On the subject of San Francisco’s homeless disaster, Wayne Justmann has seen all of it

In 1989 San Francisco had two mayors.

There was Art Agnos, voted by 70% of residents who loved the former social worker’s commitment to diversity and plans to increase affordable housing. Then there was Wayne Justmann, the so-called “Mayor of Camp Agnos” – the slang name for a hundreds of people in the Civic Center, which was supposed to put pressure on the city government to provide more services for the homeless.

“Art thought I would have cost him his re-election,” says Justmann in 1991. “But that wasn’t my intention. My intention at the time was only to ask: ‘Can you help people like me who are homeless and want to do something about it?’ “

Thirty years later, there are 2,000 more homeless people in San Francisco, and Justmann, who has served and helped shape many of The City’s homeless services, is at a loss. The 76-year-old just isn’t sure how much of what he’s learned can be carried over to homeless politics today. Because when he was homeless, drug addiction and what to do about it were not the focus of the debate.

“I don’t even remember we even smoked cannabis in the Civic Center,” says Justmann. “I don’t remember anyone having any drug problems at the time.”

For the record, smoking and drinking from pails was at least a small part of life at Camp Agnos; Anecdotes about it were reported in several papers at the time. The rhetoric about drug addiction and crime was a big part of the urge by some city dwellers to vacate the public space as well. But nightly news of half-used syringes in the streets of downtown San Francisco was only a glimmer in Rupert Murdoch’s eyes.

Mike Sugerman, a longtime TV news reporter covering Camp Agnos at the time, also confirms what Justmann says. “You needed something to get through the night, but you also needed the middle class,” he says. “So there was alcohol and pot, but I don’t remember the hard drugs at all.”

Justmann came to San Francisco in 1987 and initially stayed at the Spaulding Hotel while teaching a restaurant and hotel business course. But when he ran out of work and it became too difficult to afford the hotel, Justmann, who had been involved with the grassroots organization since college, said Justmann said it just made sense to pitch a tent in the Civic Center.

That’s because the camp was both a political movement and a sleeping place that is safe in numbers. Sugerman recalls volunteer police organized by the homeless, much like the Occupy demonstrations in 2008. Former district attorney Terence Hallinan, a then-warden, regularly visited the tents – the beginning of what was a decade-long friendship between him and Justmann. The supervisors Angela Alioto and Nancy Walker also came to visit regularly.

A 1989 Tenderloin Times newspaper with a photo and story about Camp Agnos, a homeless camp designed to put political pressure on then Mayor Art Agnos at Wayne Justmann’s apartment. (Kevin N. Hume / The Examiner)

Justmann even remained well connected to Agnos, although the camp was expensive to be re-elected. “We let him work intensively with my staff because he was very knowledgeable and struggled through the hardships of homelessness to make this whole situation very clear,” says Agnos. “He was a huge help to us in developing the first homeless plan for The City.”

Sugerman and Justmann, on the other hand, met when the media-savvy activist Sugerman asked if he would like to stay in his tent overnight and see things up close. Justmann, who is gay, jokes that Sugarman was “one of the first men I slept with in San Francisco without having sex,” though Sugarman says he didn’t sleep much – he reported back then (and remembers today because Justmann kept him up all night with his snoring.

This kind of collegiality between the homeless, the media and the city administration can hardly be found today. Grassroots homeless activism is still alive, as evidenced by the occupation of an empty house on 19th Street by the ReclaimSF group last year. Groups such as the Coalition on Homelessness, founded in the Camp Agnos era, have helped shape legislation on the length of accommodation and waiting times, the use of tasers, housing and urban development preferences and homeless searches in recent years.

But while when Justmann was homeless people could organize around a single goal – access to shelter – activism today is fragmented. Questions about how drugs and mental illness are linked to the city’s homelessness problem bring groups into conflict over programs such as safe consumption points and needle exchanges. There is a clear gap between those who believe that resources should be spent on immediate short-term housing or invested in more time-consuming but longer-term plans. Homeless searches have emerged as a litmus test for Mayor London Breed’s leadership on several occasions.

“30 years ago we didn’t have to ask for a lot of different services,” says Justmann. “We didn’t have to talk about substance abuse, which would probably have been very controversial for some people. Housing and public health services are not so controversial. “

Camp Agnos made homelessness a hot topic of the day for the media and a political lightning rod for the San Franciscans. The activism had started a few years earlier, during the tenure of then Mayor Dianne Feinstein, with street protests in San Francisco as early as 1975. But Camp Agnos brought the fight to the city government’s doorstep and sounded the alarm about Feinstein’s temporary approach to the problem. The accommodation was mainly operated by churches and private hotels, with little attention paid to maintenance or the design of long-term resettlement programs. In one notorious example, old Muni buses were used as emergency shelters.

With a view to the diverse range of safe sleeping places, private hotels, accommodation and subsidized housing in The City, Justmann believes that the demands of the protesting homeless people in Camp Agnos have been met. While there were still 6,000 homeless in The City in 1989, the number was 8,000 in 2019 when The City last counted the number of unprotected residents.

Wayne Justmann, who was homeless and became a homeless activist in the late 1980s, looks at some of the old newspapers from his activist days in his apartment. (Kevin N. Hume / The Examiner)

Justmann finds it difficult to find words to describe the persistence of the problem. “Housing is available if you have the knowledge to get it, and just the existence of housing was the biggest problem we had,” he says. “But we still have problems with homelessness, and I think some people like to be homeless. That may sound cold, but I think some people just say, ‘I’d rather be out here on the street than in a structured way of life.’ “

Justmann left his tent in the Civic Center when he had the opportunity to move into what is now called the Next Door Shelter, founded by a group of episcopalists on the corner of Geary and Polk. Shortly afterwards he moved into his first apartment, where he was able to settle the rent as a property manager. During this time he was also diagnosed with HIV and received rent subsidies because of his condition. He’s been positive for 33 years with no signs of slowing down.

Still a political activist, he is mainly focused on improving cannabis policy, especially for patients like him who find help in substance with symptoms like neuropathy. But while it’s no longer his main project, Justmann has remained connected to the fight against homelessness in San Francisco, using his networking skills to connect activists and, occasionally, people he knows to services.

In between his political commitments, Justmann spends his time in front of his television, listening to cable news and looking out his window onto the streets of Lower Nob Hill from a rented apartment he has lived in for over 20 years. In fact, he hasn’t lived anywhere in The City, except in the two or three square miles between Lower Nob Hill, the Tenderloin, and the Civic Center. So he is confronted with the legacy of his activism every day and thinks about possible solutions for every uninhabited person he sees sleeping down on his street.

“This is a problem that we can see up close – I can see the person sleeping on the couch or standing in line at Glide’s. It affects us all, ”he explains. “The Tenderloin is just as much a part of the city as the Sunset. This is a subject that we just need to show a little empathy and understanding about. “

virwin@sfexaminer.com