San Francisco is set to enact a homelessness solution it once thought unthinkable: city-sanctioned open-air encampments.
For years, San Francisco police have ordered tents removed from city streets, even at times slashing them with knives themselves. Public Works employees have tossed the ever-ubiquitous nylon homes of desperate people into dump trucks on a weekly basis.
This week, however, San Francisco will launch the first of five planned “Safe Sleeping Sites,” KQED News has confirmed, with the hope that unhoused people will be kept socially distant amid the COVID-19 pandemic in a controlled location, replete with services like showers and food.
Tents, once an ultimate bogeyman of San Francisco’s government, will be revered as lifesaving.
The first location was announced Wednesday by Mayor London Breed: an encampment of roughly 90 tents piled nearly on top of each other near the Asian Art Museum – on City Hall’s front doorstep – will be officially sanctioned and allowed to expand onto Fulton Street, between the museum and the Main Library.
Safe, healthy, social distance will finally come to Civic Center’s homeless.
The second city-sanctioned safe sleeping site is already under operation by a local nonprofit, Mother Brown’s Dining Room in the Bayview, at a park known locally as MLK Park, on Third Street and Armstrong Avenue.
For now it’s a rogue operation, but later this week the official OK from San Francisco City Hall will see services, showers and other resources blow in like a breeze under the sails of that existing effort, Gwendolyn Westbrook, Mother Brown’s executive director told KQED News.
Those wrap-around services are planned for all of the city-sanctioned sleeping sites.
“I went into the park and set up the tents,” said Westbrook, who had help from Bayview advocates Gloria Berry and Michelle Pierce. “The city left us alone, and now, as a matter of fact, they’re going to help us a lot.”
Three other sites are now under various phases of negotiation to potentially become San Francisco’s next wave of safe sleeping sites, public documents and City Hall insiders confirmed:
- The former Temporary Transbay Terminal at Howard and Main streets
- Everett Middle School on Church Street
- A former McDonald’s restaurant on Haight and Stanyan streets near an entrance to Golden Gate Park
Bayview Neighbors United
Mother Brown’s shelter, nestled on Jennings Street and Van Dyke Avenue in the Bayview, sees nearly 70 people sleeping in it nightly. Westbrook, the shelter’s proprietor, said homelessness has grown in the Bayview so precipitously that people sometimes sleep in Mother Brown’s dining room and hallways.
But the COVID-19 pandemic has required many San Francisco establishments to close, or maintain strict social distancing, and Mother Brown’s shelter was no different.
So Westbrook and other women from the Bayview took matters into their own hands. They walked over to what locals call MLK Park – which on city documentation is called Bay View Park – and measured out the distance between plots themselves.
A renegade camping site was born, from the community, serving the community, with roughly 60 souls sleeping there in tents for weeks.
“When I came in early, they were all piled up in the [shelter’s] doorway … that wasn’t working for us,” Westbrook told KQED News.
So she set up the open-air encampment without city approval.
“No one wants to die from this coronavirus,” Westbrook said. “But if I had waited on the city, people out here might’ve been dead.”
Eddie Tillman, 65, slipped his N95 respirator mask over and under his 49ers hat while sitting inside his blue tent on Tuesday. Tillman told KQED News that he is only a few years out of prison, where he was for “decades” after stealing cars in his troubled youth.
Tillman was raised in the Bayview – it is his home – but his extended family is largely dead or gone. He also said he doesn’t want to “burden” his adult children with his own life choices. So Tillman has been living on the streets, slowly withering away, he said. Then he found the MLK Park encampment. It not only saved him from COVID-19, he said, but from his darkest thoughts.
“I don’t say I was going to kill myself. But I didn’t want to live,” he said.
Now he says he feels upbeat once again and is better prepared to find a job. Work is also a concern for Tasha Swift, 33, who is sleeping in a tent with her boyfriend on the other side of MLK Park.
Swift is an Oakland native who was living with her sister in San Francisco’s Sunnydale neighborhood so the pair could support each other financially. The two parted ways amid some acrimony, and Swift found herself living in her car while still working daily shifts at Split Bread, a San Francisco restaurant.
In early March, Swift was only one tantalizing paycheck away from saving enough money with her boyfriend to go apartment hunting. The cramped confines of her car would be a dreary distant memory, her locked-up knees could heal. They saved every penny, cut every expense.
“You know all the things ‘normal’ people do to make themselves happy? I couldn’t do them. I didn’t even get one soda. No eating out. I cut everything,” she said.
Then COVID-19 hit. The Bay Area-wide shelter-in-place order was instituted March 17, and Split Bread furloughed its workers, at least, Swift still hopes, temporarily. She and her boyfriend reached into their savings to weather the financial storm, their housing dream dashed.
Living in her car was “really scary, I don’t like it. You never know when someone will come up to your window and rob you.” But at MLK Park she’s safer. Now she feels ready to get back to work.
“This isn’t a whole home, but it feels like it,” Swift said.
Soon, more San Francisco neighborhoods could become homes for other folks who’ve been sheltering in cars, doorways and tents.
Citywide Sites in the Works
Three sites across San Francisco are in the works to become safe sleeping sites like MLK Park. While not locked down as moving forward – various entities are still negotiating these safe sleep sites – KQED News has confirmed they are under consideration.
Perhaps the furthest along in planning stages is the former site of the Temporary Transbay Terminal. An agreement between the Transbay Joint Powers Authority, which holds the lease to that parcel, and the City and County of San Francisco outlines the city’s right to operate it as a safe sleeping site. The document is dated April 14.
