COME AS YOU ARE: Mental Health Care (and drug treatment) Prop C style

by Helen Redmond

Make a left from Harrison onto Merlin Street in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood and you enter another world. Past two low-slung, industrial buildings and under a noisy freeway is a scene that has come to define San Francisco: Tents line the sidewalks, and a collection of household items tumble out onto the street. There are cardboard boxes, coolers, overflowing garbage bags, containers of food, grills, chairs, and a pile of bicycles. A huge clock is attached to a chain-link fence and on top of it sits a red toy truck.

… READ MORE

Share this:

Innovative and much needed new program launching in SoMa!

by Op-Ed

SoMa RISE is an innovative program that will provide low barrier services to people who use drugs in and around the SoMa and Tenderloin areas, with a particular focus on individuals who are marginally housed or are experiencing homelessness, starting this winter. The SoMa RISE Center at 1076 Howard St. will welcome people under the influence of drugs into a safe, indoor setting. We will provide a space for people in crisis to stabilize and get connected to care,

… READ MORE

Share this:

Why We Need Safer Consumption Sites

by Seth Katz

Safer Consumption Sites (also referred to as Safer Injection Facilities, Overdose Prevention Programs, Supervised Consumption Services) have been a hot topic nationwide, but especially here in San Francisco. There are over 25,000 people who inject drugs in San Francisco alone and the overdose crisis has only worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many see the rising overdose statistics as a result of fentanyl, despite it being prevalent on the West Coast since around 2014. Those working in drug policy,

… READ MORE

Share this:

They Have Millions, We Have What Is Right

by Fernando Martí

I’ve been fighting an eviction since 2019. After living in my apartment for 20 years, always paying the rent on time, never bothering our landlords, they sold the building. Our rent-controlled unit paid off their mortgage (maybe several times over), and now in retirement they cashed in on San Francisco’s nouveau riche market.

The new buyer, of course, wants to kick us out. They are exploiting an Ellis Act loophole that allows for “owner-move-in” evictions—meaning that they can legally force us from our home as long as they or members of their family intend to live in it.

… READ MORE

Share this:

Hotels Heal: Keep SIPs Open

by Lina Khoeur

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. 

… READ MORE

Share this:

Op-Ed: Global Warming is Real

by Michael Vilkin

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.

… READ MORE

Share this:

Return to Sender: House the Bay Rallies Against UC Hastings Settlement

by Jiffy Phan, organizer with House the Bay

“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,

… READ MORE

Share this:

Fight for Essential Trans Services

by Scout Tranm President of the Board of Traction Project, a founding member of The Degenderettes, an Eisner-nominated artist with work commissioned by the SFMOMA, and was born and raised in the Bay Area.

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,

… READ MORE

Share this:

Save our SROs, Save our Homes!

by Curtis Bradford, Long-time Community Organizer and Affordable Housing Advocate from the Tenderloin Community.

     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,

… READ MORE

Share this:

Solutions Not Sweeps

by Quiver Watts

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. 

… READ MORE

Share this: