Ten years ago, I and several other concerned community leaders came together to try and deal with homelessness among LGBT youth in the Castro. The dot-com boom had hit the city like the gold rush and the casualties were piling up: people with AIDS were forced out of long-term, rent-controlled apartments by greedy landlords. Queer youth were suddenly living on the streets.
The group pushed for the creation of a weekly food program (Simply Supper), a shower project at Mission High, and three emergency homeless queer youth shelters. Those services weren't intended to eradiate homelessness. They couldn't. They were meant to be compassionate Band-Aids to alleviate the suffering of homeless LGBT youth and others.
Today, the situation is just as dire as it was back then. According to a recent report by the National Lesbian and Gay Task Force and the National Coalition on Homelessness, 42 percent of the nation's 1.6 million homeless youth are LGBT. The U.S. Conference on Mayors' latest study, coincidentally released on the same day as NGLTF's, reports that hunger and homelessness in America were on the rise in 2006. In fact, for the past several years, hunger and homelessness have been skyrocketing. In January 2006, the Youth Empowerment Team at the SF LGBT Community Center released findings from its survey of queer youth: 85 percent listed housing as their number-one concern.
Given its reputation as a queer mecca, San Francisco should be in the forefront of helping homeless queer youth. It's not. In last week's Bay Area Reporter ["Spotlight on homeless LGBT youth"], Castro Supervisor Bevan Dufty said that in his first four years in office he established a 10-unit hotel for homeless youth and secured $750,000 in funding for subsidized housing. To quote Peggy Lee: Is that all there is? Mayor Gavin Newsom has done virtually nothing. Last March, he appointed a transitional youth task force. Its recommendations will no doubt end up on the same shelf as the reports from Angela Alioto's homelessness committee and the Continuum of Care.
Politicians don't seem to understand that homelessness is a symptom of a deeper social problem. It can't be eliminated with task forces and a few units of housing. Even the much-touted Care not Cash has barely scratched the surface of the homelessness epidemic. It certainly hasn't benefited queer youth a whole lot. When it comes down to it, the city has no real plan in place for tackling the ongoing and ever-increasing problem of people not being able to afford a roof over their heads in one of the country's most expensive real-estate markets. That shouldn't surprise anyone: Twenty-five years into the AIDS epidemic, securing housing for people with AIDS is still not a primary function of AIDS organizations in San Francisco, with the exception of the AIDS Housing Alliance.
Queer kids, like everyone else, tend to be homeless in San Francisco because rents are immorally high. Even with jobs, queer youth and others who are low-income can't afford a studio apartment. Prior to the dot-com boom, LGBT youth piled into flats, turning every room into a sleeping space. Four young people in a $1,000 per month flat made it affordable, even on a minimum-wage salary. That's not true with that same flat now going for $3,000 or more.
Also contributing to homelessness is the low minimum wage. It's hard to afford an apartment on $8.75 per hour. That's why we have so many working homeless who have jobs but still sleep on a friend's couch or live in cars and vans.
Then there's the problem with what's considered "affordable housing" in San Francisco. Take Openhouse for example. "Affordable" units in its proposed LGBT senior housing project at 55 Laguna in the new gentrifying Market/Octavia area are currently being proposed at 50 percent of area median income (AMI). For San Francisco, AMI for a single person is about $77,000. Fifty percent of that means a senior would have to have $38,000 in annual income to qualify. The elderly who need apartments the most, those on SSI (roughly $850 a month) or who might have a little pension in addition to SSI won't be living at Openhouse.
The future looks bleak. With hunger and homelessness continuing to increase all over the country, San Francisco needs to pull a rabbit out of the hat or at least roll back the rents to pre-dot-com levels, raise the minimum wage to $12 per hour, and redefine "affordable" housing at 10 percent of AMI. If the mayor can marry queer couples in defiance of state law, he can push the limits in trying to end the disparity of wealth and resources that contributes to most homelessness.
Otherwise, it's back to housing queer youth 10 hotel rooms at a time and building queer senior housing for a privileged few. Or waiting for another task force to finish another dust-collecting report on homelessness.
Tommi Avicolli Mecca is a radical, Southern Italian, working-class queer activist who works at the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco, where for the past seven years he has helped low-income tenants keep their housing.