can I get two trips to save my stuff?” Garth asks, as he negotiates for a deal. “Take the stuff you want,” Radu says. “I want all my property,” Garth replies.

“If you are going to live in the corridor, you have to live in the tent we provide,” Radu says to Garth.

1:08 p.m. Officer Kleppe makes a deal with Garth: He tells Garth he has to get out of the area and he has one trip to save his property. A member of Berkeley Copwatch helps Garth load up what can fit in her vehicle. She drops him off at the end of the street by the park.

1:11 p.m. Jeff asks for reasonable time to move his stuff out of the area. His wife, Eren, is breaking down in tears inside their tent with her dog. She is unresponsive and shut down from the stress, her mind scattered on what to do next. “My wife is losing it,” Jeff says. “They are just breaking her down more.”

1:18 p.m. Radu talks to Jeff for the first time. He does not know who has been working with them. Housing is based on disability priority, Radu tells Jeff. “We’ll make sure to put some pressure on BACS to meet up with you,” Muhammed says, referring to Bay Area Community Services. 

1:28 p.m. Officer Jessica Perry asks whether they should open the street again. Radu sends the cops to lunch.

PART THREE: EVERYTHING GOES 

2:20 p.m. Dante is still sitting on the sidewalk with the possessions he could save. “They came to just break a person down and turn me back into a criminal,” Dante says. “When you don’t have anything, you are desperate. And you have to do things you don’t want to do.”

2:30 p.m. City staff and Berkeley Police return from lunch. Two outreach workers and two police officers, Perry and Schickore, help set up the city-issued two-person tents.

2:39 p.m. Alice Barbee is trying to pack up all her things to move back to her spot. She is telling Officer Hartley that she is physically ill and she is afraid to leave to use the restroom without them taking all her stuff. 

2:48 p.m. Before people can move their stuff across the street into the new tents, the city starts trashing the property they had saved. Barbee is distraught: “We are human,” she says. “We deserve time to at least move our things.” She deeply exhales and hugs her dog Compass for comfort.

2:50 p.m. City workers begin piling the property residents had saved after being asked to move across the sidewalk for the deep cleaning. Everything is going. 

3 p.m. Merced Dominguez comes screaming my name down Eighth Street. “They are taking all your stuff,” she yells. I rush down the street to find out what’s happening. 

3:03 p.m. I had been careful to move everything from the sidewalk, but they take everything that was outside of my RV: the cat carrier, scratch post and toys all go. Even the barbecue grill tucked neatly under a tarp behind my vehicle and my trash cans are tossed into the garbage truck. My neighbor demands my trash cans back, and a police officer steps in to ask Radu if this is necessary. Radu dismisses him, and tells him he knows his job. Reluctantly, one worker returns the trash cans without the lids.

3:25 p.m. The fire department comes to check on Eighth Street responding to a request from the police department to provide medical attention to someone who has “an accelerated heart rate and numbness of the face.” They check Alice Barbee’s temperature and heart beat. She is having a hard time breathing. Barbee declines to go to the hospital because she does not want to risk the city taking all her stuff.

3:34 p.m. “What do you want?” Vance asks Mackie as workers start taking his things. His property was not in the street or right of way, but on the sidewalk. She says the notice applies to all sidewalks as well.

3:38 p.m. Mackie had gone to get something to eat and returns to find his and his stepfather Bobo’s belongings in the trash.

3:51 p.m. Mackie tries to save his friend’s property. He ties a rope around the bike cart, securing the items to make the move.

3:58 p.m. Eleven public works employees and four cops surround Mackie while he picks up his friend’s property. Lt. McGee says, “We need you to get rid of stuff that you don’t need. Can you get rid of it? If there’s something you don’t need, toss that shit.” McGee has agreed to save his stuff inside the tent, but only his bedding. He does not want Mackie to take anything else, but Mackie takes his friend’s wagon and recycling.

4:08 p.m. Officer Hartley tells Alice Barbee, “They are thinking about taking you into custody. Your footprint is a large structural house.” Barbee gets frustrated. Officer Perry takes Barbee’s briefcase and pulls it from her. Now, she has to sort through the rest.

4:12 p.m. Barbee squeezes inside her tent to put away her property. She hunches over sorting the remaining items that she could save. Her pit bull, Compass, lies outside in the concrete. The tent is too small for both of them.

4:14 p.m. The crane scoops up Street’s belongings. His friend Jimmie Wiggins has been watching them this whole time, but they say he can’t keep them, and if he persists, he will be arrested. A large yellow recycling bag, a solar panel, an ice chest, a water jug, a drum, two bike tires, two bags of clothes are all smashed and scooped up by the crane. 

I can’t bear to stand by watching. The crane is above my head, and I rush to save the wheelchair. Street moves in his walker, but on bad days, the chair is essential to get him through his day. 

4:20 p.m. On the other side of the street, Public Works employees are going from person to person with Radu, discarding any items that will not fit inside each authorized two-person tent. Bins of clothes, food, hygiene products and water jugs are thrown into the trash. 

4:22 p.m. Radu sorts through Alice Barbee’s property without her permission. After tossing almost everything, he tells his workers that it is trash. Next, he sorts through the property Barbee has in a wheelbarrow. She had grabbed the wheelbarrow in a rush, tossing anything she could save from her clothes, blankets, dishes, shoes, a purse and a saw. But Radu spends seconds looking at the contents before deciding everything goes. 

4:27 p.m. Mackie gets arrested for asking for his property back. The quarrel starts when Radu tells Mackie he can’t keep his tent, and Mackie reacts: “I feel like I want to punch you in the face right now,” he says.  

4:28 p.m. Bobo tries to help his son, but is also detained by Berkeley Police. Three officers take hold of him and grasp him tightly. He is not arrested, but not allowed to keep any of his son’s property.

4:37 p.m. Public Works employees start to move in quickly again, taking everything in their path. Even non-bulky items including toilet paper, hand tools and bedding. 

4:39 p.m. Radu empties people’s wagons and bike carts, even though items are off the ground. People do not have the chance to put their items inside the new tents. 

4:39 p.m. From tent to tent, Radu goes down the street sorting through everyone’s items and tossing them to the ground. “All trash,” Radu says. He shuffles through Cat’s notebooks and sketchbooks, and decides to throw it all out.

4:45 p.m. One young woman rushes out of her tent to get her property, but Radu throws away her wagon with all her clothes and hygiene items. Two officers, White and Valle, stop her from getting close.

A garbage compactor crushes the wagon. The little property everyone had left was thrown in the trash, including religious items. 

4:48 p.m. The young woman stands in shock. She was given no warning.

She tries to communicate, but cannot speak. She asks for a pen and paper. Officer White hands them to her. She writes a list of needed essentials that Radu just threw away such as clothes and hygiene products. 

4:52 p.m. Officer White shares her note with Eve Ahmed, the team’s social worker. She reads it and says someone will be here later in the day to hand out supplies. White hands the young woman back her note, and tells her someone will be stopping by to check in later. She lays inside her tent, visibly upset, and doesn’t respond.

4:50 p.m. City workers are forcing Garcia to get her belongings inside her two-person tent. She is telling them to back off because they are triggering her PTSD. 

5 p.m. Workers continue to throw things away. The wheelchair is confiscated, and Radu tells city workers to take it to the yard where Public Works keeps its vehicles.

5:12 p.m. Public works employees and cops roll out of Eighth Street. It has been a 12-hour shift for all of us.

PART FOUR: FINAL TALLY

5:16 p.m. Housing Recovery Navigators arrive bringing hygiene kits. They offer cheap slippers, instant noodles, menstrual pads, socks and wet towels for cleaning. None of the items are equivalent in quality, quantity or value to the items that were seized and thrown away. Ahmed sorts through the items and grabs some slippers and a pair of socks to hand to the young woman who was too traumatized to speak. 

5:23 p.m. Police officers continue to push Shawna Garcia to downsize her footprint. Merced Dominguez helps Garcia consolidate her belongings inside her tent.

5:40 p.m. Before leaving, Eve Ahmed encounters Street, who asks about services. His wheelchair was confiscated, so he is sitting on his walker to rest. But she has no services to offer him, and leaves for the day. 

5:46 p.m. Radu walks down Eighth Street, surveying the work done today and snapping pictures for his next report. 

6 p.m. Cristina from Housing Recovery Navigators hears feedback from residents as she distributes hygiene supplies. Many ask her, “Why was my medicine thrown away?” “Where is the help?” and “Why can’t I get the tools to remain clean?”

CORRECTION 1/3/2023: Eve Ahmed is an outreach worker for the city of Berkeley. Her last name was incorrect in an earlier version of this story.

The post ‘Everything Is Gone, and You Become More Lost’: 12 Hours of Chaos as Berkeley Clears Encampment appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Proposition C is a proposed charter amendment that would create the Homelessness Oversight Commission to oversee the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing. The charter is the city’s constitution and can only be changed by a majority of voters in an election approving an amendment. This measure requires more than 50 percent affirmative votes to pass.

In 2016, former Mayor Ed Lee established the department to be in charge of directing all housing and social services for San Franciscans experiencing homelessness, including street outreach, homeless shelters, transitional housing and permanent supportive housing. The Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing is the eighth largest city services department with a spending budget of approximately $672 million in FY 2022-23, and $636 million in FY 2023-24. The department is not subject to direct oversight by a city commission.

The idea of an oversight committee has been on the table for years. The ballot measure to establish it was drafted in 2019 in partnership with the Homeless Emergency Service Providers Association, which represents 30 homeless service providers, along with Supervisors Gordon Mar, Aaron Peskin, Hillary Ronen and Shamann Walton.

“The Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing has less oversight, less accountability, and less transparency over its budget, strategy, and policies than nearly every other large city department,” wrote Matt Haney, in an op-ed when he was on the board of supervisors prior to being elected to the state assembly.

On July 19, 2022, the board of supervisors approved placing the measure on the November ballot, with no votes in opposition. It was co-sponsored by supervisors Ahsha Safai, Shamann Walton, Aaron Peskin, Rafael Mandelman, Gordon Mar and Catherine Stefani.

Supervisor Safaí was one of seven board members to oppose the measure in 2019, amid firm opposition from Mayor London Breed and fears that the proposal would add more bureaucracy. But a report by the Public Press in partnership with ProPublica found that the city had more than 800 units of permanent supportive housing vacant every month for a year while twice as many people approved for those homes waited for assignments, with many living in tents on the street. A recent San Francisco Chronicle investigation that shed light into the poor conditions inside much of the supportive housing stock fueled public discourse, calling for more accountability into homeless services.

If Proposition C passes, the duties of the Homeless Oversight Commission are to:

• Formulate, evaluate and set homeless policies.
• Serve as a public forum to raise accountability issues and advocate for fair policies.
• Conduct investigations into any aspect of governmental operations within its jurisdiction.
• Nominate candidates for department head to the Mayor, and remove a department head – currently, only the Mayor has this authority.
• Approve goals, objectives, plans, service programs and departmental budgets before the Board of Supervisors cast a final vote.

Additionally, prior to May 1, 2023, three charter amendments to the administration codes of these committees will allow the Commission to:

• Appoint all members of the Local Homeless Coordinating Board, which serves as the governing body of the Continuum of Care, which coordinates housing and federal funding for homeless services. The board advises the department on homeless policy and budget allocations, but its advice is not binding. The board will advise the commission on the city’s participation in the Continuum of Care program.
• Receive advice and recommendations from the Shelter Monitoring Committee, which tracks the conditions of group shelters in San Francisco, and staff documents and investigates complaints.
• Receive advice and recommendations from the Our City, Our Home Oversight Committee, which advises the Mayor and the Board of Supervisors on administration of the Our City, Our Home Fund.

Proposition C would also specify that homeless services are subject to audit by the city controller.

But the commission would not have the authority to approve, disapprove or modify criteria used to determine eligibility or priority for programs and services administered through the city’s Coordinated Entry System. A Public Press and ProPublica investigation found the system scores trauma, and it could bar some homeless populations from getting indoors.

The Commission will have seven members. Initial appointments will be made by March 1, 2023, with four appointed by the Mayor and three appointed by the Board of Supervisors.

Initial opposition to Proposition C stemmed from a debate over seat appointments.

“A majority Mayoral-appointed commission would not offer real oversight, and would be indistinguishable from the current oversight structure over HSH, which reports directly to the Mayor,” the San Francisco Berniecrats wrote in a letter.

After three drafts of the proposition, changes were made to balance membership and auditing by the city’s controller. The Mayor and Board of Supervisors will each appoint a person who has personally experienced homelessness, and a person with significant experience providing services to or engaging in advocacy on behalf of persons experiencing homelessness.

Additionally, the Board of Supervisors will be required to appoint a person with significant experience working with homeless families and youth. And the Mayor will be required to appoint a person with expertise in mental health service delivery or substance abuse treatment, and a person with experience in budgeting, finance and auditing. One of the Mayor’s appointees would be required to have a record of participation in a merchants’ or small business association, or a neighborhood association.

The post Proposition C — Homelessness Oversight Commission appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Tabitha Davis had just lost twins in childbirth and was facing homelessness. The 23-year-old had slept on friends’ floors for the first seven months of her pregnancy, before being accepted to a temporary housing program for pregnant women. But with the loss of the twins, the housing program she’d applied to live in after giving birth — intended for families — was no longer an option.

After several weeks in a hotel, which a prenatal program for homeless people had paid for while she recovered, Davis went to a brick building in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood to apply for a permanent, subsidized housing unit. There, a case worker she’d never met asked her more than a dozen questions to determine if she was eligible.

Some of the things he asked: Have you ever been sexually assaulted while experiencing homelessness? Have you ever had to use violence to keep yourself safe while experiencing homelessness? Have you ever exchanged sex for a place to stay? “Those are the questions that really bothered me,” she said. “Whatever my experience is of being sexually assaulted, or what I had to do in order to stay safe on the streets, shouldn’t pertain to whether or not I deserve housing.”

That day, Davis was informed that the score she’d been given based on her answers to the questionnaire wasn’t high enough to qualify for permanent supportive housing. It was a devastating blow after an already traumatizing few months. “I thought, ‘You put me on the streets right now, mentally, I will kill myself,’” she said.

What Davis encountered with those questions is called coordinated entry, a system designed to match people experiencing homelessness with housing. In San Francisco’s system, applicants are asked 16 core questions, and their answers are given a point value which is then tallied. The total number is intended to reflect applicants’ vulnerability; currently, a score of 118 points means they qualify for one of the city’s permanent supportive housing units, which is subsidized by the government and comes with wraparound supportive services. Applicants with lower scores may qualify for rent assistance or a bus ticket out of town, but if they want housing in San Francisco, they have to wait six months before taking the test again.

Though the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing has an annual budget of $598 million and the majority of that is spent on housing, there simply aren’t enough permanent supportive housing units available to accommodate the thousands of homeless people in San Francisco. (A 2019 survey estimated the number of homeless people at more than 8,000.) The threshold for approval is directly tied to housing availability, and right now, roughly one-third of people who take the assessment score high enough to qualify.

“It’s really prioritizing scarce resources,” said Cynthia Nagendra, the department’s deputy director of planning and strategy. “There has to be some prioritization, unfortunately, until we have some housing resource for every single person.”

Coordinated entry was meant to be a more objective tool than the previous system, which offered resources on a first-come, first-served basis. In contrast, coordinated entry aims to determine who is most vulnerable and who should therefore get access to the limited supply of available housing.

Through records requests, the San Francisco Public Press and ProPublica obtained the questions and scoring algorithm used in San Francisco’s coordinated entry questionnaire, which has never before been made public. The news organizations solicited feedback on that tool from front-line workers, academics and people experiencing homelessness. Some raised objections to how the questions were phrased. Others pointed out inequities in the scoring. And many more criticized the way it was administered, suggesting that the process itself — in which applicants are asked very personal questions by a stranger — might make it unlikely that already-distressed people would answer accurately.

In our interviews, it became clear that the survey fails to identify many of the vulnerabilities it was intended to catch. And what was supposed to be an objective tool winds up, as a result of how it’s written and administered, making it harder for certain populations — immigrants, young people and transgender people — to get indoors, experts and advocates told us.

For Davis, that meant some of the hardships she was experiencing were overlooked. For instance, there was no question in the survey that would give her points for the losses she had just suffered. Failing to qualify for housing resulted in weeks of stress and instability while she recovered from the trauma of losing her children. Eventually, with the assistance of case workers at several organizations, she found a place in a transitional housing program for youth. But being told, during the lowest moment of her life, that she did not qualify for permanent housing left its mark. “It made me feel invalid in my own experience,” she said.

In response to these critiques, homelessness department spokesperson Denny Machuca-Grebe said in an email, “I want to make it clear that anyone who comes to our department for help should NOT ‘be left out.’” For those deemed ineligible for housing, he said the city offers other services; these may include shelter placements, relocation help and rental assistance. In general, the department had not responded to requests for comments about individual cases in the past, and it didn’t comment on Davis’ experience.

Excluded Populations

Coordinated entry was first implemented in 2018, after the Department of Housing and Urban Development began requiring regions that apply for federal homelessness funds to create a tool “to ensure that people who need assistance the most can receive it in a timely manner.” Much of the rest of the country adopted a tool called the Vulnerability Index, Service Prioritization Decision Assistance Tool. San Francisco developed its own set of questions, intended to determine which unhoused people are in greatest need of a home.

In the four years since the requirement was implemented, some cities and counties have reviewed their coordinated entry systems and uncovered trends such as significant racial or gender biases. A 2019 analysis of data from Oregon, Virginia, and Washington found that even though people of color were overrepresented in the homeless population, they tended to score significantly lower than their white counterparts, making it harder for them to access permanent supportive housing. The study recommended that HUD consider revising its coordinated entry guidelines to ensure that communities“equitably allocate resources and services.” This year, San Francisco started its own analysis of its coordinated entry process, and it expects to present the findings before the end of the year.

Nearly every expert we interviewed suggested that the experiences of people of color may not be fully reflected in their answers to the coordinated entry questions. San Francisco’s own data shows Black, white, Asian and Indigenous people being approved for housing at roughly equal rates. But Nagendra, from the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, is looking into concerns that conditions that often make people of color more vulnerable are not being fully captured and that the numbers may not tell the whole story. “When you look at quantitative data, ours will show we are actually prioritizing people who are Black at an equitable rate. But when we talk to people, they might tell a different story,” she said.

Courtney Cronley, an associate professor of social work at the University of Tennessee who has written about racial bias in coordinated entry systems, pointed to one of San Francisco’s questions as an example of possible bias in action: “How many times have you used crisis services in the past year (for example, mental health crisis services, hospital, detox, suicide prevention hotline)?”

“Black people are less likely to use formal health care systems,” Cronley said. “They’ll reach out to family and friends and social support systems rather than going to the doctor. The doctor is not someone that they necessarily trust. These questions are biased towards persons who are white in our communities and biased against African Americans.”

The Department of Homeslessness and Supportive Housing has also said that very few transgender and gender-nonconforming people have been taking coordinated entry assessments. In a December 2021 meeting, Megan Owens, the department’s coordinated entry manager, presented demographic data on who was being assessed. She said that the number of people reporting those gender identities during assessments is “lower than in the best estimates of the homeless population.” In March, city data showed that transgender and gender-nonconforming people constituted only 2% of those taking assessments to try to get housing.

Critics of San Francisco’s coordinated entry system also say that one of the most basic questions, “How long have you been homeless this time?” leads to the exclusion of immigrants and younger people.

That question might sound simple, but it’s difficult for many people to say how long they’ve been homeless — and answering accurately can be critical to getting housing. That’s because San Francisco’s algorithm grants people more points the longer they have been unhoused: A person who has been homeless for more than 15 years receives 12 more points than someone who’s been homeless for one to two years. Anyone who says they’ve been homeless for less than a year gets zero points on this question. (On average, adults who qualify for housing in San Francisco report being homeless for six years.)

Gayle Roberts, the chief development officer at Larkin Street Youth Services, a nonprofit serving young homeless people in San Francisco, said it is “common knowledge among social service providers that it [the coordinated entry system] is weighted heavily toward serving the needs of those who have experienced homelessness the longest.”

Laura Valdéz, executive director of Dolores Street Community Services, is one of several nonprofit leaders who questioned the efficacy of the system. “For many newly arrived immigrants, the way they literally interpret that question is since they’ve been here in San Francisco,” she explained. “So their scores are really low in comparison to other folks. But a large percentage of our immigrant community were unhoused in their home country.”

Valdéz also said the coordinated entry system can lead people living outdoors to accrue significant trauma before they qualify for permanent supportive housing. The program, she said, “requires people to stay in that system that is creating greater and greater harm to them for them to be able to score higher.”

The duration-of-homelessness question can also be tricky for homeless youth, defined as those between 18 and 24. In a 2019 count, they accounted for 14% of the city’s homeless population. Many young people are intermittently homeless, making it difficult to calculate the full length of that experience, said Dr. Colette Auerswald, a professor of community health sciences at the University of California, Berkeley.

“Maybe they stayed on their friend’s couch for five days and they were on a bus last night,” she said. “So they may be like, ‘Well, one day,’ but actually they’ve been in an unstable situation for a really long time.”

San Francisco’s homelessness department acknowledges this bias against young people seeking housing. In an attempt to address the age gap, the department included two questions that are only scored for people ages 18 to 24: “In the place you are staying, are you experiencing physical or sexual violence?” and, “In the last 12 months have you traded sex for a place to stay?” If they answer yes to either one, it provides a significant bump in their overall score: 12 points for each question. But if anyone older than 24 who has been sexually assaulted or has traded sex for a place to stay gets no points at all. (While the answers to these questions are only scored for 18-to-24-year-olds, they are asked of every person who takes the assessment. When asked why these questions were asked of people who could not receive points for answering, the department said it was for “data gathering.”)

Machuca-Grebe,  the department spokesperson, explained that the question was added because “we have found that without the score placed on the questions for youth, they would be seriously under prioritized — leading to a disproportionate exclusion of youth.”

Davis was in the 18-to-24 age range when she first took her coordinated entry assessment, so those questions were scored. But she does not believe they should be asked at all.

“There’s not a single person that I can think of that is female-presenting that hasn’t been sexually assaulted while experiencing any part of their life, not just homelessness,” she said. “So you’re telling me that because someone hasn’t been raped, that she doesn’t get housing, and then she stays on the streets and then does get raped? And now she can? No, that doesn’t make sense.”

Questions From a Stranger

It is not just the wording and scoring of the questions that give experts pause. They also said that the way the assessment is given can fail to accurately assess a person’s vulnerability.

In San Francisco, all questions must be read by a trained staff member from one of the nonprofits that contract with the city to conduct the assessment. The questions are pulled up on an iPad or a computer. A drop-down menu offers a prewritten set of answers to select from, and the score is automatically added up by the software.

Coordinated entry assessments are frequently conducted in semi-public places, like a bustling office or a street corner under a highway. Applicants rarely have a preexisting relationship with the person asking the questions, and, due to understaffing at many nonprofits conducting assessments and the high number of people in need, there may not be time to build one.

“You really need to have interviewers establish rapport and relationship with the client prior to conducting or doing any assessment, because if they don’t trust interviewers, they’re just not going to talk to them,” said Cronley, the University of Tennessee professor.

The stakes are high: When an interviewer chooses the “Client refused” option from the pull-down menu of potential answers, the applicant receives zero points for that question.

Valdéz also sees lack of trust as a problem in the communities she serves. “Many of us would not feel comfortable speaking about our personal traumas, in 45 minutes, to a complete stranger,” she said. “My family experienced homelessness, and I can tell you right now, if I’m sitting in front of someone that I’ve just met, it is very unlikely that I would share that in an assessment.”

This was a concern voiced by Auerswald, the Berkeley professor, about the youth questions on violence and trading sex for a place to stay. She said the phrasing would not secure accurate results.

“My worries here is that a lot of young people are gonna say no,” she said. “And obviously, here, they really need to say yes. It’s one of their only hopes at prioritizing for housing, even though it’s a super traumatizing question.”

People’s personal interpretation of each question can affect their answers, Auerswald said. “A lot of young people who are trafficked would say no to this question,” she said. “They’d say, ‘Well I wasn’t raped, it wasn’t violent. I have someone taking care of me and I am paid or given something in exchange.’ Definitions of violence are different now. Violence is a lot of things. You can have sex under threat of violence, even if you don’t have a mark on you.”

Cronley said racial bias in child welfare and policing plays a similar role in determining how forthcoming people are willing to be when answering these questions.

“Black women are going to be more likely to fear that their children will be taken away from them if they report illicit behaviors, or if they report any sort of mental health challenges,” she said. “If you’ve got kids and you’re homeless and you’ve traded sex for money, you’re not going to tell them that you did that. No way.”

Davis had enough experience with systems for homeless people that she knew not answering the questions was not an option. “I had no choice but to answer them or I couldn’t get into housing,” she said.

For some, though, the experience is so uncomfortable that they drop out of the process entirely. A native of El Salvador, Luis Reyes has lived in San Francisco for 30 years and been homeless for 10 of those. Reyes said he has taken the coordinated entry questionnaire twice — once in 2019 and again in 2020, right before the pandemic hit. Like Davis, he went to the brick building at 123 10th St., the city’s largest drop-in center for these assessments.

“There was a guy who did the assessment in Spanish,” Reyes said, through an interpreter, of his 2020 interview. “‘Are you incapacitated? Are you a senior citizen? Do you have AIDS?’” Reyes remembers him asking. “He even asked me if I was gay,” he recalls — a question that is not included in the coordinated entry assessment. Reyes answered no to all of the above and says he was then told he didn’t qualify for housing.

The experience discouraged Reyes, who was living in a shelter at the time of his second assessment. He decided not to take the questionnaire again. He has spent some months sleeping in his car, and more recently he stayed with his girlfriend at a senior living facility. But she’s not allowed to have guests, and soon he will have to return to the streets.

System Under Review

Across the country, cities and counties are starting to critically examine their coordinated entry systems. Last year, eight communities, including Chicago and Austin, Texas, studied the data on their coordinated entry results and discovered significant racial disparities. Both cities revised their systems using community feedback, redesigned their processes and wound up approving more people of color for services.

In San Francisco, 17,000 coordinated entry assessments were conducted between the launch of the system in 2018 and the middle of 2021. This year, the city announced it would be undertaking its own review to determine if the government is serving people equitably and if the housing options offered are a good fit for those in need. Nagendra, at the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, is overseeing the city’s review.

“If things have gotten away from our overall intention and design, we can look at those things and figure out where we need to redesign, refresh, whatever it might be,” she said in an interview.

The city’s approach to its review is driven by data and leans heavily on interviews, which are being conducted in focus groups and through outreach at encampments. The agency plans to make the research findings public in late May.

Critics would like to see a more radical overhaul of the coordinated entry system and the way it is pegged only to the supply of housing.

Joe Wilson, executive director of Hospitality House, a community center for homeless people in the Tenderloin neighborhood, where the majority of the city’s unhoused population resides, explains the problem with that approach.

“This algorithmic-based decision-making process is designed to keep the problem small enough so we don’t have to truly address it,” he said in an interview. “They’re not filling housing based on need, they’re assigning it based on capacity. It is not logical, it’s not consistent, and it’s not effective.”

For example, families used to be required to hit 40 points to qualify for housing. In February, the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing doubled that number to 80 points due to a shortage of family-specific housing. Owens, the coordinated entry manager at the department, estimated that the change would reduce the number of families who qualified for housing to between 50% and 60% of those taking the assessment, down from 75%.

Critics of the coordinated entry program have been proposing solutions as the city begins its review. In a February report, the Coalition on Homelessness, San Francisco’s largest nonprofit advocating for homeless people, recommended that the city “develop an assessment tool that categorizes people according to what type of housing would be the most suitable for their situation, instead of assigning them an eligibility score. This will tell us what type of housing and assistance is needed, versus how much housing we have.”

The organization also proposes letting case workers and housing providers work together to identify the best place to house an applicant. This approach, the Coalition argues, would create “a real-time housing placement system” that would more quickly bring vulnerable people indoors. This could help address the city’s chronic difficulty in filling the vacant units it has available: As the San Francisco Public Press and ProPublica reported in February, 1,633 people who had been approved for housing were still waiting to move in — some for months — even as more than 800 apartments sat vacant. At least 400 people had been on the waitlist for more than a year.

For those working on the front lines of the homelessness crisis, change to the coordinated entry system can’t come fast enough. Last July, in a meeting with the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, Wilson told a story about a client his organization had helped.

“We have an 86-year-old woman who has been homeless for 14 years who has not been prioritized for housing,” he said, noting that she took a coordinated entry assessment but did not hit the 118-point threshold for housing.

A key insight from that experience, he said: Algorithmic decision-making “moves us away from the absolute necessity of human judgment and human interaction in human services.”

Read part one, In San Francisco, Hundreds of Homes for the Homeless Sit Vacant

The post San Francisco Rations Housing by Scoring Homeless People’s Trauma. By Design, Most Fail to Qualify. appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Fires in encampments, tents and other makeshift shelters occurred more frequently in recent years, reporting from the San Francisco Public Press and Mission Local shows. But incident counts alone do not offer a clear explanation of what is happening on the street.  

In late February, as temperatures dropped, a fire at a freeway overpass killed one woman and critically injured three people. KQED reported that the woman killed was survived by three children.  

While people without shelter do use fire to keep warm, fire incidents don’t seem to be linked very closely to temperature.  

“I kind of found less seasonal variation in them than I had expected,” said Mission Local data reporter Will Jarrett. “It’s used for cooking a lot and that kind of thing. So, I don’t think it’s necessarily entirely about heat, although that is obviously a big one.” 

The reporters also found that clues about a fire’s origin or nature were only reflected in detailed fire department “narratives” that are not as readily available as information like time, date and location of a blaze. Even basic data needed to be pulled out of static documents to be analyzed. 

“They would give us reports, like full PDF reports, when we asked for spreadsheets,” said Public Press data reporter Jenny Kwon. The data would be sent in rounds rather than all at once, “and sometimes not even within the date range that we requested.” 

In some cases, the information recorded in the fire department’s database did not match the experience of its victim. Jarrett said one victim Mission Local spoke with said their tent had been set on fire from the outside while they were sleeping 

“They had some burns, but they weren’t too badly hurt,” he said. “It could have been worse, but still pretty terrible. And then when we looked up the fire in the dataset, it was classified as a garbage fire, and there was no indication of injury or possessions that had been damaged.” 

Using flames in or near tents carries risk, but it is a risk many people are willing to take.  

“It’s really hard for these fires to cease if people don’t have the basic materials to actually make this safer, like be able to cook in a safer way, stay warm in a safer way,” said Yesica Prado, a multimedia journalist who has been covering homelessness for the Public Press. “We were seeing in the data, we saw that from 2019 to 2021, the fires is still kind of on the rise, you know. They haven’t really dropped down.” 

Clearing encampments or forbidding people from using heat or light sources when outdoors is not likely to be effective, Kwon, who uses gender-neutral pronouns, said.  

“It’s not, again, addressing the main reasons they’re starting fires, which is for survival purposes,” they said. “And it’s not actually advocating for the safety of the victims of these fires who are unhoused.” 

Prado and Kwon have also investigated ways to address the problem of tent, encampment and other outdoor fires. A related complication is that fire victims who live on the street feel they are not given the same consideration and empathy as housed fire victims. 

“I feel like there has been a lot of fires happening in California,” Prado said. “We have all these kinds of things set up to help fire victims, and right now, we just don’t have anything locally to help the people that are on the streets.” 

A segment from our radio show and podcast, “Civic.” Listen at 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays at 102.5 FM in San Francisco, or online at ksfp.fm, and subscribe on Apple, Google, Spotify or Stitcher. 

The post What Reporters Learned Mapping Encampment Fires appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

As encampment fires spiked in Oakland and San Francisco during the first year of the pandemic, they fell by half in the Rangers community to just six. One reason for the disparity? The Rangers beefed up fire precautions. The community’s last tent fire occurred 18 months ago, and when a vehicle caught fire in December 2021, residents were prepared. They used fire extinguishers to put out the blaze.

A mother of three who was caught under a freeway overpass in San Francisco’s Glen Park neighborhood didn’t have the good fortune to live in a community with the Rangers’ tools and preparation. A February fire killed her and severely injured three others.

Encampment fires are a fact of life due to the exposed conditions unhoused residents live in, and have led to painful consequences for residents of encampments like the pair of sites along a freeway exit in Berkeley known as Seabreeze, who were removed by state officials last summer after a series of fires. But the Rangers’ camp demonstrates that there’s hope for controlling these incidents without official intervention. The key to their success has been fire preparedness, including measures like installing smoke alarms and keeping fire extinguishers on hand, according to Derrick Soo, leader of the Rangers community.

“Fire safety measures are a necessity, including at encampments, because every human life is valuable,” said Paul-Kealoha Blake, a member of Berkeley’s Homeless Commission and a volunteer with the nonprofit Consider the Homeless! “Encampment fires are an issue because they endanger both the resident of the structure that’s on fire and endangers the encampment.”

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About a year ago, former Berkeley councilmember Cheryl Davila pushed to create an official program to address encampment fires. Davila proposed using existing homeless services funding to distribute fire extinguishers and fire prevention tools through social service providers. The City Council tabled the proposal in March 2021.

Fire preparedness is essential “to protect the safety of our people and preemptively stop the spread of preventable fires,” said Davila in a report to the council last year.

As an example of work the city could build on, she pointed to outreach done by residents and homeless advocacy nonprofits that have distributed chemical fire extinguishers to people living in tents and vehicles.

Those tools might have helped residents of a large Wood Street encampment in Oakland, where multiple vehicles caught fire on March 1, including an RV. Within a week, another encampment less than a mile away also went up in flames. Fires increased 14% in Oakland during the first year of the pandemic to 611 from the previous year’s 535, tent encampment fires are projected to decline slightly in the second year.

During the first year of the pandemic, fire incidents associated with homeless encampments in Berkeley rose at a similar rate, climbing 18% to 133 from 113 the previous year. About a third of those fires were at the Seabreeze Camp on the Interstate 80 University Avenue exit, where passersby reported smoke, cooking, trash fires and tent fires.

Residents at the Seabreeze camp used extinguishers to control some of their fires, but each time one was used, it had to be replaced or refilled, which made it difficult for volunteers to abate all fires without support from the city.

In this camp and many other locations, residents approach fires differently than the Rangers.

On the edge of the freeway

On a cold, windy evening at Seabreeze Camp, Mama West looked for spare poles to fix her sleeping quarters and prevent her tent from blowing away. 

For the past six years, Mama West lived on this strip of land along the University Avenue freeway exit in Berkeley. Residents and advocates named the community after a nearby market. Seabreeze is also an apt descriptor: The winds can reach 30 miles per hour here near the Berkeley Marina, and fire is a necessity to maintain warmth.

As the sun set, her partner, Drew, got ready to start a blaze in their fire pit, a metal tub wide and high enough to shield a sizable bonfire. He found fuel from a neighbor, Shawna, who keeps stacks of chopped-up pallets in front of her tent.

In early July 2021, the Seabreeze Camp was scheduled to be dismantled by Caltrans due to the growing issues with trash and fires. Berkeley city staff also cited problems like crime and domestic disputes.

On Aug. 9, Gov. Gavin Newsom joined the transportation agency staff in clearing part of the encampment before holding a briefing on his California Comeback Plan, which dedicates $12 billion to housing, shelter and services for people experiencing homelessness, plus $50 million for local governments to resolve encampments.

After the cleanup at the “downstairs” section of Seabreeze where people camped under the freeway, “11 residents accepted services,” said Will Arnold, a spokesman for Caltrans. Several others were displaced onto city streets without securing housing services.

A week later, when the Seabreeze “upstairs” cleanup took place, another 17 residents who lived on the islands along the University exit and Frontage Road had nowhere to go. They relocated to city sidewalks and a nearby freeway exit. About two dozen, including Mama West, moved into hotel rooms through Project Roomkey, which places unhoused residents in hotels. Two people accepted a four-person tent at the 24-hour Horizon Transitional Village shelter, according to a Berkeleyside report and a reporter’s visit to the indoor tent site.

Those who declined shelter beds pointed to bans on guests, pets, cooking and substance use. In addition, they said, showers are available only twice a week and lights stay on all the time. “Several people have turned down Horizon because their outside tents are bigger than the indoor tent that sits on the concrete floor inside,” wrote activist and civil rights attorney Andrea Henson in an email. “For some with severe disabilities and chronic pain this makes a difference.”

A civil rights lawsuit filed against Caltrans in August on behalf of Seabreeze encampment charged that some “did not receive any offer of housing at all” and others “had disabilities that prevented them from accessing alternative shelter.” The plaintiffs won a preliminary injunction allowing them to remain at the former Shellmound camp, located at the Ashby freeway exit, for six months. Caltrans has appealed. On March 23, the injunction is set to expire, and another hearing is scheduled to determine a four-month extension. Plaintiffs also ask to return to the Seabreeze camp, saying it’s a safer and more accessible location to connect remaining residents to housing services.

Mitigating fire risk

After gathering fuel, Drew loaded the fire pit with wood scraps and a Burger King bag filled with cardboard clamshell containers and paper wrappers. His torch lighter ignited the flames, and he placed a metal rack with an empty skillet on top. But he forgot the water he intended to boil, and stepped into the darkness of the tent, searching for a water jug.

“Do not leave your skillet unattended without water!” yelled Mama West when she spotted the pan. She threw it in the sand and covered the fire pit with the skeleton of a metal chair, protecting other items from coming close to the open flames.

In 2021, Mama West’s tent has caught fire three times as winds spread the flames from fires set by neighbors for cooking and warmth. Once, a small barbecue grill was knocked from the cooking table.

About a month before this dinner, Mama West lost one of her puppies in a tent fire that began while she stepped outside to make a cup of tea in her fire pit. Suddenly, smoke poured from her tent, and she dashed inside to rescue her six puppies and adult dog. She doesn’t know what set the tent ablaze.

The greatest loss for her was not her personal identification documents and other belongings, but her dog Patches and the puppies she considered “grandbabies.” Berkeley’s Animal Control      put her dogs up for adoption and charged Mama West with animal endangerment in the death of her puppy. She fought to get the charge dropped, but her animals were not returned.

Seabreeze Camp residents successfully fought for years against Caltrans efforts to clear the parcel where they lived, but their eventual displacement felt inevitable. The agency’s policy calls for evicting residents immediately when encampments pose an imminent threat to safety or relocating them over a longer timeline when the risk is high but not critical.

“Immediate threats include modifications to structures that increase the risk of collapse, encampments that physically block traffic or pathways and put people in the encampments or the traveling public at risk of imminent danger,” Hector Chichilla, a Caltrans spokesman, wrote in an email, adding that fire risk may also fall under this category. 

The pandemic put a crimp in the encampment removal policy. Cleanups fell to less than a quarter of their pre-pandemic numbers in 2020 before rebounding in 2021.

In Berkeley, the most common fire calls associated with unhoused individuals and encampments are survival-related fires — those used for cooking and warming — the notes in Berkeley Fire Department reports show. Warming fires almost doubled to 35 during the first year of the pandemic, while cooking fires fell by about half to 33. Advocates and homeless communities concerned about fires say the city could do more to help them, especially given its efforts elsewhere.

The Berkeley Fire Department has often made donations of surplus equipment and vehicles to residents in need in countries as far afield as Argentina and South Africa. They have also donated locally, helping the Berkeley School District, Berkeley Boosters Association and the Northern California city of McCloud.

Berkeley does run an emergency weather shelter, but by December 2021, it was at capacity, hosting only 19 residents due to COVID-19 restrictions. In late January, the city also relocated 27 unhoused people to hotel rooms at the Berkeley Inn through a special winter housing program, but less than a month later, almost all were returned to the streets, where temperatures dropped below 40 degrees. Many lacked tents, as their property was seized during sweeps Jan. 26 and Feb. 1.

“We don’t have enough shelter space,” said Blake of the homeless commission. “It’s all full. And the Horizon shelter has no heat.”

Dinner al fresco

As the moon lit up the night sky above their tent, Drew returned with a clear jug and put the skillet back on the fire rack, boiling water for soup with instant noodles. Mama West heated a foil plate of prepared rice, broccoli and teriyaki chicken from a homeless-services nonprofit.

While the food warmed up, Mama West stashed her groceries from weekly donations in the mended tent to keep them safe from rats. Plastic bags and bins filled half the tent, leaving the edge of the mattress open for the two to sit. After she and Drew reorganized the food bins, Mama West put her prized keyboard back inside. She loves making music.

With the food secured, dinner was ready. They sat on the mattress and laid out dishes to share on top of their metal ice chest. Mama West dug into the chicken teriyaki plate with her fingers and Drew slurped his chicken noodles, watching the fire crackle.  

Fire prevention: community solutions

In deep East Oakland, leader Derick Soo set up a fire safety system for the 77th Avenue Rangers and advocated for temporary access to a nearby fire hydrant. Kyle Mitchell, a lawyer and Soo’s friend, helped out. 

Mitchell has purchased fire suppression tools for the Rangers like extinguishers, alarms, Thermoses and power banks. The power banks allow people to charge devices and provide light, so residents can avoid the danger of open flames or wildcat hookups to electricity poles. He also distributed 20-gallon jugs of water to unhoused residents throughout Oakland, and advocated for water access at encampments to become an official city program.

For fire suppression, smoke detectors are effective, and with 10-year batteries, will last a long time. Because fire extinguishers are expensive to buy and refill, Mitchell taught unhoused residents how to cheaply refill them with pressurized water and soap. They can be refilled at gas stations or with a bicycle pump, but they are heavy – and this soap-and-water mixture won’t work on electrical or gas fires, although those incidents rarely occur at encampments due to their lack of amenities.

Soo uses a power solar grid that holds 4,000 watts with eight batteries, and a diesel generator for extra power to charge residents’ devices and two community refrigerators at night. Diesel is much less flammable than gasoline.

For heat, camp residents use gadgets fueled by propane because the power required to generate heat is more than any power bank or individual solar grid can provide. Propane is portable, abundant and long-lasting compared to other alternatives.

Fire prevention tools are distributed to Oakland residents living in homes and apartments, but on the streets, unhoused residents are responsible for devising their own solutions. Nonprofits and volunteers like Mitchell work to bridge that gap and distribute these much-needed essentials.

These tools can make a difference, especially when it’s cold. During the pandemic, fire incidents surged in winter, when temperatures dropped. Oakland averaged about 70 fires per month from November 2020 to March 2021, compared with 58 a year earlier. In 2021, fires continued to climb, spiking to 99 in March –– the highest monthly incident rate in the last three years.

The numbers are likely an underestimate, as Oakland Fire Department reports showed only encampment fires, not trash fires, vehicle fires, or other types of fires connected to unhoused residents.

Camp residents have identified several affordable tools and other alternatives for safe heating, like a portable propane heater that turns off when tipped over, or a diesel air heater. Soo heats his home with a turkey air fryer running on a small propane tank that can last him a month, but it costs him a whopping 60% more than a year ago.

Soo used to pay $15 for a 20-pound refill. Now he pays $24. The coronavirus pandemic increased demand for outdoor activities and recreational camping, and portable propane tanks were also often out of stock. Other options when propane is not available and money is tight are bottles filled with hot water or heated stones, according to Mitchell.

Soo has experimented with fire retardant paint on fabric and plywood surfaces. But even with these modifications, tents are not very resistant to any of the elements. 

“Typically, here on this street, tents last about two months because of the wind,” said Soo. “Wind just tears them up. Tents don’t hold very well even when you put tarps on them.”

Because of tents’ minimal weather protection and lack of security, Soo is designing Conestoga huts for the Rangers. These tiny homes, which look like the back of a covered wagon, will be built on a platform and have electricity, hot water, windows, showers and a mini kitchen. Each home has a water tank and infrared water heater. The rounded roof/wall uses plastic for waterproofing and tar paper for fire resistance under a heavy-duty tarp.

While these homes can be a solution to providing safe shelter, they are still temporary. Since 2016, Soo has been advocating for the sanctioning of his camp, and he also helps camp residents get connected to housing services. By March, the occupancy of the camp had dwindled down to half, and the city canceled their mobile shower service. But this has not defeated him, and Soo built a solar shower.

“Camps are a necessity because some folks have only known violent streets,” said Soo. “People don’t know a village community.”

The post Grassroots Nonprofits and Homeless Communities Create Their Own Fire Prevention Solutions appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

“I was like, ‘I’m either going to come out as transgender, or kill myself,’” he said. “San Francisco was the only place that I could think of where I thought it wasn’t going to be a problem for me to be trans.”

For the first few months after he arrived, Remora lived in his car. “I didn’t access housing services because it was too overwhelming,” he said. “I was traumatized, I didn’t feel like I was deserving of them.”

On March 9, the city’s first navigation center to specifically serve transgender and gender-nonconforming people opens in SoMa. Operated by St. James Infirmary, a nonprofit that serves sex workers, the 65-bed shelter (81 after COVID-19 restrictions end) will provide case management, health care, job opportunities and substance use treatment for people experiencing homelessness.

“We know that queer people in general, and trans and gender nonconforming people specifically, are overrepresented in the homelessness system,” Shireen McSpadden, director of the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, told the Public Press after meeting with staff and touring the site. “I think that this is the right response.”

It will fill a gap in homeless services that has excluded a highly vulnerable population. Transgender people are 17 times more likely to experience homelessness than the average person, and 70% of those who have stayed in shelters report having experienced harassment, according to a study conducted by the National Center for Transgender Equality. As a result, unhoused transgender people are often reluctant to engage in traditional services.

San Francisco is no exception. A lack of culturally competent shelter staff is something Remora, who eventually got housing and a job with a homelessness nonprofit, witnessed firsthand.

Early in the pandemic, he worked at two navigation centers in the city, where he says he saw staff struggle to address the intersections of violence, sex work and gender identity. The idea for a navigation center that serves only transgender and gender non-conforming people emerged late one night, while Remora worked an overnight shift at the Embarcadero Navigation Center with one of the few gender-nonconforming staff members, Britt Creech.

“We just started talking about this dream we had,” Creech said. “This is the most marginalized community that we see. They’ve been let down over and over and over again.”

Several months later, an opportunity to open the center appeared. The Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing reached out to the Transgender Gender-Variant and Intersex Justice Project, a prison abolition organization, to see if they’d be interested in taking over the Bryant Street Navigation Center, which had been converted to an isolation ward during the pandemic. The organization suggested the city reach out to St. James Infirmary, where Remora was working as the inaugural director of a new city initiative called Our Trans Home SF. All of a sudden, he had a path forward to creating a new type of homeless shelter for transgender people.

Creech came on board as managing site director. Together, they decided to christen the new space the Taimon Booton Navigation Center, in honor of an unhoused gender-nonconforming youth who made a significant impact on them both before dying in 2020.

The navigation center, located under Interstate 80, is one of the few not built in a large white tent. Instead, it has orange and blue walls and a large tree emerging from its patio. Its planters, currently containing struggling greenery, will soon be filled with succulents; Creech has a green thumb. There are plans for murals honoring local trans activists and fairy lights to illuminate the outdoor areas after dark. Gendered signs outside the bathrooms and showers will be removed. 

St. James Infirmary’s commitment to hiring employees with lived experience of its clients has continued at the navigation center. Remora recruited staff using solely Instagram posts and word of mouth, hoping to build a racially diverse team of transgender and gender-nonconforming staff. The response was enormous.

“I interviewed 60-something people in five weeks,” he said. “The numbers showed when we started the interview process — and everyone else was having a hard time hiring — how many trans people are not applying to regular jobs, because they know that it’s not sustainable for them or healthy. This is a really big opportunity to work somewhere you can be yourself.”

The commitment to a peer-based model of services is something McSpadden applauds. “I think this can be transformational for people,” she said. “It’s healing. It’s safe. It builds community. That, to me, is really exciting.”

That healing is central to St. James’ mission for the space. Stephany Ashley, St. James’ former executive director, consulted on the opening of the center. “Trans people, and especially trans feminine people, experience so much violence on a daily basis,” she said. “It’s one thing to have a home to go to at the end of the day, and a door to close, that’s your safe space. But for people who are unhoused, there’s never that moment where you’re not subjected to that violence. This place is really going to be a refuge. That’s what’s been missing from the system of care.”

With just a few days to go until the navigation center opens, St. James’ staffers are busy alerting nonprofits, frontline workers and case managers — who already have relationships with transgender people experiencing homelessness — about its presence. A guest list is starting to form, though the plan is to bring in residents slowly.

“People are traumatized, and if they don’t have a space where they can start the day with some peace, then they’re always going to stay in trauma,” Creech said. “We have people in place to help guide them and open those doors. So maybe we start with a little bit of care, get people to open up, then the world’s their oyster.”

The post SF Launches First Navigation Center to Serve Homeless Transgender People appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.