A housing solution to our homeless problem

By Jim Reid

A concrete solution based on a solution that worked in 1906,

In 1906, we did not judge these people, we housed them. John McLaren, the Father of Golden Gate Park, persuaded the army to build 5,610 small houses to shelter all those who remained homeless weeks after the quake. They build this housing within three months and we moved most of these people back into the fabric of San Francisco society within two years.

I am a building contractor and have a picture of one of the large camps of earthquake shacks above my desk. This picture is powerful to me because it shows me that we housed a large number of poor homeless people quickly and at little cost. The City was devastated and there was little money to take care of the homeless yet they still had to be housed. Today San Francisco has a $300 million deficit and we still need to find a way to house our desperately poor homeless people without spending a lot of money.

I ran for mayor in 1999 because I got tired of hearing politicians promise to solve the homeless problem then fail to do so in spite of spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on the symptoms of the problem without ever addressing the prime cause, housing.

There are a number of myths that prevent us from solving this problem, the land myth, the "if we do this, more will come" myth, and "the homeless are all drunks and drug addicts" myth.

The land myth prevents us from housing the homeless and solving our 27-year-old housing shortage that spawned rent control. Most people believe that there is no land in San Francisco because they have been told this and they do not question its validity. I see land everyday because I am looking for it. A parking lot is land. If we need parking and we do, the air space above a parking lot is land. Every non-historic one or two story building that I see represents land to me. The corner house that I rent in Bernal Heights, that is falling down and has little foundation, represents land to me. Hunters Point shipyard, which is 500 acres of land, is like 50 city blocks. This is land that should not be squandered building a bedroom community of market rate housing three stories high.

Dianne Feinstein once said as mayor that if we did anything to solve the homeless problem, more would come because of our good climate, so she chose not to do anything. Most big city mayors believe that their city is a magnet to homeless people from other cities. Few of them look at the national statistics to see that all big cities have growing populations of homeless people, many former housed residents.

In the early 1980's, San Francisco developed the model for care and treatment of people with HIV and AIDS. The Naysayers at the time said that if you do this, Gay people and drug addicts from around the nation would come to San Francisco and bankrupt the city. The opposite happened, many Gay people went back to their city of birth to die because the federal government copied and funded our model in every city in America.

There are 17 different classes of homeless people with very different problems and needs. Their common need is housing. There have always been bums and hobos who lived a free and migrating lifestyle. I discovered recently that there are nine sociological classifications of homeless bums. If we are going to solve the homeless problem, we need to separate the homeless who want and need housing from those who are traditional bums.

The National Coalition for Homeless Veterans estimates that on any given night, 271,000 veterans are homeless. San Francisco has over 2,400 homeless veterans according to advocacy group Swords to Plowshares. Upon starting the war in Iraq, the Bush administration proposed cutting veterans benefits by tens of billions. How many of our returning veterans from Iraq will be homeless in twenty or thirty years on our nation's streets? This is an unspoken national disgrace.

When I ran for mayor in 1999, in February, I grew a beard, put on old clothes and become homeless for nine days and nights to experience our homeless services first hand and to meet homeless people on the streets. I discovered that many of the homeless are clean and sober and had full time jobs. I later saw these people on the streets and would not have guessed that they were homeless because they did not look like the stereotypical homeless person that the public assumes are all the homeless. We are going to solve the homeless problem one person at a time, not by treating them as if they are all alike.

After my first stay in the shelters, I believed that we should build an extraordinary shelter system as a major piece of the solution to the homeless problem. In 2002, I was the official ballot opponent of Care Not Cash and I again grew a beard and stayed in the homeless shelters, this time only sleeping in the shelters for the seven nights before the November election. I went home every morning and wrote my recollections of the previous night and published it on my mayoral web site on the internet as "Seven nights in Hell"

My 2002 conclusions were that our shelters are a disgrace and that housing not shelter is the solution. I began to see shelters as a very temporary solution that would keep people from dieing until they could get their life back to normal. There are too many non-profit organizations profiting from maintaining the homeless system as it now exists. They would go out of existence if we began to house the homeless rather than shelter them. There are people who are paying their mortgages who would be unemployed if we solved the problem. This is why San Francisco spends $200 million dollars each year without housing the homeless.

There are perhaps 30,000 San Franciscans one paycheck from becoming homeless and we must build truly affordable housing that these people can buy so that they have the security of homeownership that will keep them safe through downturns in the economy. It is much cheaper to prevent people from becoming homeless that to rehabilitate them once they become homeless. A homeowner can borrow money against the equity in they house to keep them housed during difficult times, renters cannot.

In 1999, I talked about building very tiny housing to house the homeless. In 2000, I build a 100 square foot house on a trailer to educate public officials, the public, and the homeless about simple decent housing that any San Franciscan could afford to own. I took it to City Hall three times. Neither the Mayor nor any member of the Board of Supervisors had the courtesy to walk across the street to look at this solution to the homeless problem. This told me that politicians do not want to solve the problem. It helps them to be reelected. Of the thousand or so people who did tour ShelterOne, half of them wanted to buy it; and they were not homeless people. This made me aware that there must be tens of thousand of working San Franciscans who would like to own a house in San Francisco, even a very tiny house.

Today, San Francisco has the resources to solve the homeless problem locally without sending more taxpayer dollars. The homeless are a large untapped source of labor. Many of them are able-bodied and hardworking, though unskilled. I know this from personal experience. We have an enormous piece of vacant real estate within the city limits owned by the military. We have a Home Depot store eager to move in nearby. And we have building contractors looking for new work. I or any building contractor, with a reasonable amount of patience, could teach homeless veterans to do carpentry work, plumbing, electrical, sheetrock, roofing, painting, etc. I have done this many times. A few hundred retrained veterans could build enough simple decent housing, reminiscent of the 1906 earthquake shacks, out at Hunters Point shipyard to house most of our homeless.

Home Depot had paid the former campaign manager for the mayor $300,000 to lobby the mayor to allow then to build a store in the city. I call the person responsible for the lobbying payment and I asked her if Home Depot would provide materials to build housing for the homeless; she said that they would provide materials at their cost, if we used them to house our homeless. This is a 50% discount. It would cost them nothing to do this; it would make them a very responsible corporate citizen, and save taxpayers millions of dollars.

Within a year, with virtually no taxpayer money, we could house the 75% of our homeless who want and need housing. We then could deal with the drunk and drug addicted bums left on the street who do not want housing. We would need to move existing support services and a health clinic to the shipyard to deal with the homeless who are mentally ill and those who need drug and alcohol treatment. The easiest part about building housing is actually building it.

Within a few years, we could put the support services in place to retrain and educate the homeless who are able to work and move them back into San Francisco society or back where they came from. State and local governments have no tax resources today and we need to find non-monetary ways to solve the homeless problem and prevent more people from becoming homeless.

As we approach the 97th anniversary of the 1906 Earthquake, we need to have the courage to build a model for care and housing of our homeless people on government land utilizing the time and energy of homeless people. If we do this, the nation would again copy our lead. We did it in 1906 when money was tight and we can do it again today.