After a 12 months in their very own beds, the place will San Francisco’s most susceptible homeless girls go?
The stiff plastic chairs should be the last resort. Instead, they became part of a dreaded nighttime ritual for dozens of homeless women seeking safe haven on the streets of San Francisco.
Connie Pelkey slept in a chair at A Woman’s Place after moving to town from Georgia during a sex reassignment operation. Taijah Minnifield stayed there after her tent was set on fire. Susan Sakura, an abuse survivor who wanted to be identified by a pseudonym, spent months after losing her home rocking her dog in her wheelchair between the rows of plastic.
“I hated every minute,” said Minnifield, a 50-year-old transgender woman who was concerned that her few belongings could be stolen while she was trying to sleep. “What was the point of getting off the road?”
In a region with fewer and fewer tent cities, the goal was to avoid at least some of the violence that affects up to 92% of homeless women, according to an estimate by the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence. But everything changed last spring when the pandemic broke out. Dozens of homeless transgender women, abuse survivors, and seniors who used to sleep in the boxy steel-legged chairs have been taken to emergency hotels and women’s shelter – a 15-month retreat to provide clean bedding, security, and stability that many believe has been done her life better.
Now is the day of the box office.
The pandemic relief programs are expected to expire at the end of September. After that, proponents fear that San Francisco’s most vulnerable women will be left behind amid an unprecedented flood of funds for homeless services.
Governor Gavin Newsom has pledged $ 7 billion to convert some motels into permanent homes, and the Mayor of San Francisco London Breed has committed $ 1 billion to new homes, coupons and other homeless programs. But none of the plans call for gender-specific housing, which proponents say could undermine their success with hard-to-reach women.
Herbal teas and other foods on the table in Taijah Minnifield’s room.
Lea Suzuki / The Chronicle
“There is money there, but it will likely go into a more universal solution,” said Kara Zordel, CEO of Community Forward SF, a nonprofit shared apartment that operates A Woman’s Place and several accommodations. “That doesn’t get these women off the streets.”
To get rid of stopgap solutions like the chairs for good, Zordel unveils a unique $ 20 million plan to convert a hostel in Lower Nob Hill into a 120-room women’s center with counseling, yoga, and new drops – showers, emergency beds, and health services. Whether it works will not only test the pandemic’s enduring impact on a disrupted social safety net, it will test the city’s willingness to deal with strong underlying issues such as street violence, trauma and rising homeless deaths.
As homelessness rises across all genders, the number of single women living outdoors in California has increased faster than any other state to 29,190 people in 2019, up from 19,452 im, according to an analysis by the National Alliance to End Homelessness Increased by 50% in 2016. Across the country, the number of transgender people who were not housed rose 113% over the same period.
The dramatically shorter lives of women on the street is a major concern of lawyers and health researchers.
The average age at death for a homeless woman in a recent report from Sacramento was 47 years, compared with 80 years for all women and 51 years for homeless men. Public homelessness and age data is not disaggregated by gender in San Francisco, but in a 2019 city report, 51 was the average age of death for an unhoused person. The majority of San Francisco’s homeless residents, approximately 57%, were over 40 years old, and many local service providers now define homeless seniors as those who are 55 years or older.
“Astronomically”, UCSF medical professor Margot Kushel explains the rate of violence that affects homeless seniors, women and transgender people. After two decades of researching the high rates of assault and the health effects of homelessness, she watched Bay Area senior citizens who were staying in hotels during the pandemic change in such a way that staff did not recognize some of them.
“It was a life changing experience,” said Kushel. “When people get an apartment again, everything will be better.”
When San Francisco closed in March 2020, Sakura settled into a new life full of clean towels, organic laundry detergents, and the occasional essential oil sample. As a 52-year-old woman who lived with one eye and severe spinal disease, she had qualified for a pandemic housing program that allowed her to stay beyond the usual 180-day limit at Community Forward SF’s women’s shelter in SoMa .
“It was like going to Fantasy Island for women,” said Sakura. “The crème de la crème of the homeless system.”
Taijah Minnifield, a transgender woman, worried that her few belongings were stolen while she was trying to sleep in a focal point.
Lea Suzuki / The Chronicle
While the perks were nice, what she really appreciated was the security. By the time she hit the ’80s punk scene as a teenager, Sakura remembers sleeping with a homemade knife under her pillow in case she had to fend off someone while hopping between accommodations. She eventually made it through college and rented a small apartment until it became impossible to get her new wheelchair upstairs.
With nowhere else to go, she turned to the homeless person. After a life full of abuse and institutions, she now sees a women’s center with long-term living, therapy and a sense of community as her greatest hope for a future.
“I want to live in a women-only apartment complex,” said Sakura. “There is a feeling of security that I have never experienced in my entire life.”
As the clock is ticking again for women like Sakura, several factors will determine whether the planned women’s center will actually become a reality. Community Forward SF spreads a petition and raises money from private donors. But when it comes to government support, officials have been inundated with competing offers for homeless services, and anti-discrimination laws can make it difficult to raise federal funding for housing a specific group of people.
The city of San Francisco declined to comment directly on Community Forward SF’s plan, but said in a statement that it already offers several dozen beds in women’s shelters. Mayor Breed’s budget proposal also includes a call to distribute more apartment vouchers to victims of domestic violence, the San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing told The Chronicle in a statement.
“We recognize that women affected by homelessness are uniquely vulnerable and have specific protection and housing needs,” the statement said. The agency added that it aims to serve people of all gender identities and that an influx of new funding “will give us the opportunity to experiment and try new models”.
For women like Pelkey, 44, who was born in San Diego and mostly raised in the south, San Francisco has always been the light at the end of the tunnel. Her work, hosting live events in the city, evaporated during the pandemic, but she also qualified for an extended stint at the Community Forward SF women’s shelter, which the nonprofit is now slated to end in October when health orders for the pandemic are made ease up.
With the extra time under one roof, Pelkey began learning about working in the cannabis industry as it seems more recession-proof. She ordered a long, braided wig and rasta dress from Amazon to see it. Figuring out where she will live next is less straightforward. Pelkey said part of the challenge with existing residential programs and support groups is how to force participants into certain shapes.
“As a transgender, people just assume you’re either a prostitute or you’ve been in jail,” Pelkey said. “You’re pretty much the weirdo that sticks out, and you’re wondering, ‘Why am I even here?'”
As state and local officials debate what to do with homelessness, a nagging challenge is how invisible the struggles can be to women who oppose traditional mixed-sex shelters. Reliable data on gender and homelessness have long been scarce, but government agencies have started asking more demographic questions in recent years.
Based on survey estimates widely considered to be outnumbered by the real street population, there were approximately 2,800 homeless women, 320 homeless transgender people, and 80 homeless non-binary people in San Francisco as of 2019.
However, there are no localized data on the risks of physical and sexual violence for people without protection. Kushel and other researchers found that 32% of homeless women and 38% of homeless transgender people were seriously attacked in the past year, and that people without stable housing often develop a range of health complications.
Drug use is another fact of street life that cannot be ignored but is difficult to generalize. Advocates like Zordel are frustrated by stereotypes that women become homeless because of drug use, as she often sees the substance abuse prevail later.
“One goes with the other,” said Zordel. “You’re trying to sleep outside after you’ve been attacked.”
In many ways, the stories of women like Minnifield illustrate why it was so difficult to find lasting solutions to San Francisco’s street homelessness crisis. She survived the pandemic at a hotel in a quiet corner of town and donned a silver rhinestone face mask for Janet Jackson-inspired dance routines to get others to partake in her infectious full-body laugh.
But when Minnifield talks about the darker days of street life since 2007 – the long nights in the plastic chairs, the constant fear of rape – her voice falls and her gaze wanders to the ground. She didn’t come out as transgender until 2002 when she was in jail for a sex offense. Since her release in 2007, the self-proclaimed addict has hopped between tents, shelters and mental health facilities.
With only a few weeks left in their pandemic hotel room, a permanent haven for women like her seems like an option that may eventually be too good to pass up.
“Damn it, I would go,” said Minnifield. “I would be in my own room.”
Lauren Hepler is a contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: lauren.hepler@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @LAHepler
