Gas Everyone- Especially the Homeless People

by Bruce Allison/PNN

Two weeks ago at the general meeting of the board of supervisors, a special proposition was discussed to change the curfew hours at Golden Gate Park from sun-up to sun-down, to 8pm to 8am. I attended the meeting because they were taking public comments and, as a poverty scholar, I wanted to respond to this discriminatory legislation.

The General Director of Golden Gate Park spoke and gave a slide-show presentation with the purpose of showing how the homeless community is altering the park by digging holes for sleeping and stealing furniture from the recycling center at the edge of the park. He was attempting to make a case in support of the increased curfew hours.

The proposed curfew change would give the homeless outreach team more time to catch people sleeping in the park. The outreach team is supposed to help by taking people to shelters, but it rarely ever does and most of the time people are simply taken to shelters that are already over capacity.

Many of the people on the streets are seniors like me and have no place to go thanks to care not cash. These are the people that have nowhere else to go except places like Golden Gate Park.

Most seniors and people with disabilities need a quiet place to sleep out of the cold, yet this is rarely provided by the City’s shelters. Compared to sleeping on the streets, the park is quiet and houseless people are not harassed by pedestrians and others while they are trying to sleep. Until the City can provide adequate housing for these seniors, the park is unfortunately their only option.

The outreach team is called when a park ranger or police officer sees someone with a sleeping bag, or “illegally lodging.� Illegal lodging was enacted in the 1800s to stop claim jumping in the gold rush. Now it is used for torturing poor homeless people who cannot find a decent place to sleep.

The slide presentation was so biased that when ever they showed a park worker you could not see his face. But when a houseless person was shown in the park, his or her face was openly shown.

After the slide show, the managing director of the park, said, “These people [homeless people], bring in furniture and barbeque equipment into the park because they do not want to enter the housing community.�

Trent Raw, the Department of Human Services Director, said, that “ [homeless people] are a burden on the city’s budget for the park.� The outreach team’s solution is to pick up people sleeping in the park and take them to the “available� shelters.

During the thirty-minute presentation I felt angry. Everyone in the room was being misled and everything presented was biased toward houseless people and presented in support of the park’s authority.

During the public comment time, I spoke, along with about fifty other people. We were each were allotted three minutes. I spoke to the problem of care not cash people taking all the beds and about how there are only two beds set aside for seniors and people with disabilities.

After I spoke a formerly houseless woman spoke. She said police in San Francisco attacked her and it was this incident that “straightened her out.� Her solution she said was to “gas everyone in the park� who doesn’t belong there to straighten them out. Listening to her speak, I realized that this woman has a bad mental illness known as the Helsinki syndrome, which makes her bond and sympathizes with her capturers.

More and more, the houseless community in San Francisco is beginning to agree with and pardon its captors, the wardens, police officers and city officials that are oppressing us. We have to remember that these people are the reason we are struggling to survive and being forced to sleep outside in a city that is our home. Until there is adequate housing for low and no-income folks in this City, people will be sleeping Golden Gate Park, one of the last and now endangered refuges.