Editor:
I'm tired of Mayor Newsom's predilection for short-shrifting the people of this fair city with his hypocritical schemes. He started out with Care Not Cash, which deprived huge numbers of unfortunate people of benefits, providing some special services for a few, and then claimed a huge success and improvement for the homeless along with a lasting refusal to meet with Sr. Bernie of Religious Witness with Homeless People to discuss their further unmet needs. Hmm.
And now we have him claiming the sparkling benefits to the people of fewer garbage cans on the streets (his rationale is that garbage cans create garbage) and claiming that fewer bus stops will result in better bus service. Let him explain that to the lame or the elderly who can't drive, or to the working mother carrying her child to or from daycare in the dark in the rain or someone carrying five bags of groceries! Such cynical corner-cutting makes me wonder whether his backroom deal with Google/Earthlink for city-wide wireless service is really for the benefit of the underprivileged in their inability to bridge the digital divide since it's as short of megabytes as Muni will be of bus-stops
and the streets will be of garbage cans.
And now, by the way, he's proposing eliminating more of those eye-sore newsracks, I guess to spare us folks' eyesight for all that laptop internet reading we'll be doing! And who knows what-all else he's been up to? I for one have given up trying to keep track of his misty-minded antics. Such nose-thumbings of the common people have earned him my sincere resentment and contempt.
Therefore, I am very interested in hearing more about the record of violations of open records laws by Mayor Newsom and his Office of Communications for which they were referred by the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force to the state Attorney General, the District Attorney and the Ethics Commission
for further action. I'd sure like to know with whom he was meeting during all those months that his calendar was disappeared. Well, anyway, I guess it wasn't Sister Bernie.
Deetje Boler
Randy:
As a homeless advocate specializing in public housing issues, I get a sense of deja vu all over again when I read about the "Homeless Rousted" and "Golden Gate Park Sweep." Clearly, many citizens have become uncomfortable or even incensed by the unsightlyness, the public inebriation, the rantings of the the mentally ill, and now, discarded needles in the Park. We now have another band-aid treatment for a major wound. Instead of fixing what is perceived as a flawed needle exchange program, the City is engaging in a public relations gambit by rousting and sweeping the homeless from the Park. I also note that an election approaches. However, when the homeless are rousted from Golden Gate Park, most will still have no where to sleep and most will still be homeless and poor.
There are approximately 6,000 to 10,000 homeless in San Francisco vying for approximately 1,165 shelter beds for singles and three shelters with beds for approximately 45 families. This assumes that shelters are "housing." The homeless and near homeless receive benefits from a variety of sources: General Assistance (GA), SSI/SSDI and Veteran’s benefits to name a few. San Francisco cannot touch Social Security or Veteran’s benefits; it does, however, control GA funds. Therefore, the 3,000 or so homeless receiving GA at the initiation of the "Care Not Cash" program got priority for the shelter beds and found their monthly checks severely cut, all at the expense of non-GA recipients. No new beds were created under the program. It just meant that non-GA recipients were not sleeping in a bed most nights. Supposedly, the funds taken from GA recipients have been used for additional social services for the homeless. With San Francisco facing severe budget problems, does anyone really believe that these funds have been used to substantially bolster our understaffed, overworked, and underbudgeted social service agencies.
According to San Francisco Housing Authority figures, San Francisco has approximately 6,000 public housing units and 7,409 Section 8 voucher programs and 2,720 other federally subsidized voucher programs. There are thousands on the waiting list for public housing and the waiting time can be several years. Once selected for public housing, it can take 3 to 6 months for the application to be processed. In the meantime, the unit remains empty. The waiting list for Section 8 vouchers has been closed. Finally, there are about 500 hotels with apporximately 1,200 units designated as Single Residency Occupancy (SRO) hotels. Some of these SROs are in need of repair, present safety/health issues, and face demolition
The "roust" and the "sweep" are merely an excuse by the City to deceive the public that shelters, SROs, and the insufficient public housing stock will end homelessness. Instead, we need to address the structural causes of homelessness, i.e, the de-funding of federal affordable housing programs in the United States since 1983. See "Without Housing: Decades of Federal Housing Cutbacks, Massive Homelessness and Policy Failures" (2006) by the Western Regional Advocacy Project.
We have spent $448.5+ billion in our Iraq misadventure. Imagine how much affordable housing this could have provided.
Judi Iranyi, a licensed clinical social worker, is an unpaid social worker with the Homeless Advocacy Project and a member of San Francisco's Shelter Monitoring Committee, which conducts announced and unannounced inspections of homeless shelters.
Judi Iranyi, LCSW
San Francisco
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November 20, 2009
