By Danielle McVay and Tab Buckner, HANC Board
HANC’s next general membership meeting will occur on Thursday, April 13 at 7:00 PM in a hybrid format at the Flywheel Café at 672 Stanyan Street (see accompanying article for online access). Guest speakers will address accountability deficiencies at City Hall and community efforts to counter such shortcomings. The panel will include San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness (COH) Executive Director Jennifer Friedenbach, Hospitality House Executive Director Joe Wilson, and Lydia Bransten, Executive Director of the Gubbio Project.
The COH filed a lawsuit last September against the City & County of San Francisco and Mayor London Breed in response to police sweeps of homeless encampments as a violation of people’s constitutional rights. On December 23, U.S. Magistrate Judge Donna Ryu granted a preliminary injunction to halt aggressive policing against the unhoused by means of enforcing certain laws against sitting, lying and sleeping on sidewalks. The injunction also prohibits confiscation and destruction of their personal property. The ruling stated that the City was violating its own laws as well as federal precedent by displacing and destroying encampments without offering a stable shelter alternative. The court’s decision was based on expert witness findings that reviewed three years of enforcement data, declarations from 25 impacted unhoused individuals and the observation of three former City employees. The findings indicate that the City’s forced displacements expose the illusion of a “services-first” program in place. The City has appealed the preliminary injunction and moved to stay the injunction pending the appeal.
Joe Wilson will comment on media coverage and members of the public addressing accountability of non-profit organizations that struggle to fulfill contractual obligations. As a member of the Human Services Network (HSN), his organization and others have endured particularly hard times with the pandemic, shifts in the national economy and a widening local wealth gap. While HSN supports transparency of nonprofits that receive public funds, there is also the need for the City to remain accountable by providing the resources for such organizations to meet their goals.
In more exciting news – Is a Supervised Consumption Site coming to San Francisco? Supervised consumption sites (SCS) are a hotly contested harm reduction intervention across the United States – despite international success (Europe, Canada, Australia). According to the National Harm Reduction Coalition “After 30 years of operations, SCS have demonstrated to: prevent overdose, HIV and hepatitis C transmission, injection-related infection, and public disposal of syringes.” Despite Controversy, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors is in the process of taking concrete steps to open the first SCS. For there to be a sanctioned SCS it must be privately funded thanks to the governor's veto of SB-57 which would have allowed a tri-city safe injection pilot. When offering context to the veto, the Governor expressed concerns of “a world of unintended consequences.” To get the ball rolling, due to corruption among city staffers in relation to behested payments (how could we forget), the board waived the Behested Payment Ordinance allowing the city to “solicit donations to support the opening and operation of safe consumption sites...” In the waiver supes declare “That granting this waiver serves the public interest by preventing and reducing overdose deaths, reducing criminality in areas surrounding the sites, and improving overall street conditions;”
At a time when The City continues to step on its own foot in terms of support for the unhoused and people who use drugs (PWUD) hopefully the SCS can get up and running and bring support to some of our most vulnerable.