This shelter at the SF County Fair Building in Golden Gate Park was only open briefly as the criteria for opening temporary shelters in San Francisco has been changing almost as fast as the winter weather.
Stories and photos by Thomas K. Pendergast
(Originally published in the February, 2016, issue of the Sunset Beacon newspaper, a community newspaper serving the Sunset District of San Francisco.)
The recent El Nino storms have made this a real challenge for city agencies. The original plan was for about ten temporary sites of a hundred beds each but only a few of these sites actually occured.
Yet, it seems that some pressure here and flexibility there made sure a temporary shelter was set up recently at the SF County Hall of Flowers near the intersection of 9th Avenue and Lincoln Way.
It opened on January 21, at about 6:00 p.m., and closed on the 23rd, at about 9:00 a.m., hosted 100 spaces and blankets for a hundred people, with hot and cold meals included.
The original plan was for a thousand mattress spaces around San Francisco, so what went wrong?
City officials were waiting for the temperature to drop below 40 degrees Fahrenheit, but that only happened the last week of 2015, before anything else had been set up. So, that made no difference.
Then the threshold for the temporary shelter beds was whether or not monsoon rains would drench San Francisco for several days in a row, but that didn’t happen either. So, after advice from homeless advocates, the plan was adjusted.
“We have an existing homeless shelter system. We have a Cold Snap Protocol for that system and that’s where we use 40 degrees or lower, then we expand our services within that system” said Ben Amyes, the City’s disaster response manager for the Emergency Response Unit. “When we have heavy El Nino rains, that’s when this system operates, and this is our disaster response system. And essentially what we’re doing is we’re exercising our disaster response plan that we have for an earthquake. We take out the word ‘earthquake,’ we insert the words ‘El Nino’ and we’re testing our plan for mass care and shelter using our earthquake plan.”
Amyes said the criteria for when this all kicks in is “evolving.”
“Based on the information that we had when I was originally writing up our plan we thought we were going to get torrential rain coming in for long periods of time. I set my criteria based on that,” he explained. “Then we have the reality of a couple of days of rain, sometimes it’s light, sometimes it’s heavy. So we sort of made adjustments. … It’s continuing to morph and anything over an inch within twenty-four hours is something that will make us have a conference call and make a decision based on the circumstances at that moment, and what our resources are and what the need is.”
Amyes confirmed that they were hoping for a thousand beds using Recreation & Parks facilities, YMCAs and churches.
“The challenging thing is that every time that we come in to open a shelter, we’re displacing another program,” he said. … “This (site) was open and other sites were occupied. We decided we only needed one shelter for this rainstorm so we ended up out here and we want to see how it runs out here.”
As for outreach, he says the City’s Homeless Outreach Team (HOT) goes out to engage with people and let them know what services are available and seeing if they need transportation to them.
They are also serving breakfast, lunch and dinner provided by different food providers that have volunteered to work with them, so each time the system is a little different. At the Hall of Flowers, for example, Meals On Wheels provided breakfast and dinner, while his agency provided the lunch for a combination of hot and cold meals.
As he stood outside the hall on the morning of January 22nd, he described the difficulties involved in providing the hot meals.
“Tonight, we’ll do fifty hot meals and fifty cold meals, based on the current population, because I expect some stragglers to come in, but because of food-handling issues regarding safety, I can’t hold the hot meals indefinitely, so I need to provide cold meals because they are safer to hold.”
An unidentified homeless man sleeps in a bus shelter near the Safeway at Seventh Avenue and Cabrillo Street during the recent inclement El Nino weather that hit San Francisco.
Andrea Coleman, 63, said she is a native San Franciscan who has been homeless for “years” and she has been on a waiting list for about two years for housing. She praised the volunteers working at this temporary shelter.
“These people have been so nice to us,” said Coleman. “I started not to even come because of how the other shelters treat you. … They treat us like we’re human beings and it feels good.”
She heard about this one at the St. Anthony’s shelter, which did not have room for her. She said she got a bus ride out to the shelter and she was grateful to get out of the rain, describing the difficulties of being on the street during storm season, scavenging for plastic to cover herself at night and stay dry.
“Oh it’s dreadful to sleep on a concrete floor, on the sidewalk, cold all night,” she said. “I went to a construction site and found plastic.”
She also was very grateful for the steak sandwich they provided.
“It was a meal, a whole sandwich and cheese.… I don’t eat that much because I’m not used to eating.”
James Cota, 52, originally from Santa Cruz, said he has been homeless for more than three years and he is also on a waiting list for housing.
“I’m patient,” said Cota. “I’ve been in the storm for the last three weeks. I’ve been in the storm practically every night and the conditions are tough. There have been one or two nights I was able to get into St. Mary’s. Sunday is the day they pass out new tickets so once all the bed mats are given, you’re on standby. And once standby is at capacity then the pop-up shelter opportunity, SF HOT lets us know where they’re at.”
Jennifer Friedenbach is the executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness SF and she said the City’s Human Services Agency, which oversees most of the city-run homeless services, has been hearing about the inadequacies of the temporary shelter system from homeless advocates.
“They’ve gotten a lot of feedback, and they’ve been adjusting, that the criteria was too stringent and also the (weather) predictions aren’t always right,” said Friedenbach…. “From our perspective it wasn’t working because we had a whole bunch of downpours where no shelters opened up.
“We really wanted to get some capacity out on the west side as well because that is an area that generally gets pretty ignored in terms of resources. So, we were happy to see that the county fair building opened up,” she said. “We were really frustrated at the first part, where they weren’t really getting the word out and they took too long to open up stuff. … But our recommendations that we’ve given they’ve adopted in how to get the word out.”
She also said the homeless on San Francisco's west side are not all that different from the homeless in many cities.
“There’s a lot of people living in their cars,” she said. “When we do outreach out there it’s a lot of people who grew up there.… People tend to stay close to their communities when they’re in trouble because that’s where their support systems are. It’s people you’re going to look at and not realize that they’re homeless. It’s the nature of homelessness; in all municipalities, as well as San Francisco, the overwhelming majority of people who are homeless in San Francisco became homeless as San Franciscans.”
She acknowledged that the popular perception is many of the homeless are transients from somewhere else who to come here to take advantage of the City’s homeless services.
“That’s the line because that gets the policymakers off the hook and that makes people more comfortable not really empathizing with folks who are homeless,” Friedenbach said.
