Last month’s debate on the homeless crisis drew a lot of attention. Held at Manny’s, a civic treasure of a cafe/public forum, some 100 paying customers turned out to listen to two diametrically opposed views on unhoused individuals living on San Francisco streets.
The debate was proposed and championed by Adam Mesnick, a chef who owns the Deli Board, a SoMa cafe which features enormous, but delicious, sandwiches. (That is not debatable.)
However, Mesnick was there as a civic activist. His Folsom Street location has a persistent problem with homeless campers, but more seriously, with drug addicts. Mesnick feeds many of those people, and tries to help, but also posts tragic photos of them, often looking broken, on his X account @bettersoma.
Those photos, and his commentary, created a following of some 20,000 for Mesnick, and he began to advocate for a debate with Jennifer Friedenbach. She is the long-time executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness, who often clashes with those who want to remove tent campers from city sidewalks and is the media go-to quote for the progressive view on homelessness.
Surely there were those who assumed the debate would be pretty open and shut. Mesnick would describe the scene and that would be that.
Indeed, that’s how he opened.
He gave a passionate statement about the “lack of humanity . . . and the inability to understand the suffering I’ve witnessed in SoMa. I have found two dead bodies, one in 2023 one in 2019, walking my dog, outside of my home. If you can look at the conditions at Mission and Seventh and tell me that is humane, I will bow out. I will leave. But I think it is irrefutable.”
So, case closed.
Except, then you’re making that classic San Francisco mistake when discussing homelessness — underestimating Jennifer Friedenbach.
Friedenbach has been leading the coalition for some 25 years. She’s been around this race track many times. She’s a pro.
Typically, as she did at Manny’s, she arrives with stacks of info. She’s prepared and she makes a point to be relatable.
“I’m a mom. I’m a neighbor,” she said. “And I totally understand how frustrating it is.”
She took the microphone confidently and launched smoothly into one of several long monologues.
In Friedenbach-land, all signs are up. One program has a “70-80 percent success rate.” Treatment systems have been expanded. They had a drug rehab program that was doing great until the city cut some $40 million during the recession.
It’s a persistent theme. If only the city would kick in some more funding, the Coalition could go ahead with its plans for a “permanent solution to homelessness.” Also $500 million in funds from the voter-approved, and Coalition and Marc Benioff funded Prop C are now available.
Benioff, cheered on by the Coalition, spent some $7.8 million to promote Prop C, even though city officials, including Mayor London Breed did not support it, saying more money and more bureaucracy was not the answer.
(According to a city report SF is spending over $800 million on “Our City, Our Home,” which is essentially homeless outreach, housing, hygiene and mental health programs. Other city-created reports, using different metrics, has put the number at well over $1 billion a year.)
It seems, in Friedenbach’s view, homelessness is a tough problem, but everything is trending in the right direction. She wrapped up her early remarks with a line that has the ring of regular use.
“I come to work each day with the intent of working myself out of a job,” she said.
And now that you mention it, what is her job?
“Sometimes we do tell the city what to do,” she said with a grin. “You know, ‘suggest.’”
A subscription to the newsletter means it will be sent to your inbox. To be honest, postings are irregular, but you’d get them. There’s even a place to contribute to help the cause.
And, to be fair, the clout the CoH has amassed in the city is impressive. The group tirelessly pushes back on city policies it finds ineffective or unfair. It produces policy papers that are full of complicated graphs and dense numerical equations. Say what you will about the Coalition, it has a voice in SF politics and city officials don’t take it lightly.
As for a job description, Friedenbach said at Manny’s it is “community organizing, (working for) a permanent solution to homelessness and work to protect the human rights of folks forced to live on the street. We create policy papers, do media work, do lawsuits and sometimes go to the ballot.”
Noticeably absent there is “cleaning up the scary tent encampment at Seventh and Mission.” That’s the downtown tent village that is so out of control — a dead body discovered, knife threats etc. — that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services told workers to avoid the Federal Building due to “safety and health issues.”
Instead of discussing the sad reality that conditions on the streets are dangerous, intimidating and a symptom of a city that is out of control, Friedenbach told the story of spending the day helping a pregnant homeless woman get into a shelter.
A nice story — and good for Friedenbach — but as Mesnick said at one point, “There are people in my neighborhood who don’t have shoes.”
At some point even the most reasonable San Franciscan has to question whether the Coalition is really trying to get people off the street or defending the status quo.
At least one San Franciscan said it out loud, just recently — Mayor Breed:
“These activists are the same people who hand out tents to keep people on the street instead of working to bring them indoors, as we are trying to do,” Breed wrote on the online platform Medium. “And they are the same people instructing and encouraging people to refuse shelter — to remain on the street instead of going indoors. Their agenda is clear.”
And that’s when the facts start to get a little squishy. Asked at Manny’s if the Coalition was passing out tents, Friedenbach first said no.
Then, after consideration, she said they did “for a minute at the beginning of the pandemic.”
And of course, critics, like activist Gary Tan, quickly posted screenshots from the Coalition’s X account, announcing the arrival of 78 new tents to be handed out. It was dated April, 2022 — two years after the start of the pandemic.
Tan wrote: “Jennifer Friedenbach and Coalition on Homelessness are dishonest liars and they *do* think passing out tents so people can do drugs on the street until they die is the right move Enabling further grift by the homeless industrial complex is what the CoH *does* Defund the CoH”
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There’s a frustrating pattern to these dialogues. Someone like Mesnick makes what seems like a common sense observation — conditions are intolerable and getting worse — and the Coalition moves the goalposts.
For example, I’ll bet a lot of people (most?) imagine addressing homelessness would mean that every person would get a free bed, access to a bathroom and a warm room with a roof over their head. (I will admit that current shelters have safety issues that should be addressed.)
But that’s not what the Coalition is picturing. Friedenbach imagines a place “where people are meeting their health goals, they are mentally healthy, recovered and in stable housing.”
Geez, that’s a lot. Weren’t we just trying to give people a safe place to sleep?
In fact, in a lawsuit that is currently underway, the Coalition attorneys argued that city officials could not remove or displace anyone or any tent unless there was a place for them to go. As some residents learned, under that ruling, someone can erect a tent in front of your house and there’s nothing you can do about it.
(There’s recently been a interesting twist in that lawsuit, but that’s for another newsletter.)
And there’s more.
“What we really should do,” Friedenbach said, “is prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place.”
Wait. What? We also have to fix the national economy and cure the housing shortage?
Again, weren’t we just trying to find people a safe place to sleep?
And now, finally, we come to the real point of all this. What, exactly, does “ending homelessness” look like? What is the grand vision?
I’ve heard Friedenbach lay it out more than once.
“A home,” she said at Manny’s. “A door to lock. A shower to luxuriate in. A bed.”
So a little house. Or an apartment. We take the 3-4,000 unhoused individuals in San Francisco and we build enough housing that every one of them can live there, free, for the rest of their lives. The technical term is “permanent sustainable housing.”
Spoiler alert. That isn’t going to happen.
Here’s a report from the Bay Area Council Economic Institution. It calculates that the price to house every homeless person in the Bay Area in PSH would be $12.7 billion. And as the report said, that’s just “point of time.” When more people arrive, more housing would have to be built.
It’s too much money. Even wealthy San Francisco isn’t going to spend that.
And, by the way, if you did, what would you have? A sprawling tract of public housing, a new little city of 4-5,000 people. And it would be the city’s job to administrate that, police it and maintain it.
It sounds impossibly expensive, complicated and unworkable.
A realistic solution would be to expand and improve the shelter system until there are enough beds — not houses, beds — for everyone.
I’m willing to admit the San Francisco shelter system needs upgrading. Safety should be a priority. The Navigation Centers are a good model. Residents can bring pets, store belongings and live with a partner. They don’t have to leave every morning and re-apply for a spot in the afternoon.
That’s the thrust of Supervisor Rafael Mandelman’s “A Place for All.” Rather than focus on building thousands of homes and apartments, he has called for an additional 2,000 shelter beds. Enough, the theory goes, to give everyone the option to come indoors.
His point is that tent campers are technically on the street because they are waiting for permanent supportive housing. And that doesn’t make sense. A well-run shelter is a better place to wait than a tent on the sidewalk.
“Street sleeping doesn’t make someone safe, sane or sober,” he said. “Our City leaders need to commit to shelter all who want a roof over their heads as a first step on the path out of homelessness."
Residents would have a bed, access to a bathroom and a roof over their heads and will be out of tents and off the sidewalk.
In a lot of cities that might be considered a reasonable compromise. But this is San Francisco.
Contact C.W. Nevius at cwnevius@gmail.com. Twitter: @cwnevius
Marin’s Homeward Bound organization gets folks off streets, cars, tents and couches and into transitional shelters with services so they can move towards permanent housing. First things first: No one gets more sane or healthy while on the street. It’s a slow slog but their outcomes appear strong. And, they’re building or converting housing all over the county so formerly homeless are not boxed into non-NIMBY areas.
Excellent discussion. 50 years ago my wife, 1 1/2 year old son and I lived a year without a house. We were grateful whenever we could find shelter with a roof, body cleaning space, maybe a floor or couch or cot day by day. Got us through till one of the applications I had put in got me in the door to employment with a full time position. So, I’m with those who see houselessness as a temporary bridge not a destination for placement in free housing which honestly will never happen.