A tower of words is no shelter
Our T-shirts were sticking to our backs by the time we emerged from the subway into Greenwich Village. New York City in July is like the back kitchen of a bayou diner.
But it is still New York, so we happily walked through the Village, down into Soho, Little Italy and the financial district. Through all those blocks, and later in midtown, we came upon exactly two people living on the street.
Two days later, back in San Francisco, on the mile or so walk from the Ferry Building to Fifth and Mission, I passed 11 people curled up against buildings, staring blankly from behind their cardboard signs or babbling to phantom companions.
I always feel sad and deflated when I pass them, but these ragged men and women remind me of nothing so much as failure, theirs and ours. Not that homelessness is peculiar to San Francisco. The problem is rising nationwide: a recent survey stated that 800,000 people in the United States are homeless, 200,000 of them children in homeless families.
Still, for sheer numbers on the street, homelessness distinguishes San Francisco from other cities these days almost as much as its cable cars. About 4,500 people are living on the streets, according to a 2002 count by the mayor’s office, the last official numbers available. Another 4,000 or so reside in shelters, hospitals or drug treatment programs for a homeless population of about 8,500. (Some say the actual number is higher.)
I looked up the numbers for New York on the city’s Web site (www.nyc.gov/dhs). It has 38,562 homeless people … five times as many as San Francisco. Yet, from what I saw, only a handful were visible on the streets.
Why? I suggest two reasons: Focus and coordination, foreign concepts in these parts.
When there is a problem in San Francisco, there are three proposals for every two politicians. If words were dollars, San Francisco would be the Donald Trump of city governments. It has produced enough initiatives, reports, directives, policies, assessments and advisories about homelessness to stuff every cot in the city’s shelters.
Now the Board of Supervisors is haggling over the details of a new version of “Care Not Cash,” the proposition on homelessness that passed with 60 percent of the vote last November. It would have cut welfare payments to those on general assistance from as much as $395 to $59, substituting shelter, food and city services for the cash.
New York spends more than $800 million a year through its Department of Homelessness on outreach, housing and services. San Francisco spends between $100 million and $200 million, a comparable amount given the cities’ respective numbers of homeless people. Yet San Francisco’s services are so disjointed, its coordination among agencies so scattershot, that no one in city government can say how many homeless people the city serves or how effective the services are.
Last week, Mayor Willie Brown signed off on a weakened version of Care Not Cash that will affect only several hundred homeless people. A different compromise might yet be reached that is more in keeping with the measure passed by the voters. Advocates for the homeless still oppose some of the provisions, and they should keep speaking up because they make us remember the human beings inside the tattered clothes. But San Francisco has to move ahead. All the elegant, compassionate, best-intentioned words in the world offer scant relief to the wretched poor on the street, or to a city that is losing its soul.
(Joan Ryan is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Send comments to her in care of this newspaper or send her e-mail at [email protected].)