Homelessness in San Francisco's Mission: A Neighborhood View

A man’s weathered face peers out from inside a green-and-gray tent on Treat Avenue in San Francisco’s Mission District. Pop tunes pour out of a portable radio next to him, as I introduce myself and shake his hand. He tells me his name: Willy Colon. He says he’s been living on the street for about 15 years.

Colon is tired and recovering from a stroke and a broken hip. He is 69 years old.

 “I can’t do this no more,” he says. “I don’t want to die out here. I want to die at home in a bed, you know, in my own apartment.”

Colon says he has been on the city’s public housing waitlist for a decade. So, for now, this is home. On either side of his tent sit two shopping carts, neatly stacked with belongings. Colon points to a broom, which he uses to sweep the sidewalk from the corner store down to the park.

He sticks to this block because this is where he grew up. When his Social Security check runs out, the guys at the corner store give him credit. And he says he knows everyone in the neighborhood. Or he used to.

“But now we have a lot of white people so they don’t know me. But I tell them, ‘You’ll know me.’ I’m a good person. I’m a very good person. I don’t touch nothing. I don’t steal. I don’t do bad things," he says, and then pauses. "Only I mean the drugs. I don’t sell, but I’m using.”

I ask him how he is doing emotionally.

“Emotionally, it’s like being lonely and very, very, very sad.” He sighs deeply, and his eyes fill with tears. He lies back in his tent. “That’s it.”

Officer Patrick Garrens, who’s been a homeless outreach officer for the San Francisco Police Department’s Mission Station for the past year, knows Colon by name.

“He really, really, really wants to get indoors,” Garrens says. “But there’s a lot of people that want to get indoors, and unfortunately everybody’s on the same list.”

But it’s Garrens' job to try and get Colon to move. A neighbor called the police.

“So on this call, they talk about the encampment close to the playground. The neighbor wants them moved along because it's an ongoing problem. But the neighbor doesn’t say what the problems are, though," Garrens said. "I don’t know if the ongoing problem is the mere existence of the tent here, or if there’s other things they didn’t state.”

Garrens squats down to eye level with Colon. He asks him about his medical condition and tells Colon there’s been a complaint because he’s near the playground. After talking for a few minutes, Garrens tells Colon he’ll send the city’s homeless outreach team to help move him to a temporary shelter in the Bayview.

From 4 a.m. to 2 p.m., Garrens responds to “homeless-related calls for service.”  He says there is rarely a day when his shift ends and he's been able to answer all of the calls. Some are about a specific activity, such as drug use, alcohol use or public urination, but he says most are pretty generic.

“A male with a tent blocking the sidewalk,” he read off the dispatch screen in front of him.

People who call the police usually want the homeless person “moved along,” but Garrens says he just doesn’t have the authority to force people off the street. He can arrest someone if he sees a felony being committed, but he says that is very rare. Usually, all he can do is write a homeless person a ticket or ask them to move.

If he’s successful in getting someone to move, he says they usually pack up their tent and relocate to another spot in the city. When someone in that area calls to complain, the police go out and ask the person to move again.

I asked Garrens if he ever feels like his job is pointless.

“A lot of the time you do feel like you’re failing the public and the complaints that they have,” he says. “And the homeless population still exists. It’s probably gotten bigger since the year I’ve been on, so I guess we haven’t helped much there. And we really try. And we really honestly try to help both sides. Both the people who are homeless and the people who are calling in.”

Homeless complaints across the city are way up. Over the past three years, citywide complaints about encampments have increased by 1,000 percent. Part of the reason is it’s now easier to call, text or even tweet complaints to the city. But Garrens says residents are also more on edge.

“You can see it just when you talk to them,” he says. “You can hear it when you talk to 'em, but you can see it -- they actually are really scared.”

Candace Combs owns a spa in the Mission, and she says she is on high alert when she walks to work.

“As a woman, walking around San Francisco, it’s frightening,” she says. “I’m not even going to lie.”

Combs says she’s lived in San Francisco for 26 years, and homelessness — especially encampments — is the worst she’s ever seen it. As the head of the Mission Creek Merchants Association, Combs says she regularly gets calls and emails from business owners and neighbors who say they are losing customers because of the encampments. And they’re afraid, too.

“Oh my God, it makes you want to cry,” she said. “We have a mother who owns a house on Treat Street who was coming out strolling her kid. And the homeless man just starts screaming at her and was like, 'I’m going to murder both you and your child.' ”

Combs says every day on her way to work she sees illegal activity going on in homeless encampments, from people smoking crack, to sawing up stolen bikes to resell for parts. And she thinks the city needs to take more responsibility for treating and housing homeless people — because it’s not safe for anyone. 

“You can’t leave people in tents on the sidewalk. You just can’t.”

Supervisor David Campos, whose district includes the Inner Mission, said the solution ultimately is more housing. And while that’s a long-term goal, he says the city is also starting to move in the right direction short term.

San Francisco supervisors and Mayor Ed Lee have approved a plan to build six more Navigation Centers in the city over the next two years.

Navigation Centers provide room and board to homeless people, but they are a little different from ordinary shelters. For one, they have fewer rules and restrictions. At the Navigation Center, people can stay with their pets and their partners, and they can come and go freely.

On a sunny Wednesday afternoon, Campos, sporting a yellow bow tie and matching pocket square, shows me around the first Navigation Center, which was opened a year ago in his district at 16th and Mission streets. Four guys greet Campos warmly as we wander through one of the communal rooms where they are watching the Giants game.

Campos led the push to build these centers across the city after seeing the successes at this pilot site. Most importantly, it promises case management to connect homeless people to permanent housing.

“They may not know how to get out of being homeless, and that’s where we come in,” Campos says. “How do we break that cycle?”

But with more than 6,000 people homeless in the city, even six more Navigation Centers aren’t going to fix the problem. People need homes, says Angela Clifton-Flax, who’s living in a tent on Shotwell.

“When you playing with people like you’re playing with them, that’s not going to help anybody,” she says. “It’s not helping. You’re just putting a Band-Aid over a bullet wound.”

The city is building more low-income housing and working to get homeless people into single-room-occupancy hotels. But Campos says it’s a difficult problem to solve. There aren’t even enough homes in San Francisco for those who do have money. While there’s no single solution to this crisis, Campos says the city has to keep looking for answers.