A Publication of the Coalition on Homelessness
I’m not sure where to begin and end on this short tale about my homelessness. It’s just when you think it’s over the saga continues. So let’s start with when I first left home with no place to go. I was only 13 years old and I told my mama that I was a man, and she replied “get your ass out there and be a man. When yo’ mannish ass get yo’ own place you can do what you want to do.
Thief: The City of SF – DPW, SFPD and Caltrans
Interview with Crystal by the Stolen Belonging team, January 31, 2019, Bayview District, San Francisco.
Crystal: My name is Crystal and I’ve been here since 2002, but I grew up in the North Bay. I’ve been in every district and neighborhood in the city at one point or another.
The sweeps really suck. It’s happened a few times in the last month or two.
Reprint from NextCity/Street Spirit
by Sarah Holder
The decision to leave home wasn’t easy for Greyson. After his mother was deported to Mexico, he’d been almost single-handedly taking care of his two younger sisters and his father, who was addicted to drugs. When he was 15, the family made plans to move from California’s East Bay down to Mexico, too. As a trans person, Greyson was scared. He had heard horror stories of beatings and assaults of LGBTQ people.
As we see there is a total of four Navigation Centers here in San Francisco. There is one in the Mission, another on Market, the third at the Dogpatch, and the last one on Army Street.
So I asked a few people about their opinions about the new Navigation Centers and this is what they say. (Mind you, some of these individuals asked to keep their names anonymous during this interview,
“You know what we call you guys, right?”
I knew immediately that this was heading in a direction that I wanted no parts of. Before I could decide if I wanted to play dead in the backseat, he answered to amuse himself.
“Unicorns.”
I was in an uber. I had spent hours at my friend’s house in Lake View, a small community in San Francisco,
