Tangobaby, a San Francisco blogger has been all over the news recently helping a single homeless mother with kids get off the streets of downtown San Francisco. Tangobaby has also recently discovered how difficult it is for a homeless single mother with kids to get shelter in San Francisco. The following, in italics, is part of her latest appeal on behalf of this mother. By all means, help her out if you can
What I need and this is the plain and honest truth:
* I need a sublet, a single bedroom apartment or a hotel room with a kitchenette to rent for K and the kids from now until the end of August in San Francisco. That’s it. It’s that simple. With the donations I’ve received, if there is a good hearted landlord out there (and I’m guessing there has to be at least one) I need a place where this little family can stay until their permanent housing comes through in September. Budget is obviously a consideration.
In some of the comments on her blog, and she herself is wondering why it’s so difficult for a homeless battered woman with kids to find shelter in San Francisco. It is because San Francisco has geared nearly all of it’s homeless funds and housing to help primarily homeless single adults with mental illness and drug problems, and NOT homeless battered women with children.
It is because of people like Randy Shaw, head of Tenderloin Housing Clinic, who is bragging about this very thing today. Randy Shaws clients are almost exclusively single adults with mental illness and/or drug problems. This is no accident because it’s been a concerted effort with the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the Department of Human Services to make it this way for over 20 years now, to the exclusion of people like K and her kids. Randy Shaw has one of the biggest chunks of the homeless budget, and hasn’t housed a single mother with children in decades
If people are starting to get outraged at this, they should. San Franciscans need to get outraged enough to go, en masse, to the Board of Supervisors, and demand at least some change in budgeting priorities.
Because San Francisco is paying twice. Once to house single adults with drug habits, and again out of their own pockets to house battered women with children
and people like Randy Shaw are laughing all the way to the bank while running the very term ‘progressive’ into the dirt