Asking for change

Asking for change

In the current debate amongst the board of supervisors about how to best deal with the growing homelessness in San Francisco, one theme seems to be universal. No politician is willing to identify and tackle the root causes of homelessness. Instead of viewing homelessness as the symptom of a much greater set of circumstances, at the root of which lies the shortage of affordable housing units, the current trend is to define the people living on the streets as the problem in and of itself. The city has apparently given up on ending poverty and has instead decided to try and hide it.
The mayoral candidates for 2004 are attempting to build their career by introducing tough measures presumably designed to help the homeless. The truth is, though, that Supervisor Gavin Newsom, in a bald attempt to bolster his political career, has decided to launch his mayoral campaign on the backs of poor people. His new “Care not Cash” initiative aims to cut monthly welfare checks from an average of $ 350 to only $ 59 (that’s less than $ 2 a day for necessities such as clothes, transportation, personal hygiene items, medicines, etc.) without definitely guaranteeing an increase in services.
According to estimates of the San Francisco based Coalition on Homelessness, the GA cuts would only affect about 2700 people currently. Chance Martin, Project Coordinator for the “Street Sheet” at the Coalition on Homelessness thinks that the savings in the city’s budget would lie somewhere around $ 4.5 million a year. “We already spend $ 104 million a year on homeless services here in San Francisco,” says Martin, “4.5 million dollars isn’t going to make a big dent, one way or the other.” It will, however, create immense difficulties for the homeless population. The biggest problem with “Care not Cash” program is that even if the saved money is going towards financing more services, these services do not exist right now. And they won’t be up and running when people’s welfare checks are getting cut.
Ultimately the measure is designed to drive homeless people out of San Francisco. In the initiatives own words, they want to bring San Francisco ‘in line’ with other cities in California, “thereby eliminating the incentive for homeless individuals who want cash rather than services to congregate here.” While many people still view “Care not Cash” as an honest attempt to help the homeless, in reality it will mainly serve downtown business interests. “The fact that tourist and real estate industries are actively conducting public relation campaigns for this proposal is really the biggest giveaway. These industries have identified widespread visible homelessness as detrimental to their business interests,” says Martin.
The tourist industry is also organizing its own call to arms against the homeless. The Hotel Council of San Francisco recently launched an advertising campaign for a web-site they are hosting (wewantchange.com). The posters depict various store or hotel owners holding card-boards with messages written on them. The imagery itself already suggests an act of ‘fighting back’. They are using the homeless’ own methods for panhandling - thus implicitly trying to beat them with their own weapons. One of the advertised slogans reads: “I do not want to sweep people of my doorstep”. This hostile choice of words already hints at the general attitude of the wewantchange.com campaign towards the homeless. They are regarded as dirt that needs to be swept away, not as people. The irony of the situation is that here you have “one industry in San Francisco that could actually do something about homelessness especially in light of the fact that they are currently crying about not being able to fill their rooms”, says Martin. Yet their only intention is to get rid of the homeless – by any means necessary.
This approach echoes a lot of people’s sentiment towards the city’s dwellers. Many people purely consider the homeless as eyesores without having any sympathy for their situation. The public face of homelessness, as pushed forward by the above mentioned initiatives, contributes to the impression of homeless people as drunks and junkies. While it probably is true that homeless people have a higher percentage of drug users than the more fortunate parts of society, the homeless are also forced to live their whole lives, the good parts and the bad, in the public eye.
There is also a large ethic of ‘personal responsibility’ that informs people’s attitude towards homelessness and unemployment. Certain members of the public react rather rude when they are asked for change. “Get a job” is an answer that a lot of panhandlers get these days. The inability of some people to grasp the larger connections that contribute to a situation like this is plainly amazing. It seems bizarre that people can be so short-sighted that they do not realize that the system we live in requires a certain percentage of the population to be without a job in order to function properly. Homelessness is a (calculated) symptom of a disease that permeates society as a whole. While it is true that poverty is not a pretty sight, ignorance is even uglier.
In blaming the victim, society easily discards itself of any sense of guilt. It is a very difficult and painful process to identify and deal with the root causes of homelessness. A lot of times this means accepting the failure of society as a whole, and taking collective responsibility. A fact that a lot of people would find very troublesome to come to terms with. “Homelessness has always been seen as only a temporary problem,” according to Martin, “there is this egoism in the American collective psyche that doesn’t want to admit to itself that there are some serious systemic problems, and that we, in fact, are creating this situation.”
The real problem seems to be the completely out of control rent market. Housing is slowly becoming a privilege, not a right in San Francisco. Even most people with jobs are never more than two paychecks away from homelessness. The U.S. is about 600.000 units of affordable housing short of current need. The political will, however, to build these houses is missing. As Chance Martin puts it: “Unless we build housing, we are always going to have homeless people. Anything we do that falls short of putting them in affordable housing is only going to perpetuate the cycle.”