Papa Bear took a seat near the edge of POOR Magazine’s Community Newsroom circle, settling into his chair as another poverty-scholar-reporter finished speaking. He’s POOR’s “Panhandler Reporter,” joining the newsroom for his monthly report: a state of the city address for houseless people, based on what he witnesses and studies daily in the Tenderloin.
He leaned forward in his chair and gestured slowly with his hands as he taught. “Sit-lie is moving up on the outskirts of the Tenderloin,” he explained, referencing the San Francisco ordinance, passed in 2010, that criminalizes houselessness and poverty by making it a crime to sit down on a public sidewalk. (Fascinatingly, although my white, college-educated ass has sat on many a public sidewalk in San Francisco, I have yet to be ticketed or harassed.) “If they don’t give you a ticket for blocking the sidewalk in front of the office buildings, they’ll give you one for sit-lie.” Although sit-lie passed in 2010, Papa Bear’s story suggests that enforcement is picking up in areas that are undergoing most intense gentrification.
Papa Bear continued, “There’s a new security company in town: Legion Security.” He described the all-black Legion cars that had seemed to surface in the streets overnight. Legion has taken over security for the building nearest to where Papa Bear usually stays. They’re making his life more and more difficult, although Papa Bear has certainly been there longer than this new security company has.
“And,” Papa Bear sighed slow, pained, “People are still dropping like flies. I’m getting a little nervous that I’ve been living and breathing the atmosphere in the Tenderloin for 8 years, sleeping on the street there.” He was succinct, clear, hurt by the words: houseless people in the Tenderloin are dying, many of them.
As the uneasiness and grief settled over the newsroom, someone asked Papa Bear if he had any ideas about why so many people were dying recently. He paused. “I never assume, and I never guess.” Although he knows the people and the place so well, he didn’t try to explain away the crisis. He let it hang in the air, heavy and unresolved.
Someone else raised her hand and said that, since Papa Bear is a veteran, the VA might have something to offer him to help him find housing. He nodded along with her as she explained her suggestion. “I want my own pension to pick my own place,” he said softly, precisely. He continued by explaining that they’ve taken his pension away and would take away his decision-making power over where and how he’d be living, if he went through the VA. Before he rose to head back to the Tenderloin, he closed his report, saying simply: “I dislike having someone else live my life I’m supposed to be living.”