The bus chartered to bring the protesters to the secret takeover site was late. The driver, reached by cell phone, reported a holiday hangover from which he’d just woken up. He would be stopping for a strong cup of coffee.
Even though it was Thanksgiving Day, there was more than one protest going on in San Francisco; a couple of hundred feet away, United Food and Commercial Workers members picketed Safeway in the ongoing battle over the company’s attempts to decimate employee healthcare benefits. A delegation went over to wish the unionists well, as one nervous housing protester tried to conceal the Safeway logo on her fresh cup of coffee.
The press showed up early to search for a spokesperson, played today by Carrie Goodspeed, a formerly homeless twenty-four-year-old organizer with Family Rights and Dignity (FRD).3 She’s nervous at first but then relaxes. “The Authority [SFHA] owns over one thousand units of vacant housing that could be used to house families. We will risk arrest to make this point.”
“Is this the right thing to do?” blurted out one reporter. There’s silence, and the expression of someone having second thoughts crosses Godspeed’s face. Suddenly that expression disappears.
“Definitely. It’s the right thing to do.”
Takeover! The caravan consisting of five autos, some bikes, and the long-awaited bus arrived at the tip of the West Point Housing Development. Banners in the windows proclaimed: “HOMES NOT JAILS FOR HOMELESS FAMILIES,” and “THESE UNITS SIT VACANT WHILE FAMILIES SLEEP ON THE STREETS.” The dwelling, at 45 Westpoint, was opened up the night before by a covert team. The strategy was for one group of people to do the breaking and another to do the entering, so as to shrink potential criminal charges.
Some were there to pressure the Authority to rehabilitate the vacant units. Homeless people added another thoroughly practical perspective: “If I get busted, I sleep inside. If I don’t, I sleep inside,” one person remarked.
In front of the building, a resident of the development, Camila Watson, took the microphone. Watson is one of the reasons this action landed here—because of her outreach most of the neighbors are reasonably supportive. When Watson became homeless, she turned for help to Bianca Henry of FRD, one of the women occupying the apartment. Watson’s name had “disappeared” from the Housing Authority’s waiting list. Extremely aggressive advocacy (oftentimes visiting at the Authority’s offices to file a complaint with a bullhorn) had helped the agency “find” Watson and offer her a place to live.
“I used to come by here and think, ‘Why can’t I live in apartment 41, or 45, or 47? Give me paint and a hammer and I’ll fix it up.’” With housing, other good things have come to pass. Watson now holds down a job, and is doing well at City College. The experience left her determined to fight for those still stuck in the shelter system.
“They say these units are vacant because people don’t want to live here. I haven’t met a mother yet that wouldn’t move here over the streets and the shelter.”
Another woman told a story of how her homelessness began the day the government demolished the public housing development where she lived and reneged on promises for replacement housing. One resident remarked that she feared taking homeless family members into her home, since her contract with the Authority made that act of compassion an evictable offense. A young poet named Puff spoke in a style that was equal parts poetry slam, evangelism, and comedy. By the end of her time on the microphone, she managed to connect homelessness, minimum-wage work, consumerism, police abuse, war, and genocide. The San Francisco Labor Chorus rallied the group in rousing renditions of post-revolutionary holiday favorites such as “Budget La-La-Land,” stretched to fit “Winter Wonderland,” and “Share the Dough,” set to the tune of “Let It Snow.”
As many neighbors stopped by, a trio of young men came down the hill. “Is that where the homeless people are going to live?” the tallest one asked.
“We hope so!” yelled Bianca Henry from the second floor window.
“How many rooms?”
“Three!” Henry replied.
The youngest looking of the three flashed a smile gleaming with gold caps, “Happy Thanksgiving, Yo!” as the trio continued down the hill.
From Hope to Hopeless, The Local Politics of Austerity
Within a very short time people who never before could get a decent roof over their heads will live here in reasonable comfort and healthful, worthwhile surroundings.
—President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, at the opening of Atlanta’s Techwood Homes 1940
How was it possible for thousands of units of public housing to sit vacant in the middle of a housing crisis? Life for the San Francisco Housing Authority, as San Francisco’s largest landlord and last line of defense against homelessness, has never been easy. Born in 1940, the SFHA initially housed returning servicemen and their families.4 Over the years, it grew to operate over 6,575 units of housing and administer another 10,000 units in conjunction with other partners. In the late 1980s, then-Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Jack Kemp announced the creation of the Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE) program, which would tear down public housing and rebuild it. HOPE was intended to move the feds out of housing provision by transferring ownership to resident cooperatives. Kemp’s cocktail was infused with doses of privatization and austerity, yet it wasn’t a road map for displacement. Homes would have to be replaced on a one-to-one basis. It assumed and allowed for most residents to return. If the federal government, like a father in a divorce, left the house, it at least tried to leave it in good working order.
In 1990, the Cranston-Gonzalez Affordable Housing Act created HOPE VI, infusing new funding into the revitalization of public housing. In theory, the original tenants are able to return to their refurbished homes and enjoy a wide range of social and economic programs designed to ease the transition from welfare to work. Democratic president Bill Clinton removed most of the hope from the HOPE program when, in 1995, requirements for resident participation, return, and unit replacement were stricken from the federal record. Smaller developments meant that not every family even had a place to return. In reality, what often happened was that the reconstruction was delayed or abandoned altogether, or the “mixed income” residency requirements caused the poorest of the tenants—those most in need of subsidies—to lose their homes.
Since 1992, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has awarded 446 HOPE VI grants in 166 cities. A 2004 study found that only 21,000 units had been built to replace the 49,828 demolished units.5 In other words, only 42 percent of the demolished public housing has been replaced. Other estimates put the loss higher, suggesting 50 percent of the public housing stock has been slashed.
No amount of “resident empowerment” can change the fact that once a building is finished, it will shortly suffer small and large injuries. When the elevator breaks or a pipe bursts it is usually too expensive for the residents—minimum-wage workers, senior citizens, and government-assistance recipients—to repair. To meet the deficit in operating costs, the SFHA requested proposals from both for-profit and nonprofit developers to redevelop its properties—again raising the specter of displacement—what would be dubbed “The Plan” by many residents, thanks to a shameful history of being on the receiving end of plans. Many residents, some who lived through the “urban removal” of the 1960s, saw the demolition as one more attempt to kick blacks out of town.
The term “urban removal” refers explicitly to the government-financed and -facilitated destruction of inner-city housing. In the case of HOPE VI, the destruction is of government-owned developments, but in some cases, the government