Disease does not care about class divisions or housing status. If you leave anybody vulnerable to COVID-19, you increase your whole city’s vulnerability to COVID-19. When you increase access to stable, humane housing, you increase the health of your city. When you support and prioritize the health of your friends and community members who are experiencing homelessness, you support and prioritize the health of your healers in the hospitals and the health of those organizing in the community.
Op-Ed: Global Warming is Real
Developing nations could go solar in fighting climate change
We all know that fossil fuels cause the greenhouse effect and global warming. The question is how to stop it. For decades, activists protested against nuclear power. Germany closed many nuclear power plants. To generate electricity they are now burning dirty coal. Green energy—wind and solar—is still a very small part of the energy mix worldwide. Meanwhile, the greenhouse effect is becoming stronger and more deadly.
Return to Sender: House the Bay Rallies Against UC Hastings Settlement
“Homes not barricades!! Homes not barricades!!”
These are the words chanted by protesters marching through the streets of the Tenderloin. Some were carrying police barricades, while others held signs that read ‘DEFUND SFPD,” “Rent is Theft” and “Black Homes Matter”. Others were equipped with medical supplies and sustenance, and in the back you could hear the Brass Liberation orchestra playing their instruments brightly to the beat of the chants.
Community organizations such as House the Bay,
Fight for Essential Trans Services
The seminal clinic that developed the gender protocols by which bigger, better funded medical providers now endeavor to treat trans patients, Lyon-Martin Health Services, is also my everyday clinic, and I still need it. It’s where I meet with my primary care provider, where I go when I’m sick, where I get my hormone scrips refilled, where I was able to get effective referrals for gender confirmation surgeries, where I got all my paperwork for legal gender change,
Save our SROs, Save our Homes!
San Francisco is facing a serious housing affordability crisis. We can all agree to that fact and I’m sure it doesn’t come as a surprise to hear. With homelessness increasing by 15-30% last year depending on who you talk to, and the cost of rental housing at an all-time high, everyone in San Francisco is feeling the effects of the crisis. So why, given the level of suffering we see on our streets every day,
Solutions Not Sweeps
by Brian Edwards
On any given night in San Francisco, there are over 9,000 unhoused San Francisco residents, and as of Wednesday, January 29, there were 937 people on the single adult shelter waitlist. Without an indoor option, thousands of San Franciscans are forced to live outside in public spaces. The City increasingly criminalizes their presence in these places, and forcibly removes them with daily (and nightly) sweeps without offering adequate alternative shelter or services.
Housing First: It Just Makes Sense
Cities across the United States have tested the housing first model and found that it works very well, presenting a compelling case that housing first should be expanded where it is already used on a small scale and implemented where it is not public policy.
Despite the immediate costs and political resistance with building housing for chronically homeless people, the shift to putting homeless people in permanent, personalized shelter is justified on a range of grounds.
BLACK HISTORY MONTH OR THANKING THE SLAVES FOR MAKING AMERICA GREAT?
For many people, especially Black people, the month of February signifies the annual celebration of Black History Month/African-American Heritage Month. February is designated as a time to recognize African American achievements and contributions to America. One notable consequence is the hero worship of a handful of prominent figures. What’s more, this celebration of Black achievement particularly tends to be sanitized, and this selective representation is often at the expense of erasing a rich legacy of individuals,