B4 || sfpublicpress.org || ABOUT US | LABOR | STREETSCAPE | CiViCS | GREEN | EXTRA || San Francisco Public Press, Spring 2013
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for Homeless Women, sleeping on the bus can be safest option
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magine having nowhere to sleep. Now, imagine that reality if you’re older, and maybe you suffer from illness or decreased mobility. San Francisco’s Department of Aging and Adult Services says that about 19,000 seniors are living below the poverty line. One place some of those seniors are showing up is at local shelters. Navigating San Francisco’s shelter system can be dangerous as well as exhausting, and is something that KALW’s Rose Aguilar got to know well in interview: the three months she spent researching holly kernan homelessness among older women. The fol//kAlW news “Crosscurrents” lowing is an edited version of the interview.
holly kernan: We’re discussing the rise of homelessness among senior women in San francisco. kAlW’s Rose Aguilar spent months researching this issue for an article in The nation magazine. i asked her what got her looking at this particular homeless population.
Community organizer Roberto Hernandez tells a crowd about shootings in his neighborhood that prompted him to get involved in the anti-violence movement. Alex Emslie // kqEd
Mission leaders unite to stop gun Violence Community organizers collaborate with city leaders to craft new plan
kernan: That’s one of the things that you actually found in your research — that these women all had suffered some sort of sexual assault.
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oberto Hernandez stood facing an auditorium packed with city authorities and hundreds of his community organizer colleagues to plan a new initiative to counter gun violence in San Francisco’s Mission District. “I am tired of raising money for coffins,” he said. “The norm is to hit the floor when we hear gunshots. The Head Start program on 24th and Harrison has gunshot drills for children from ages 3 to 5. That’s unacceptable.” With the support of city agencies and District 9 Supervisor David Campos, Hernandez is Story: spearheading an Rigoberto effort to create a hernandez five-year plan to end // mission gun violence in the local Mission, where it has claimed hundreds of lives — by and large Latino victims — in recent decades. Homicides in the neighborhood increased by 50 percent last year, from six deaths in 2011 to nine in 2012. This year started badly when a man police described as a known gang member was involved in a traffic accident that killed two people in the early morning of Jan. 1, shortly after a drive-by shooting occurred nearby, police said. “Whatever we are doing is not working anymore,” Hernandez said. Hundreds of community organizers gathered on Jan. 31 at Everett Middle School to brainstorm solutions for ending gun violence. It was the first of two workshops aimed at developing and implementing a comprehensive plan with the city’s help. The plan would connect agencies that provide a wide range of services, including tattoo removal, mental health support, gun buybacks and a hiring program for at-risk youth. There’s a window of opportunity for major change, organizers said, now that gun violence and mental health are in the spotlight following the Sandy Hook massacre in Connecticut. Their goal: to treat gun violence as a mental health issue and address the root causes that lead to it. ThinkinG ouTSidE ThE box
Organizers from around the city chimed in on best practices for reaching vulnerable youth. The first task, they said, was to overcome the social stigma in the community surrounding mental illness, sexual assault and substance abuse. Experts agreed that outreach must involve young children and their parents, too. “It starts with parenting training, because some parents are not always keeping kids on the right path,” said Julio Escobar, coordinator for the San Francisco Archdiocese’s Restorative Justice Ministry. He said the emphasis must be on the youth. Escobar, who has worked with youth in jail for 18 years, held three sidewalk memorial services for people who were
Rose Aguilar: I decided to start doing this research after riding the bus at 2:30, 3 o’clock in the morning about a year ago. I was sitting next to an older woman. At that time, it’s mostly people leaving bars, so it’s unusual to see a woman on the bus that late at night. I sat next to her, and I started talking to her. I said, “Do you mind me asking where you’re going?” And she said, “I’m going to a 24-hour coffee shop out in the Richmond District.” I said, “Why? It’s 3 in the morning.” She said, “Well, because the owner lets me sleep there, and I can’t find a shelter for the night.” I said, “How common is this?” She said, “Go to coffee shops. You’ll find us.” And that never left my mind. So that’s why I decided to start doing some research. I spent three months going to shelters, to food banks, to incredible places like St. Anthony Foundation, and there are homeless women all over the city, but they’re invisible. Because when you think about what you see on the streets, there are so many homeless people on the streets. But 95 percent of them are men, because it’s too dangerous for women to live on the streets. You’re almost 100 percent guaranteed to be assaulted if you’re a homeless woman on the streets of San Francisco.
Aguilar: Yes. They’ve all suffered sexual assault, especial-
ly as young girls or teenagers. An overwhelming majority of women on the streets have been sexually assaulted.
kernan: So tell me about some of these women that you met. Aguilar: Well, I went to the Mission Neighborhood
Resource Center, and in order to get a shelter bed, you have to stand in line at about 4 in the morning … Because there’s a lottery system, and you’ll get a number at 7 a.m. — you’ll find out if you have a bed. So you need to be in the front of the line, because the line is usually so long.
kernan: You wait in the cold for three hours in order to get a bed for that night? Aguilar: That’s right. On the sidewalk. In the dark. Let’s
Hundreds of community organizers gathered at Everett Middle School to put together a plan to end gun violence in the Mission. Staff // mission local slain in the Mission last year. Parents and mentors need to reach youngsters early, said Mission District police Capt. Robert Moser, because gang recruitment starts as early as middle school when gangs court youth by buying them clothes or shoes. The broad-based response will involve networking among dozens of neighborhood nonprofits that offer a range of community services. The Central American Resource Center, for example, has a tattoo-removal program, while the Instituto Familiar de la Raza offers culturally competent mental health services. However, both of those organizations have waiting lists. Former city Supervisor Christina Olague, now an executive assistant at Arriba Juntos, a nonprofit that helps people
construction work on the new Warriors arena, the Central Subway and the Lennar development in the Bayview. Longtime Mission community organizers were the dominant force at the meeting. Olague said the organizers intend to knock on doors to enlist more supporters. “When you first get started and the conversation gets going, it’s the natural thing to go to a group that you know has some level of expertise,” Olague said. “It doesn’t exclude us from doing additional outreach to bring more people in.” Supervisor Campos said it is too early to talk about funding, but some organizers hope that some financing could come from the $30 million Neighborhood Promise Grant that the Mission Economic Development Agency was awarded by
“Police officers have come to us saying, ‘We are tired of this cycle: We arrest and they come out. We need to break that cycle.’” find employment, said foundations already exist to address many of these concerns. “It’s not like we are starting from scratch,” Olague said. “We have to look at the assets we have in our community.” The plan will also include helping some 500 youth identified as at-risk to find work. Hernandez said he would like to see the city hire youth for short-term
the U.S. Department of Education. The groups are currently in talks, according to Victor Corral of the Mission Economic Development Agency. “I know they are trying to address the same issues. We need to discuss how to work together,” he said. “We are trying to achieve some of the same goals, we are just going through an established funding source using a proven model.”
For his part, Campos plans to spend the bulk of his $100,000 annual district allowance on a gun buyback program tailored for the Mission. There is historical precedent for community organizers creating a critical mass around certain issues in the Mission. In the 1960s, some 10,000 community members took to the streets to protest a major development plan. They were successful in halting the development, and the movement spawned some of the organizations that are involved with the new initiative to counter gun violence. Organizers say they are acting now because they feel that there is support from the city for trying new methods to mitigate violence. “Police officers have come to us saying, ‘We are tired of this cycle: We arrest and they come out. We need to break that cycle,’” Campos said. Recently, Campos said that the police department is working closely with violence interrupters from the Community Response Network — a new development. The network helps families victimized by violence, helping them with funeral arrangements and taking kids out for pizza and to the movies when tensions run high. After years of budget cuts, however, it has had to consolidate from three neighborhood-specific agencies into one citywide group. “They are going from crisis to crisis,” Hernandez said. “It’s a cycle. Somebody dies, and [there’s] a big cry. The police come out and patrol more, and then it’s back to business as usual.”
say you’re in a shelter in Hunters Point, and you’ve got to go to a place in the Mission to get a lottery ticket. You’ve got to get on the bus to do that. Let’s say you do get the bed, but you can’t go to the shelter until 5. So you’ve got all that time to kill. Maybe you were in the library yesterday, so today you don’t want to do that. So you jump on BART and you ride it for hours. You might go to a place for a free lunch. You get a free lunch, and then you have some more time to kill. You go to the shelter at 5. So Marcia is 56 and she was taking care of her older mother like so many women that I met do or did, and the mom passed away. She and her sister were supposed to share the money from the sale of the home. The sister took the money and left the state. Marcia said she got hit by a car and is now having trouble walking. And none of her relatives or friends will help her. I heard this over and over again. So Marcia is living off of about $900 a month in Social Security. She lived in a single-room occupancy — this is basically like an old motel. You’ve got a single room. You might have a stove, but you don’t have a fridge. Nowhere to cook. Half of her money was going to the SRO. The other half was going to food. At the end of the month, she would be left with $10. She said she’s never been so poor. She said the SRO was filthy. There was a guy that lived next door who never went to bed, so she couldn’t get a good night’s sleep. So she left the SRO, and the only other option is the shelter.
kernan: So you’re saying that she can survive on that $900 or $800 and keep herself in good condition? Aguilar: Well, she didn’t know what else was out there, so
she just decided to leave, because she got so irritated by the whole process. So I would see her on a regular basis — in line to get a shelter, at a senior center eating lunch. Sometimes she’d get a bed and when she didn’t get a bed, she would go to Oshun, which is now called the Women’s Place, and this is a shelter that really shocked me because there are 45 women in this. It’s supposed to be a walk-in center, but a lot of women stay there again because it’s a safe place to be, but they’re sleeping in chairs.
kernan: in your research, you found that according to hearth, an organization working to end elder homelessness, that the country had 40,750 homeless people 62 or older in 2012. And you found that this population of elderly homeless women is very likely to increase. Why? Aguilar: They say it’s going to double by 2050. All of the
advocates I’ve interviewed say these numbers sound incredibly low, because the numbers are exploding. The baby boomer generation is aging. The social safety net has been shredded. If you have a retirement, it’s probably been sliced in half because of the economic crisis. They want to raise the retirement age in Washington. People are finding that they just don’t have options, and they’re running out of money.