This employee has slept on San Francisco’s streets for 20 years. How town failed him
Every morning, Agustin Fuentes makes his way to the front door of the San Francisco Day Labor Program in the Mission. There he starts his day by sweeping the leaves, plastic bags and cigarette butts that have blown down Cesar Chavez Street and gathered on the sidewalk overnight. After he’s done, he checks in to see if anyone’s called in to the program with a job moving, painting or gardening. If not, he joins the hundreds of day laborers standing on street corners throughout the city, hoping for a few hours of work.
At the end of the day, Fuentes doesn’t retreat to a warm bed indoors. Instead, he finds a few pieces of cardboard and hunkers down on the sidewalk.
Fuentes is one of hundreds of unhoused people in the Mission who are underserved by the city’s homeless programs. In the daytime, when outreach workers hit the streets, he’s at work. At night, he keeps a low profile, trying to stay out of other people’s way. Nearly 60, he’s lived in San Francisco 40 years. For the past 20, he’s been homeless.
Contrary to what we read on Twitter and in the national media, particularly surrounding discussions of Chesa Boudin’s recall, San Francisco’s population of homeless people are not all drug addicts who break into cars and commit violent crimes. In some ways, it’s easier to lean on that narrative; by assuming they are at fault for their homelessness through some deep moral failing, it absolves us from feeling obligated to do anything about it.
But that’s not the reality.
Many, like Fuentes, are longtime residents who simply can’t afford a place to live. And they love this city.
“It’s a beautiful place to live whether you’re homeless or you have a house,” Fuentes said. “I want to stay in my home, in my community, in my beautiful city.”
But as the city — particularly the Mission — has gotten more expensive, its homeless population has grown. Infrastructure to address the crisis has been slow to catch up.
After years of trying to get help with no offers of housing or resources, Fuentes has lost trust in the system. He rarely leaves the neighborhood and doesn’t feel safe in the tenderloin, where much of the city’s services are located.
We often refer to people like Fuentes as falling through the cracks. But it’s not a crack, it’s a gaping hole. The system simply isn’t designed to serve them.
That’s why in March, the Latino Task Force, a collective of more than 40 community groups, deployed 80 volunteers to do block-by-block survey of the Mission’s homeless residents. The goal was not to simply count people, but to collect nuanced information on their needs: how far people must travel to get water (60% said more than two blocks), how many had lost items during homeless sweeps (75%) or how many spoke Spanish as their preferred language (43%).
The ensuing report, released Thursday, fills in crucial gaps in city data on people experiencing homelessness and proposes some long-overdue solutions.
The report confirms that there are many like Fuentes who have been left out. Of the 110 people polled, only 17% said they were on a waiting list for shelter or housing, although nearly every person said they’d like to move indoors.
One barrier: There is nowhere in the Mission District to apply for permanent supportive housing. And even if you’re lucky enough to get on the waitlist for a coveted, subsidized unit, the path inside is broken — especially for the area’s Latino population. The journey from approval to moving indoors can take more than a year. In the first three months of 2022, only 20% of those who moved into this type of housing were Latino. But in the Latino Task Force’s poll, nearly 50% identified as Latino.
After decades of watching more of their community end up on the streets, members of the Latino Task Force aren’t waiting for a top-down solution to homelessness to land in their laps. They have a plan to get people off the streets: El Proyecto Dignidad, the Dignity Project.
The plan looks something like this:
When a sweep of a homeless camp is scheduled, community monitors will act as an intermediary between city agencies and homeless residents, ensuring that people and their belongings are kept safe. Trained case workers from nonprofits will then partner with each person in the camp to start referrals. People will enter shelters and their belongings will be stored while they wait for permanent housing. The streets where they camped will then be cleaned.
It’s not wildly different from what the city says it does during a homeless sweep, though, importantly, without an overreliance on police. And instead of depending on city agencies, El Proyecto Dignidad will empower the Mission neighborhood to care for its own. That means outreach to people like Fuentes would come from people who speak his language, who understand his culture and who he may even recognize from the neighborhood. That trust is essential.
It’s a plan that requires policy shifts, but minuscule new financial investment: The only budget ask is for money to hire two community members to monitor activities between city agencies and mission residents who live outdoors.
There’s a precedent in the city’s plan to end homelessness in the transgender community, which entails a $6.5 million investment in trans-led groups already working with the population and a commitment to permanently subsidize housing for 150 people.
Supporting a similarly engaged coalition that has a clear idea of how to solve homelessness within their community should be a no-brainer.
Too many in San Francisco view homelessness as an intractable, unsolvable challenge. But there’s another narrative that could be true: When given the resources, communities can take care of their own, without displacing people, adding to their trauma or letting them fall through the cracks. For the mission, which has experienced decades of gentrification with little remediation, this trust and investment is long overdue.
Nuala Bishari is a San Francisco Chronicle opinion columnist and editorial writer. Email: nuala.bishari@sfchronicle.com
