By Calvin Welch, HANC Board Member
The April issue of the HANC Voice is being distributed door-to-door in our neighborhood because we can't hold our usual neighborhoo0d meeting at the Library but we still want to be in touch with you. . This is the first time in fifty years HANC has not met. We miss our neighbors’ thoughts and opinions on issues of importance to all of us.
We will do door to door distribution of the VOICE until we can all meet again. It’s our way to stay in touch.
This issue will list information of importance to all of us in this period of world-wide challenge. In addition to that information that is aimed at things individuals can do to make their own and others’ lives better, the HANC Board also understands that at this time we must continue to join with others and raise a collective voice to assert policies needed for the most vulnerable among us: tenants with little or no income and our homeless neighbors.
TENANT PROTECTIONS
HANC supports policies to ban evictions of tenants facing April rents when having no or drastically reduced incomes for March. This is the first month this will happen but it won't be the last month. The local Order creating an Eviction Moratorium does not cover state allowed evictions under the Ellis Act. Banning Ellis Act evictions requires Gov. Newsom to act to suspend the Ellis Act, which at this writing (March 27th) he has yet to do. HANC strongly urges its members to act collectively and email Gov. Newsom urging him to suspend the Ellis Act evictions. Copy Sen. Wiener and Assemblymen Chiu and Tang as well.
This will not be the only time we ask you for action on this matter as the crisis deepens and broadens.
SHELTERING OUR HOMELESS SAN FRANCISCANS
While Mayor Breed should be applauded for her early commitment to shelter in place and her ongoing support for progressive policies during the crisis , there is one glaring shortcoming in her administration’s response: housing our homeless neighbors. One cannot meet her early and perceptive requirement for "shelter in place" if one has no "place" in which to shelter. It is a major flaw in an otherwise commendable public health response.
D5 Supervisor Dean Preston has taken it upon himself to mount a campaign to raise funds for renting vacant hotel rooms for homeless residents raising, at this writing, some $57,000 in a gofundme account (https://www.gofundme.com/f/46f5e-house-homeless-in-hotels-stop-the-spread-of-covid). In addition, he and five other Supervisors are urging the Mayor to adopt this program City wide . The City has the power to actually order the hotels to hand over rooms for a public purpose in this emergency. Indeed, Mayor Breed has asked for some 1,500 rooms for emergency responders including health care workers, unsheltered seniors and folks from Laguna Honda and other congregate care facilities. The hotels are complying given the fact that the conventions and visitor industry is vastly reduced and empty hotel room number at least 11,000.
The 2019 Point-in-Time Count listed some 8,000 people "experiencing homelessness" in San Francisco, 5,000 of which were "unsheltered". In the midst of this public health crisis how can the City not "shelter" these folks? How can we expect to "flatten the curve" and not provide a room for all homeless San Franciscans. How can the policy of "self-isolation" or the 14-day post "cure" isolation be accomplished for them if they have no private space? Doesn't this failure undermine the total effort? We need all 11,000 hotel rooms, not 1,500.
More locally, the 5,000 seat Kezar Pavilion on Stanyan with team showers and bathrooms could also be used in the crisis. And the plans of the Coalition for a Complete Community for senior and youth services to be temporarily opened at 730 Stanyan until the affordable housing is built on that site must be pushed forward as soon as possible.
The point here is to mobilize public support for the City to take hotel rooms and make available empty public facilities to address the needs of our homeless neighbors. Email Mayor Breed and ask her to make these resources available for our neighbors and don't forget to thank her for her leadership thus far.