When Brian Basinger of the AIDS Housing Alliance sent me an announcement that Horizons Foundation, which funds LGBT causes, was sponsoring a roundtable discussion of poverty in the LGBT community (Monday, March 19, 5:30 p.m. LGBT center, 1800 Market Street, unfortunately it's invitation only, call Horizons to see if there's still seats, 398-2333, ext. 116), I thought: finally mainstream queer organizations were concerned about this issue.
I've been doing anti-poverty work in our community for the past 15 years. I understand all too well that while, as the flier from Horizons states, there's a myth that our community is wealthier than others, "the reality is very different. In fact, statistics show that many segments of the LGBT community experience the same and sometimes higher levels of poverty as the general population."
We know that in San Francisco, 40 percent of homeless youth are LGBT, 75 percent of transgender people are unemployed or not employed full-time, and homelessness (or being inadequately housed) is rampant among people with AIDS. LGBT seniors, too, face incredible economic hardship, as evidenced by testimony at a recent hearing at the Land Use Committee of the Board of Supervisors.
There's always been poverty in our community, but it's gotten far worse over the past decade and a half.
The late '90s tech boom
When the dot-boom sent rents soaring in the late 1990s, many queer youth who fled here for refuge, as they have since the late 1960s, found that they couldn't afford an apartment, even with a job. As merchants and neighbors waged a campaign against those young people for panhandling and sleeping on the streets, the Reverend Jim Mitulski, then the pastor of Metropolitan Community Church-San Francisco, and I helped organize three winter shelters, a free dinner two nights a week, and a place for people to take a shower.
There was another negative effect to the economic boom: many long-term tenants with AIDS living in rent-controlled apartments in the Castro were pushed out by landlords anxious to rent to dot-comers with bigger bank accounts. Activist Gabriel Haaland and I were among the folks who organized hard against those evictions, which became the number-one reason the homeless rate among people with AIDS suddenly shot through the roof.
Unfortunately, most mainstream LGBT and AIDS organizations refused to get involved in the fight to provide services to homeless youth or to save the homes of long-term tenants with AIDS.
Occupying the Castro
Fast forward to three months ago: Occupy the Castro briefly occupied the Human Rights Campaign store to present the organization with a resolution calling on HRC to address economic justice issues within our community, including homelessness, poverty, and a lack of affordable housing, jobs, and health care. In response, a spokesperson for HRC told the Advocate that his group already addresses these issues. The reporter failed to ask exactly how it does that.
It's not just HRC. Why is AHA the only AIDS group in our community that actually finds housing for people with AIDS? Why, when queer youth make up such a disproportionate percentage of homeless young people, are there no organizations that find them permanent affordable housing (other than Larkin Street Youth Services, which provides limited shelter beds and in some instances hotel rooms)? What exactly is being done to address the employment crisis in the transgender community? Why is there no affordable housing for queer seniors other than Openhouse's proposed 110-unit project slated to be built at 55 Laguna?
Why did Supervisor Scott Wiener, who represents the heart of the queer community (District 8), hold a hearing about the housing needs of "middle-income" people when the city has not begun to meet the need for housing for the neediest among us? Wiener believes the two are not "mutually exclusive," but with scarce resources, the city can't possibly help both groups. Imagine two people calling for help in a lake: one can't swim and is clearly drowning, the other is sitting in a life raft and though not in danger of drowning, is tired of waiting to be rescued. Whom do you rescue first?
The war on poverty
What I hope comes out of the Horizons roundtable is an all-out war on poverty in our community. Talk is great, but action will make the real difference.
That war effort needs to focus not only on the tremendous need for housing and living wage jobs within our community, but also ways to prevent more people from falling into poverty (an ounce of prevention). The emphasis should be on making people self-sufficient. It's giving someone a fishing rod rather than a fish. In addition, advocates for the poor need to speak out against measures that criminalize those who panhandle or sit or lie on the sidewalks. Criminalization thwarts efforts to house people. If a person cited under sit/lie or anti-panhandling laws doesn't pay the fine (they don't have the money), it turns into a bench warrant and possible jail time. If that person applies for subsidized housing, he/she can be turned down for having a "criminal record."
Gay marriage proponents talk about justice and equality for our community, but when all is said and done, there's no justice without economic justice, no equality without economic equality.
Tommi Avicolli Mecca is a longtime queer economic justice activist living in San Francisco.