Brown Meets a Problem He Can’t Solve: the Homeless

SAN FRANCISCO — After sailing through most of his first year in office, winning praise for bridging political chasms in this fractious city, Mayor Willie Brown says he may have hit a problem he can’t solve--the dilemma posed by the city’s estimated 10,000 to 15,000 homeless people.

“This is the most complex problem I have faced as mayor,” the normally can-do mayor said in an interview. “It is not one that lends itself to readily triable, replicable solutions.”

Last month, Brown stunned advocates for the homeless by canceling a summit that was intended to focus attention on the problems of street people, just as two previous summits hosted by Brown spotlighted health care and the city’s economy.

Just days before its Sept. 21 opening, Brown told reporters there was not enough common ground between City Hall and advocates for the homeless to hold the gathering. Perhaps, Brown mused, there simply was no solution for a problem that has plagued American cities for more than a decade.

On San Francisco’s Market Street, in the heart of the downtown financial district, tourists and office workers have been running a gantlet of panhandlers for years.

Some say they are so used to the sight of old women pushing shopping carts piled with their belongings or men holding conversations with imaginary companions that they hardly notice them anymore.

“There is a guy who stands out in front of our shop every afternoon, ranting and raving and spitting on himself after he digs through the garbage can,” said Trevor Davis, a clerk in a men’s shop. “It doesn’t bother me, but I think it might throw people from the smaller towns who don’t see what we see every day in the city.”

Others say they are still disturbed by the sight of people of all ages and races aimlessly wandering the streets.

Monica Witt, 26, said she has mixed emotions when someone asks her for spare change.

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“Sometimes I feel that some of the people who say they are homeless may not be completely sincere,” said Witt, a counter clerk at Pasqua’s gourmet coffee shop. “I know for a fact that some of the regulars make . . . more money than I do. But others are really in need, and it is depressing to see them, because there is so much money all around here, and they are so disenfranchised.”

Witt’s is the kind of compassion that makes San Francisco a good place to be homeless, said Paul Cook, who shares a blanket on Market Street with his three cats.

“We are hungry, homeless,” reads the hand-lettered sign Cook has propped in front of his blanket. An Oklahoman, Cook, 34, said he came to San Francisco two years ago looking for work, but couldn’t find a job.

“I can’t stay in the shelters, because they won’t take the cats,” he said. “But this is one of the best cities to be homeless in. The people are more sympathetic here than other places. In Oklahoma, they would just walk right by me.”

In canceling the summit, San Francisco pundits said, Brown was publicly admitting for the first time that the city had a problem he might not be able to fix. Some wondered whether the politically savvy mayor’s “admission” might simply be an effort to put the city’s powerful advocacy and social welfare groups on notice that he was not going to be pushed around. But others speculated that Brown, after years in the state Assembly, was truly unprepared for something so politically and emotionally fraught as homelessness.

Hundreds of hours of pre-summit meetings among Brown’s staff, advocates for the homeless and providers of services to the homeless, Brown said, had only proved that the various sides could not even agree on the nature of the problem, much less how to solve it.

Some more militant advocates insisted that the focus of the summit be the civil rights of the homeless, including the right to sleep in parks and on the city’s sidewalks unmolested by the police. Brown wanted the focus to be on finding ways to get people off the streets.

“This is a messy, messy issue,” said one leader of an advocacy group who expressed sympathy for Brown’s predicament. “It is a no-win issue,” said the woman, speaking on condition of anonymity. “The business community is mad about the numbers of homeless on the streets. The advocates are mad about police pushing them out of parks.”

Brown, who last year savaged incumbent Frank Jordan during the mayoral campaign for Jordan’s get-tough approach to the homeless, says he since has learned that government is not the only culprit. Advocates, he said, share the blame.

“I had always had the impression that we, in government, really constituted the problem, because we are so focused on image,” Brown said. “But the advocates too are plagued with inaction. They have no new ideas.”

Now, Brown said, he plans to develop his own proposal. Once he puts a package together, Brown said, he will “go out and sell that to the community.” He said he still hopes to hold a summit--perhaps as early as next spring.

But at the moment, the mayor said, he hasn’t a clue as to what his package will include.

“Right now, we will maintain the current programs. But that clearly is not enough,” he said.

Brown’s criticism, and his decision to develop a plan inside City Hall, sent shock waves through the advocacy community here, which had enthusiastically supported his candidacy.

“Are we disappointed? Sure,” said Paul Boden of the nonprofit Coalition on Homelessness. “We went through a seven-month planning process, only to have a summit get canceled.”

Boden blamed the failure on Brown, faulting him for appointing a young attorney, Andy Olshin, to the key position of Coordinator on Homelessness. Olshin, said Boden, had no experience with the community and failed to reach out to it.

The only accomplishment of the summit planning process, Boden said, was a survey of 1,500 homeless people the city conducted, using the homeless as field workers. The survey identified what street people believed to be the causes of their homelessness and their suggestions for ways to get them off the streets. Not surprisingly, most said housing, jobs and services were the key issues.

Brown praised the survey as the city’s first attempt to build policy from the street level up. But his public display of impatience with advocates said much about the growing frustration over the problem.

“There is no city in America that has figured out how to deal with this issue,” Brown insisted.

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Since homelessness erupted as a phenomenon here in the 1980s, three mayors have tried and failed to reduce the number of people sleeping on the streets. Although Los Angeles has far more homeless on a given night--42,000, according to the last federal census--the issue has always been more explosive politically here.

San Franciscans cite three reasons:

The homeless are simply more visible in this compact city than they are in sprawling Los Angeles. Hundreds make their home during the day in Golden Gate Park, a favorite tourist attraction, and sleep there at night. Dozens regularly panhandle on downtown streets and sleep in the doorways of office buildings and restaurants.

Then there is San Francisco’s proud reputation as a bastion of liberal compassion. Over the years, the city has developed a myriad of social welfare programs, ranging from distribution of free food and clothes to construction of low-income housing, that some believe have made it the destination of choice for homeless people across the nation.

And finally, said former Mayor Art Agnos, there is the city’s unique population of well-organized, sometimes militant advocates. “San Francisco has always attracted nonconformists from every walk of life,” said Agnos, now the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Western regional director. “Our homeless people are no exception to that rule.”

Agnos, a longtime political ally of Brown, is blamed by some for making San Francisco too welcoming for the down-and-out.

But he counters that San Francisco is on the path toward solving the problem. In the ‘80s, Agnos said, he developed a three-step plan for moving the homeless off the streets and into permanent, subsidized housing. That plan is now being applied across the nation by HUD.

Called the “continuum of care,” the program assesses the homeless in temporary shelters, then moves them to transitional housing where they may receive psychological counseling, job training and other assistance, and ultimately installs them in permanent, subsidized housing. Cities that develop such a plan are eligible for block grants to build subsidized housing and provide treatment and job training. In 1995, HUD handed out $1.12 billion nationally and this year it will will distribute $823 million.

San Francisco won $18 million in HUD grants for the homeless this year. City officials say that the money will help increase the supply of housing for the poorest of the poor, but that the demand is still far greater than the supply. At the moment, there is a five-year waiting list in San Francisco for the most heavily subsidized rental units, Agnos said.

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But Brown says that funding existing programs is not going to eliminate homelessness. He appears to be searching for a solution somewhere between Agnos’ approach and the crackdown that Jordan initiated when he defeated Agnos.

Jordan’s plan, called Matrix, sent squads of police sweeping through concentrations of homeless people, handing out hundreds of citations every week for offenses ranging from urinating or drinking in public to illegally camping in parks.

Some in the business community welcomed Matrix, saying it helped tourists and shoppers feel safer downtown and allowed residents to enjoy their parks. But advocates and the city’s liberal establishment denounced it, saying Jordan was simply shifting the homeless from parks to the front steps of homes in neighborhoods across the city.

One of the strongest critics was Brown, who lambasted Jordan for criminalizing the poor.

But police statistics show that arrests for some Matrix-type offenses have continued at the same pace under Brown. Citations for such offenses as camping in the parks are actually up, according to the police. The mayor’s office says the numbers have not declined only because Brown has put more police on the streets.

On San Francisco streets, both homeless people and police officers say they are not fazed by the political storm raging around them.

At the eastern entrance to Golden Gate Park, where dozens of young homeless people congregate, an 18-year-old who identified herself only as Smiley said the city’s policies won’t affect her decision to live on the streets.

“I live in the park because it’s safer here than in a shelter,” said Smiley, who said she came to San Francisco four months ago from Oregon. Her blue eyes slightly unfocused, Smiley said she has no plans to look for work and likes spending her days in the park with friends.

“People look out for me here,” she said. “I know that if anything happened, my friends would come running.”

A 19-year-old friend, who identified himself only as Mike, said he has “been homeless in Philadelphia, in New Orleans. This city is definitely the best place to be homeless.

“They give you money. They give you food. The weather is good and the cops are OK. They only hassle you if you’re doing something wrong.”