San Francisco can do better — it’s time for real solutions
Why are there so many people sleeping in Haight Street doorways?
It’s a question every shop owner has asked themselves — and their elected officials — going back decades now. Decades? Yep. We’ve been in this situation for a long time and there are a lot of business owners who have had their shops 20+ years with long memories of how we got here.
As for me, I’ve seen a lot in the 11 years that I’ve operated Booksmith on Haight Street. San Francisco’s historic Haight-Ashbury is its own hodge podge culture of residents, visitors, shoppers, gawkers and everyone in between.
It’s long past the often-marketed “Summer of Love” days but our community still embodies that heart-filled spirit — I can’t hardly walk a block without being warmly greeted by a neighbor. Part of the Haight’s reality is also the permanent population of those with nowhere to sleep.
Many mornings when I open the store I regularly navigate people curled up in our doorway. Over the years, I’ve become more comfortable with my approach of how to engage them. But my approach isn’t the same as everyone else’s.
I’ll never forget a conversation I had a while back with a local Haight street bar owner. He pulled out his bat from behind the bar and tapped it on the counter. He said that if someone ever refused to get up from his doorway he had a means of moving them along.
Every small business owner in the city has their own method for how to handle people sleeping in their entrance way — most do *not* involve threats of violence.
Mine is to politely speak in a loud voice, “Excuse me. Sorry to wake you up. But I need to get into the store now.” The individual or individuals nearly always awake with a start and usually mutter an apology. They groggily find their way up from the ground, gather their belongings and relocate down the block. The whole process usually takes a few minutes.
And, I feel terrible every time, because I know people have nowhere to go. San Francisco prohibits sleeping in the parks at night time along with banning sitting on the streets in the daytime, so the folks who I’m waking up are simply shifting back and forth from our streets to our parks every day.
The reality is that there are no beds to offer them. San Francisco’s wait list for a temporary 90-day shelter bed is over 1,000 people long.
For a quick history lesson, homelessness as a systemic problem started in the 1980’s when Governor Ronald Reagan closed the state mental hospitals, and again when President Reagan’s administration slashed the HUD (Housing and Urban Development) budget, which provided cities and states with funds used to build and maintain subsidized housing. Since then, nearly every administration has reduced the federal budget for housing.
And to no surprise, the Trump administration has only accelerated the loss of federal housing funds, cutting the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% and has proposed slashing the HUD budget by double digits.
We know the history but what are we going to do about it?
We know that housing solves homelessness and that’s where Prop C comes in.
Here’s how Prop C works — by levying a small tax on corporations with over $50 million in gross receipts (only 3% of all businesses would pay that), the City Controller estimates we would generate $250-$300 million annually for homeless housing and services. Overall, that’s an average of 0.5% tax on the gross receipts of San Francisco’s biggest corporations, all of which just benefited from Trump’s massive corporate tax break.
It’s because of that huge tax cut that the city’s Chief Economist Ted Egan says in his economic impact report “that the income tax cut these corporations received would outweigh the 0.5% gross receipts tax increase for the majority of the 300–400 affected businesses.”
Yes, you read that right — the large corporations affected by Prop C will pay zero new dollars due to the billions of dollars in tax cuts pushed through by President Trump.
Homelessness hurts us all and we all need to do our part for the health of our city and for the health of our fellow San Franciscans. The Chamber of Commerce (who has never met a tax it likes) is predictably leading the opposition but we think this is a fair share for the richest corporations to pay.
Solutions cost money and we need everyone to contribute if we want o make progress after years of status quo policies especially those benefiting from massive tax cuts.
Prop C offers an opportunity for San Francisco to make a real investment because right now, as Heather Knight of the Chronicle points out, we spend about $11 per day (roughly $3,800 a year) on each of the city’s estimated 15,000 people who are experiencing homelessness and we need to do more.
Sadly, despite knowing what works (surprise…wait for it…housing people!), San Francisco (along with many other cities in the state) have spent years trying to criminalize its way out of homelessness and poverty to no success. Right now, we lead California with no less than 23 separate laws on the books that are considered “anti-homeless”.
Over the past four decades, the city has tried a myriad of punitive approaches to police those living on the streets — a decade ago Mayor Gavin Newsom famously walked Haight Street and made the decision to push for sit/lie legislation, making it illegal to sit on city streets during the day.
But he wasn’t the first mayor to “get tough” on those living on the streets. In the 1990’s, Willie Brown wanted to employ a night-vision police helicopter to locate homeless people in Golden Gate Park and his administration organized a special crew of Rec and Park employees to identify and remove encampments. Sound familiar?
It blew my mind to learn that the city had a sit/lie law that it replaced with a sidewalk obstruction ordinance in 1980 — that’s 38 years ago! “How to address visible homelessness” has been a mayoral election issue going back to the days when Dianne Feinstein was mayor.
In the last 20 years alone, we’ve banned panhandling (Prop M), banned tents (Prop Q) and banned sitting on the streets (Prop L) not to mention taking away financial benefits (Prop N, Care Not Cash). And all of these laws have gotten us where? Take a look at our streets right now and it’s clear that if we’re not housing homeless people than we’re not addressing homelessness.
It’s time to stop punishing people for being homeless and enact policies that work— let’s try housing our homeless neighbors.
Housing our homeless is the only smart and humane investment for San Francisco if we want to provide real solutions rather than the status quo.
By providing housing rather than punishment, Prop C will actually save the city money by reducing the number of times police are called to clear encampments (6,000 calls per month), reducing the paramedic and Emergency Room costs of responding to people sick on the street, and it will provide funds for bathrooms to reduce the Department of Public Works clean up costs and costs of employing poop patrols.
But don’t just accept my word alone — Ted Egan (City’s Chief Economist) says that “Prop C will likely reduce homelessness, improve health outcomes and reduce the use of acute and emergency services in the city.”
Egan’s report also found that the increased spending on housing and related services will stimulate those sectors of the economy, leading to positive multiplier effects on other industries. In addition, the attention paid to street behavior and quality of life issues, a reduction in homelessness is likely to increase the attractiveness of the city to tourists, residents, and commuters.
Who can argue with that?
That’s why when I was asked if I wanted to be a proponent for Proposition C: Our City Our Home, I jumped at the chance to say yes. This is my first political campaign and the first time that I honestly believe we can make a real change in people’s lives.
I hope you’ll join me in supporting Prop C. I’m tired of asking people to move when they have nowhere to go.
San Francisco can do better — it’s time for real solutions not more of the same failed policies. Let’s house our homeless rather than continuing to ask them to move along.
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Christin Evans is a small business owner. In 2007, she assumed stewardship of independent bookstore The Booksmith, a 40+ year old San Francisco Legacy Business. Last year, she expanded into the old Red Vic Movie theater and opened The Bindery, a dedicated event space. This past April, she partnered with the Two Sisters Book Bar team to re-open The Alembic, a neighborhood favorite craft cocktail bar.
