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Another Project Homeless Connect, but Problem Persists
Rodney Hogg, who is homeless, eats food that was given to him by volunteers at the San Francisco Project Homeless Connect Feb. 28, 2007
Project Homeless Connect, a service fair that took place in San Francisco Wednesday for the 38th time, has now provided more than 31,000 homeless people with help ranging from eye exams to shelter and has become a model for about 220 other cities, the Bay City News Service reports.
But that impressive track record has not translated into an abatement of the issue of homelessness in San Francisco.
A poll commissioned by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce last month found that voters still see homelessness as the city's most pressing problem. Thirty-two percent of respondents identified homelessness and panhandling as major issues facing San Francisco, up from 28 percent last year and beating the 26 percent who said they were concerned about jobs and the economy.
Part of the problem is that while more than 12,000 people were taken off the streets during the tenure of former Mayor Gavin Newsom, who conceived of Project Homeless Connect and the city's trademark Care Not Cash program, new homeless people continue to arrive in the city. Newsom told the Chronicle last fall that he estimated nearly half of the people on the streets whom police and social workers interacted with had been in town less than three months.
Voters' frustration with transients on the streets contributed to the passage in November of a controversial ordinance that bans sitting or lying down on city sidewalks from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. The San Francisco Examiner reported Tuesday that the San Francisco Police Department quietly began enforcing the ordinance last week, though officers have apparently not yet issued any citations.
I was a founding online editor of The Bay Citizen. Previously, I helped create the daily local news magazine Crosscurrents from KALW Public Radio, where I reported, edited and produced radio stories and managed the ...
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Bob Offer-Westort
It's been two months, but for anyone who comes back to access the archived version of this, it's now documented that the statistics about homeless people above are really, really wrong. (That's not Ms. Corneli's fault, but the fault of Mayor Newsom & people from his administration who promoted misinformation.)
According to the 2011 Homeless Count—a biennial, Federally-mandated project which the Newsom administration promoted extensively—the majority of homeless people were San Francisco residents a year or more before they became homeless. Of the one quarter of homeless people in San Francisco who came here from somewhere else, we don't know how long they've been here, but certainly many have been here longer than three months.
It's certainly fair to say that Newsom didn't have these numbers last fall, but he *did* have the 2009 numbers, which are an even greater discredit to his hypothesis: At that time, the majority had lived here two or more years before losing their housing. Mind you, in both cases, this is how long they lived in San Francisco *prior to* becoming homeless: We don't know how long they've been homeless in San Francisco *since* losing housing.
Finally, Newsom's measures did not end homelessness for anywhere close to 12,000 people. Working again from the Newsom administration's own numbers, nearly 6,000 of those people 'taken off the streets' were only taken off *San Francisco* streets: They were people sent on buses to other cities. While the City expects that people who are given bus tickets then stay with family or friends elsewhere, there is actually no follow-up to verify that this does happen. The City sometimes complains about similar programs in other cities (& these programs have been around since the '70s, when they were used as "Greyhound therapy" to move people with mental illnesses from one municipality to another), claiming that they lead to a mass influx of homelessness. We can't have it both ways: Busing people is either helping us end homelessness, or it's causing an increase in local homelessness. But claiming that *our* busing does one, while other cities' busing does the other is a ridiculous double standard.