According to a report in last week's Bay Area Reporter ["No love lost between Castro merchants and Super Bowl," Business Briefs], Castro merchants were upset with the recent Super Bowl 50 festivities that the city staged in the days leading up to the big football game in Santa Clara.
Upset that they saw no spike in business during the sports celebration because the F-Line's historic trolleys weren't running while their tracks at the foot of Market Street were occupied by Super Bowl City, a blocks-long fair for tourists who otherwise might have headed for the world's most famous gayborhood to spend some of their dough.
Merchants weren't the only ones in our community affected by the Super Bowl celebration. A lesbian couple living in a tent were forced to move again and one of the two women lost her job because of the sweep of the homeless that preceded the Super Bowl, even though city officials deny such a sweep occurred.
According to a story in the San Francisco Examiner ["Homeless woman lost job after Super Bowl tent sweeps," February 5], Chanell Jones, a homeless lesbian, lost her job when police and San Francisco Public Works workers swept her and her wife, Linda Fuchs, from their tents. Jones says that she and her partner were forced to pick up and move 15 times during the month of January.
Jones said she had to choose between going to work and protecting her tent and her belongings. She stayed with her wife.
Jones and Fuchs are among the 30 percent of the homeless who identify as LGBT. They are the invisible homeless, invisible because they're seldom acknowledged, and never advocated for, by mainstream LGBT organizations such as the Human Rights Campaign or Equality California. Their stories are never featured in promotional materials for the gay marriage fight. If they set up their tent in the Castro, merchants and neighbors would no doubt call the cops on them.
Jones and Fuchs attended a protest at the Embarcadero on the Thursday night before the Super Bowl to demand affordable housing for those who need it the most, as well as an end to the criminalization of homelessness via sit/lie and other laws that result in fines and/or arrests and make obtaining housing more difficult. The 500 people at the demonstration were also angry at recent statements politicians made about those without a roof over their heads.
Mayor Ed Lee proclaimed in the weeks before the event that certain people weren't welcome in the city for the Super Bowl. The homeless. "They are going to have to leave," he said. His statement ignited a firestorm of criticism from housing and homeless advocates.
Just days before the kick-off, Castro Supervisor Scott Wiener re-ignited that firestorm when he sent a letter to the heads of several city agencies asking for an investigation of the many tents and encampments that have appeared on the streets this winter. While he urged a transition of homeless people into housing, he described the growing number of tents as a failure on the part of the city "to make clear to those who refuse help that tents on our sidewalks and in our public spaces are unacceptable."
Where are people supposed to go when there are not enough shelter beds and the city doesn't have units in which to place all of the homeless? Shouldn't they be allowed to protect themselves from the rain? Construction of new housing is mainly geared to the middle class and the rich. If the mayor were serious about housing the homeless, he'd reserve the first 7,000 of the 30,000 units he says he wants to build by 2020 for those on the streets. But that isn't going to happen, the mayor told me at a meeting months ago.
Spending over $5 million on a party for tourists and rich people at a time when that money could be better spent on other more important things, like housing, should make us all mad. Especially when that party causes more suffering for the most vulnerable among us.
Tommi Avicolli Mecca is a longtime queer activist, writer, and performer who works at the Housing Rights Committee.