Storm clouds move swiftly across the sky – north and east. At 7:07 AM a man can be heard shouting from the street. The distance and the buildings between us make his words unrecognizable. If I had to guess, he’s under the overhang at the library across the street. Two crows shout back and I imagine that they might be pointing him in the direction of a garbage can with food. I think about that life for a moment. I see it often enough – people shouting on street corners, picking food out of garbage cans. I imagine the spoils of the dumpster behind my grocery store. I imagine the type of street knowledge one might acquire – what gets thrown away, when and where. Then I think of the sickness that follows. A rotten meal and nowhere to take a shit. At what point does one get used to having diarrhea when living on the street? Earlier in the morning, I had turned the heat up in my apartment – which feels downright decadent given the morning contemplation. I’m thankful to have a roof over my head.
The other night, on a rainy walk with a friend and her dog, I said hi to Dave, who had settled into the doorway of one of the clothing stores. Dave lives on the street in my neighborhood. After we had passed, my friend said she’s noticed more homeless people in the neighborhood lately. I was tempted to reply, “oh that’s Dave. He’s not homeless – this is his home.” Even though I will sometimes use the word homeless, I recognize the distinction between unhoused (or unsheltered) and homeless. Home, as I like to think of it, is more than a building. It encompasses people and community and belonging. Many of the people living on the street have their routines and their places and some semblance of community. Some of them look out for each other. Dave will sometimes come by the local bar where the bartenders know him and will refill his big, waxy, movie theater cup with ice and soda. Sometimes they give him coffee. Dave has been in my neighborhood for the entire two years I’ve lived here – most certainly longer. While he may not have a permanent place to live, he is a resident here.
I can count at least a dozen neighborhood regulars that I see almost every day – maybe more. There’s the young guy who wears all black with a few silvery, metally, jangly things and black eyeliner. He can sometimes seem aggressive. He wanders around a lot – gives a mean stare. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him setting up camp anywhere. There’s the guy with curly hair who always wears a grease-stained hoodie and often mutters a quick and low-toned, “hoo!” There’s the big guy with the bucket hat and a small plastic bag swinging from his one hand. He always says, “excuse me sir, spare a dollar?” Despite the politeness of his question, he’s rumored to have kicked a child. There’s the guy who is always barefoot and walking his bike around – the bike has loaded on it his various possessions including a long thin object that looks like a rifle bag. There’s another guy with a bike. He seems fairly well put together. He stands outside of the market or the grocery store and usually offers to do gardening work for a few dollars. Sometimes he asks for money for the hotel room. There’s the really old guy who has a small shopping cart and squats by the closed bank or huddles by the doorway where the stationary store used to be. He sits on a soiled blue pad of some sort. He goes missing for long periods of time and I often wonder/worry abut him – he looks very old and frail. There’s the woman who carries the big backpack and wears a heavy parka. She usually sets up camp near a specialty gift store. There’s the man with the metal coffee cup who stands on the corner across from the meat store. He stands overly upright with his hands in front of his chest, almost in prayer, talking as if he were a preacher – he’s usually muttering about conspiracy theories. There’s the older man, balding and Asian, who sets up a small cardboard fort in the doorway of a shop on Union Street. There’s the tall, young guy with blond hair who usually has a sleeping bag and settles in near one of the coffee shops. There’s the youngish, bearded, tattooed, and loner-looking guy who spends his days across the street from Balboa Cafe. He’s usually sitting on a step or ledge, sometimes drinking, sometimes drawing, sometimes scrolling on his phone. I’ve seen his sketchbook as I’ve walked past. He’s good. There’s a guy who’s always reading a book and usually has a mauve colored rolling suitcase. I see him on the bus and in the Presidio, and occasionally on my street. There was another guy, older with a long gray beard. He set up his sleeping bag one or two doorways over from the bookstore – he was always reading a book too. I haven’t seen him in a while. There’s an older woman – thin and not very with it. She mumbles to herself and sits in a chair outside of the Sweetgreen shop or in one of the doorways near the Horseshoe (one of the bars I go to). There’s a neighborhood guy (not homeless) who I’ve seen delivering warm clothing to her. There was a guy who was pitching a tent by the bus stop across the street from my apartment. Every night he methodically set his tent up. Every morning, he methodically took it down. Some nights, I’d walk by and could see the glow of a flashlight and hear him listening to the radio. He was only there for a few months, maybe less. There’s the guy with the three-legged dog – he’s not around much and is usually by the park at Fort Mason. There’s the black guy – one of the the only unhoused persons of color I see in the neighborhood. He’s been setting his bags up at the library entrance. I only see him at night and at a distance. Maybe he was the one shouting in the morning rain.
To quote the Sesame Street song, “these are the people in my neighborhood… in my neighborhood… in my neigh-bor-hood…” Most of them move about quite a bit. Some I only see during the day, some I only see at night when they’re bedding down. I’m sure there are a lot more. Dave is the only one I know by name.
According to the official count from 2024, there were 8,323 people in the homelessness system here in the city. These numbers are almost always an under-representation of the true number. The count is typically conducted on a single day in January and as such, is necessarily a snapshot. 4,354 of those people are unsheltered – meaning living on the street, in cars, or in places not meant for habitation (abandoned building, parks, etc.). Nearly 60% of the homeless population are men, and nearly one third of the population is considered to be an adult with serious mental illness. When I talk to people about issues related to homelessness, I try to caution them about their assumptions on mental illness. Many think that mental illness is the cause of homelessness. It can be a cause, but lack of sleep, isolation, and trauma (both from living on the street and from whatever precipitated becoming unhoused) all contribute to poor mental health. Moreover, well-intentioned policies like deinstitutionalization (in which patients were released from mental hospitals) and attempts to end mass incarceration (reducing sentences and releasing prisoners) both resulted in more people living on the streets without adequate support.
The district where I live has 270 of those 8,323 people – sixth fewest or fifth most out of the eleven districts in the city. There is precipitous drop-off in numbers between fourth most (district 9 with 966 people) and my district (district 2 with 270 people). That’s how it is here. The majority of our homeless population, both sheltered and unsheltered, live in a handful of neighborhoods with a high concentration of subsidized housing (single room occupancy) and high concentration of services (shelters and soup kitchens). The services go where the people are and the people go where the services are. Because my district (which is much bigger than just my neighborhood) has some of the steeper hills in the city (a 200+ foot climb with a 24% incline), a lot of the unsheltered people live in the lower-lying commercial corridors and parks where there is foot traffic and opportunities to solicit money.
Even though I no longer work directly on issues related to housing and homelessness, I pay close attention to what’s going on at the local and national level. When I can (usually in conversations with friends and acquaintances), I advocate on behalf of my unhoused neighbors because I think it’s too easy to write them off, ignore them, or worse – think of them as a menace without trying to understand the situation. I don’t have solutions to the problem of homelessness (it’s actually many problems). The one thing I can do is make eye contact, say hello, and yes, hear the shouting and try to imagine how hard that way of living must be.