Though it's been overshadowed this week by the flood of news connected to the Oakland's Ghost Ship fire, a number of news outlets this week are circling back to the SF Homeless Project that was first launched with a wave of media coverage in June. The Chronicle's Kevin Fagan has done some excellent work following seven chronically homeless individuals who were all cleared out of the Division Street encampment in the city's sweep at the end of February. It's believed that as many as 350 people were camped or parked on and around Division Street during winter rains this past January and February, and the big sweep completed by March 1 made the encampment temporarily disappear, sending some 245 people into temporary shelters, and shuffling others onto other alleys and sidewalks. But the encampment has only reappeared in albeit smaller form in recent months, and there are now other smaller encampments on streets just blocks away, like at 16th and Florida, and 15th and Bryant, and 12th and Harrison.
It's a compassionate piece that breathes some much needed human voices into the debate over how the city can and does address the issue of its highly visible homeless illustrating well how the problem comes down pretty simply to a lack of adequate shelters for people to move to in any stable way.
Of the seven people Fagan followed and check in on over the last nine months, two have found semi-permanent housing in SROs and both of whom have addiction issues that they are trying to overcome. The Chron produced this illustrative interactive map you can scroll through showing that paths that each of the individuals have taken, several of whom ending up right back on Division Street or nearby two are part of a couple living out of their RV, Robert and Cassandra Brownell, and have the same trajectory on the map, ending up right back where they started, parked outside the Best Buy on Division Street.
Robert Brownell, 58, tells the paper he's had trouble getting work though he used to be a floor installer. He and wife Cassandra, 64, bought the RV and began living out of it two years ago after being priced out of an apartment they shared in Hayward. "We stay here because we love this city and this is what we know," he says. See their story in the video below.
Kathy Gray, a 52-year-old trans woman, began the year in a tent on Division Street but she's been in the process of kicking a meth habit and decided, with last winter's weather, that she'd like to try to find some permanent shelter. She and her Shih-tzu Gracie, after a few moves to temporary shelters and several months at the Civic Center Hotel Navigation Center, are now living in the Riviera Hotel at Jones and Ellis, and a case worker is trying to find Gray a more permanent home. See her story in the video above.
See more from the redux of the SF Homeless Project here.
Previously: City To Clear 'Tent City' Homeless Encampment Within 72 Hours