by CJ Ross
“Where am I taking you? Where are you gonna stay tonight?” It was 2016. I Googled “shelters in San Francisco” on my friend’s phone from the passenger seat with about two hours left until we reached the city.
I never thought I’d return to the city where I was born and raised. As I searched, I expected to find lists of places to sleep in a pinch, but instead I came across lists of “criteria” used to “score” my life experiences, which were the new determinants of how easily I’d be granted shelter in my own hometown—thanks to what was then a newly implemented system. I felt overwhelmed, like I suddenly had an hour and a half to ace an exam—only the test questions were about my life. I may never have survived if I had needed to process my traumas before then.
With 15 minutes until the Sixth Street exit, we decided to skip the test and get margaritas at El Rio before the Bernie Sanders rally and just rent a U-Haul van for me to sleep in.
Eight years later, I was on the verge of finally being housed on my own in the city of my birth. I witnessed the inception of what it’s now called the coordinated entry system, which attaches a numerical score to your priority based on your responses to questions about my experiences before and during my homelessness. I chose terrifying nights alone on the streets over having to answer the questions even though I knew that answering them would take me off the streets.
Just before COVID-19 hit San Francisco in 2020, I heard about a new place to go, down on the Embarcadero, which was “like a shelter, but better.” My social worker friend called it a “navigation center,” and said it was hard to get into but worth trying. She said to go hang out around the outside of the place and try to get the attention of a worker who may be able to tell me the way in. I did.
It must’ve been cold because I somehow found it in me to have a conversation with the worker about how long I’ve been homeless. The guy said I had a good chance of getting in and told me to go up the Embarcadero to a park across from the Ferry Building and to look for the Homeless Outreach Team van. The HOT team, as it’s called, had no phone number at the time, but its members drove around looking for unsheltered people, and they had the authority to take me back there for bed. What an ordeal! The HOT team didn’t “find” me—instead, it was a National Park Service ranger named Valdez, who went above and beyond the call of duty to get me there. As the fog rolled in and evening came, he called his boss, who called her boss, whose friend knew the navigation center’s then-unlisted phone number. We called, and Valdez asked if he could take me there himself that night instead of waiting for the HOT team the following day. Yes, they said, but only with the female ranger on the phone with us in his car and our route called in beforehand. It was dark by the time we got there, where the wall around the “nav center” stood one full story high. It was less than one mile from where we were. I got my bed.
I had been there for some time when I learned about the coordinated entry system from the nav center guests in line for housing assistance. At the onset of COVID, we were relocated to shelter-in-place hotels. But instead of waiting for the pandemic to end to get my housing, I bought a truck and left town in an attempt to relocate. I’ve perpetually underestimated the vortex of forces that keeps a sixth-generation San Franciscan coming back. I try to leave for no real reason other than defiance, but always seem to end up back.
In 2022, I finally found the HOT team, literally by accident: I fell off of a curb backwards on Polk Street to avoid stepping in dog poop, dropping a bag of stuff, losing a flip-flop and bruising my ass on their van’s open door. It was kind of a praise-God moment because the team’s new phone number hadn’t been working, and I’d been trying to get into a shelter for days. They said they could do my assessment right there in front of Walgreens, and I finally was confronted with the questions I read about in 2016. I was more traumatized by those seven minutes than by six terrifying years of sleeping doorways carpeted by cardboard boxes.
“Have you ever traded sex for a place to sleep? Have you ever been beaten, raped for abused by someone offering you shelter? What were the reasons you became homeless in the first place? Do you have any mental problems?” Umm… I do now.
In tears, with one shoe on, I accepted the shelter bed that I was offered, but declined the ride I was offered to the shelter. I told them that I needed to take care of a few things first, but “I’ll be there by four—on the bus? Thanks, see you there…” No chance. I went to drink wine instead and recover.
As it turned out, my score for coordinated entry was just one point below what I needed to qualify for permanent supportive housing. I was only assigned “problem-solving” status, which doesn’t give you housing. That kept me in the shelter system with the same unsolved problems until last year when a homeless advocate said that I could have what’s called a “clinical review” of my housing assessment. As fortunate as I felt to have that opportunity, by the end of the hour-long review, I had drudged even deeper into past traumas. It was like hitting the windshield at 80 mph face-first, but I got three points!
In 2023, I finally made it into the line for permanent supportive housing. But it was only after I’d been waiting in line watching people who just knew the right things to say in their assessments sail past me into comfy digs of their own for free.
It’s been a confusing, depressing and frustrating process, yet I forced myself to stay. I’ve traveled too many miles of hell toward housing just to tap out now.
