Homeless in San Francisco
Reporter Amanda Witherell and intern Bryan Cohen of the San Franisco Bay Guardian spent a week living undercover in the city's shelters to learn what it's like for the homeless to navigate a confusing system. Witherell's amazing "Shelter Shuffle" is full of powerful observations about the demoralizing grind of homelessness. Here she describes a night at a church shelter:
Moments after I finish eating the lights are turned off, even though a couple of women are still working on their meals. A shelter monitor comes through and confiscates our cups of water, saying she just refinished the floors in here and doesn't want any spills. I notice that unlike at other shelters where I've stayed, none of the women here have bothered to change into pajamas. Some haven't even removed their shoes. I follow suit, tucking my jacket under my head for a pillow and pulling the blanket around me.
When the lights come back on at 5:45 a.m., I understand why no one changed: there's no time to get dressed. Shelter monitors enter the room, rousting sleepers with catcalls to get up and get moving. One turns on a radio, loud. They're brisk and no-nonsense, grabbing blankets and shoving them into garbage bags, pulling mats into a stack at the edge of the room.
Witherell also does a nice job of explaining some of the root causes of homelessness:
Throughout the '80s wages stagnated while the cost of living soared: between 1978 and 1988 the average rent for a studio apartment in San Francisco jumped 183 percent — from $159 a month to $450. Twenty years later it's $1,114. In 1978 the Housing and Urban Development budget was $83 billion. Today it's $35.2 billion, almost nothing by federal budgetary standards, and almost no new public housing units have been built since 1996, while 100,000 have been lost.
The story's Web package comes with nightly journals kept by Cohen and Witherell along with profiles of some of the people they met at the shelters. www.sfbg.com/entry.php?entry_id=5669&volume_id=317&issue_id=339&volume_num=42&issue_num=20&l=1