We’ve created this structure here where it’s purely about the relationship. “You’re smoking crack on the streets? Great, don’t blow it in my face. You’re about to get in a fight? Well, we’ll walk away because we don’t want to get in the middle of it, but we don’t have to stop you from doing it. You’re using racial epithets? Use them until you’re blue in the face.” And then our work in the daytime is one-to-one. So the time spent is just connecting with people.
As long as kids aren’t hurting anyone or hurting themself, we support them in whatever life they want to build for themself. And it doesn’t matter what that looks like. It doesn’t matter to us if that involves school or work or housing. Now, the reality is that those are things most kids want. They want a legal income, so they want to work. They want stable housing, they want a home, they want healthy relationships. But we don’t have to force them into it.
There was a kid, the first four years she wanted to work with us, she wanted me to buy her lunch and just receive her anger and profanity. She’d curse me out, she’d yell at me, she’d call me every name in the book, she’d rage against me. That’s what she wanted, so that’s what we gave. Eventually it gave way to her wanting to get off the streets, stop drinking a liter of vodka a day, stop doing two grams of heroin. So then we were able to help her with that. But you have to be willing to help with the first part for the kid to let you help with the second.
We do not save lives here, and we are really clear about that. You will never see in our literature or hear a counselor say, “Yeah, we save lives here.” It’s disrespectful, it’s disempowering, and it can be patronizing. My brother-in-law saves lives, he’s an emergency physician. We don’t. We help them, we support them, we empower them, we bear witness, we assist. Choose your verb, but “save” is not among them.
Downtown has changed dramatically. When we first started working, maybe about 75 percent of the kids we saw were white, and then maybe a quarter black. The white kids, they ruled the night.
We’d sit down with a group of twenty crusty gutter-punk kids. They’d all be sitting in a circle or in little packs drinking, smoking weed, doing drugs, whatever. We’d kind of break up the circle a little and squeeze in between two kids to chat with them. A beer would pass by you; a joint would pass by you. They’d offer it, you’d say no. You’d offer them stuff, you’d chat with them, then you’d move one down and you’d move one down. We’d spend an hour or two just in that one circle of kids.
But then the neighborhood started to change. The white kids were getting targeted more by law enforcement. They were getting pushed to other neighborhoods, they were getting locked up, or services were reaching out to them. And so slowly, little by little we were seeing fewer and fewer white kids there.
Then there was the growth of the black community in youth street culture. It went from seeing five black kids a night to ten to fifteen to twenty. To now, on a typical night we might see fifty black kids and five kids from other ethnic backgrounds.
The black kids don’t look stereotypically homeless, so no homeless services are targeting them. It’s why their needs are getting so underserved. At the beginning, we did not know what the hell we were doing with the black kids out there. We’d be like, Are they homeless? Are they not? Should we be targeting them? Should we not?
It’s funny, you learn to notice differences. You see that the same kid has been wearing the same outfit for four straight days. Or they don’t smell great and they probably haven’t showered in a couple days. Or all their stuff, while it looks clean, it’s not name-brand. And when we really clarified the term “underserved homeless youth,” it was like a light went on: Holy shit. The black kids are exactly who we need to reach. Because no one was prioritizing them.
And over time, that resolve has grown even stronger. A, these kids aren’t being identified by the city, by service providers, by anyone—and, B, most of them do not identify as homeless.
When people in San Francisco think of homeless youth, they think of dirty white kids. Kids who actively reject the system, who project themselves as anarchists, “Man, the system fucked me, so fuck the system.”
And black kids are like, “No, no, I am not a Haight Street kid!” Very, very clearly that is not who they are. And so because of that they’re not going to go and seek out homelessness services, they’re not going to go into a drop-in center, they’re not going to go into a job program for homeless people.
Then there’s another issue. The black kids that we work with have grown up in lots of different houses with cousins, with aunts, with uncles. That’s not shaming or labeling. That’s part of the reality of being poor and black in this city, in this country. It’s part of being targeted by law enforcement, being incarcerated, and having your family broken up time and time again.
As the black population in San Francisco has shrunk, we’ve seen a rise in the number of black homeless youth. And we’ve tried to make sense of it. Thirty-five years ago, when San Francisco was 14 percent black, a sixteen-year-old black kid—if their pseudo-nuclear home wasn’t working out—they had options. They had five, ten, fifteen different relatives, different households that provided opportunities other than a street. Well, now all those relatives have moved away.
So now rather than having a few different places that they can stay for six months here, three months there, two months there—or even a night here, a night there—those places don’t exist anymore. Those places are now in Antioch, they’re in Sacramento, they’re in Vallejo. Or they’ve just left the Bay Area completely.
Many white kids wear their homelessness like a badge of courage: “Being homeless was the safest and smartest option for me. So why would I be embarrassed about that?” There’s no condemnation of people that they love. There might be condemnation of people they hate in saying, “I’m homeless.”
For the black kids, so much of their support comes from friends and family, churches, the community. They take the place of social services, which often fail these kids. I’ve always wondered if part of the reason that so many black youth don’t identify as homeless is out of a fear that it implies that their community of friends and family also failed them.
Black kids don’t sleep on the streets, almost never. They will find any other alternative. They want to be able to keep a certain appearance. It’s why a white kid is more comfortable panhandling—make enough money to support your drug habit and your food. Whereas the black kids are more focused on making money out there because they’re trying to pay for a hotel room every night so that they’re not sleeping on the streets. They often don’t think of themselves as homeless.
But if you ask them the question, “When is the last time you had a stable place to stay?” they’d be like, “I don’t know. Five years ago, eight years ago, twelve years ago.”
SAMMY NUNEZ
He felt lost—he had seen his family worn to shreds working the fields of California’s farms, watched his father and brothers drift in and out of prison, his community torn apart by drugs, prostitution, poverty. He could still feel the shotgun wound in his shoulder healing, years later. He turned to indigenous medicine, sweat ceremonies: “Since time immemorial, we’ve had methods of healing, creating equilibrium and balance. How do you raise Chicano men of color, boys of color, to be brave, to be truthful, you know, to be compassionate? I felt something stirring within my spirit, a kind of jump, wakening a feeling like I had been here before.” The organization he started, Fathers and Families of San Joaquin, has broad reach into the city of Stockton. They act almost as a parallel government, serving those forgotten by a once-forgotten city. Stockton is over two hours from the Bay Area and has slowly felt the ripples of change radiating from San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Recently, those ripples have grown to waves as those displaced from the Bay Area have started to crash on Stockton’s shores.
For many, this is the place of last resort. There’s a mass influx, an exodus. Poor people are getting pushed out of the Bay, pushed right
to our community. It’s forced migration.
They arrive totally dislocated. Rattled, shell-shocked. Stockton is not Oakland. The weather’s different. The way things flow is different. We have our own get down out here.
And we don’t have the resources to actually support these folks. We don’t have the same infrastructure, the same opportunities, the same culture. There’s a disparity, a regional disparity in terms of the reinvestment and resources. The Bay has a plethora of social justice–type organizations there. Here, there’s very few. This is traditionally a conservative stronghold. People proudly say, “We’re not the Bay,” you know.
It’s kind of a cruel irony. The Central Valley is an agricultural hub, if you will. We feed the world, yet we have some of the worst food insecurity here. Private industry and developers pretty much control the politics in Stockton—they got rich. So you’ve got tremendous wealth with punctuated poverty. Some of the deepest racism and segregation. Our school system is failing our children: third-highest illiteracy rate in the nation, the highest in the state, you have some schools with zero percent literacy. Double the national average for unemployment, so there’s not a lot of opportunity for upward mobility. Slumlords, squalor, horrid living conditions. We have some of the worst air quality here. Crazy corrupt government. Indictments for embezzlement. Our politicians not in the headlines for the right reasons.
These are global issues, and they’re concentrated in Stockton. This was ground zero for the housing crisis. One of the largest metropolitan cities to file for bankruptcy. California is, what, the fifth- or sixth-largest economy in the world? And we have poverty comparable to third-world conditions? It’s criminal. You have this storm—perfect storm—of poverty, despair, and oppression.
Now you add to that these folks that are being gentrified from the Bay Area.
They put pressure on the community, on the grassroots, on the underground economy. It has created a real flash point, a lot of tension. Violence across the United States has dropped; violence in Stockton is on the uptick. Folks are bringing their neighborhoods, their banners, their flags into Stockton. Whole gangs from Oakland are moving into this area and are obviously having conflict with the indigenous organizations. We get a lot of folks from Oakland coming to Stockton to bury their relatives. I would call it a crisis.
We have to create a paradigm shift. If they aren’t actively involved and engaged in the process, that means we have to engage them.
So every day, when somebody from Oakland comes into our offices—or we get a call from sister agencies in Oakland telling us some of their folks are here now and are homeless, or they’re in crisis, or somebody got shot—we respond. Because, the way I see it, they’re not Oaklanders. They live in our city. Now they’re Stocktonians.
We’re sort of the brokers, I guess you can say, to what other folks consider “hard-to-reach communities.” I was at a presentation, all these organizations talking about “hard-to-reach communities.” And I was like, “No. We’re not hard to reach. Y’all are hard to reach. We don’t find you in our neighborhoods. We have access to probation officers, and that’s pretty much it.” Victims of violence become violent. Parents teach their kids how to survive incarceration. When you’re unemployed, you’re hungry, you’re basically homeless—and you got a gun—something bad is gonna happen.
Now if crime harms, justice should heal. We just need the political will to create this collective healing.
So we are the rising tide that lifts all ships. Whether that’s shrinking the prison population or improving reentry. Whether that’s climate change and climate investment here locally. Childhood, parenthood, neighborhood. Strong families create strong communities.
We’ve been at it for twenty years, building this movement on the ground. We have call-in lines for legal questions, questions about public services. We host an elder circle every day. We intervene in domestic violence incidents. We beautify the parks and provide after-school programs for kids. We are doing everything the government can’t. We’re the most transformative, the most engaged, the most responsive organization on the ground out here, and we can barely keep up.
Resiliency, hope, heart. Look, if you’re in Stockton, man, you’ve gotta have heart and you’ve gotta have a thick skin. You gotta have grit, you know what I’m saying, if you’re gonna survive in this city.
Whether you were born here or you’ve come here, we’re rewriting our future together. And Stockton is starting to emerge and become a kind of breakthrough community. We’ll even teach the Bay a thing or two.
TITUS BELL (CONT’D)
We meet in the Outer Mission, by the Muni tracks where he was arrested for armed robbery when he was sixteen. He was released from prison three years ago and has stayed out of trouble since.
My closest friend, he’s locked up right now for murder. It was about three years ago, on Valentine’s Day.
My birthday is the day before. He called me, wished me a happy birthday. I was this close to kicking with them that night too. But I was with my girl, and I was like, “I’m kinda tired. Let’s just go home.”
He rode out and shot at some people down on Fifteenth. Got in a high-speed, and it was over after that. The cops started chasing him, and he crashed into one car, took out the passenger. And that car crashed into some dude that was walking to the store.
The next morning, it was like, “Dude, where’s Goldie?” It was like, “We can’t find him. He’s not at home.” Because he would always say, “Oh, I’m home and safe” at the end of the night, and he didn’t do that.
And then my homie who lives down in Fremont was like, “Brah, turn on the news.” And it was everywhere. I’m like, “Damn! That’s crazy! Like I was just talking to the man last night!” And I coulda been there too.
That goes to show, girls will keep you safe! I’m telling you. Listen to your girl; she’ll keep you safe.
I had to reevaluate myself. Had I stayed in the streets, things were getting pretty serious. It wasn’t fun and games anymore. That reputation, that wanting power. We were getting to the point where it was getting super dangerous, and we felt like we didn’t have no other choice.
So I started kicking with different people.
I started hanging out with my girl more. And she showed me, like, “Oh, you go to a job. You go to work.” I had never seen that before. I had never been around people who actually go to work every day to pay rent. She worked at Chipotle and this little sushi spot. I was twenty years old and still in high school. I’m like, Okay, let me get this done. After I was done with high school, I was able to work more. I was able to earn a little bit more money, so it made sense to me. Like, Oh, more education, more money. . . .
Now I’m at City College. This is my last semester. It’s just so much information. I feel like my brain is about to implode.
Most people who go through what I go through have so much hate in their heart, so much anger. They see the gloom and the dark side—they can’t see things like this. I have a weird sense of humor, and people like being around that. I love that feeling. That same feeling that I was getting in the streets, I was getting in those jobs and stuff.
I don’t want to be sixty-five, here, in a small apartment in the Tenderloin. So what do I need to do? Oh, I’m gonna go to law school. Dang, I want to go to Harvard! I can taste it! I saw the Obama movie and it made so much sense to me. It takes a high, high, high, high, high assimilation to get into places of power. But then the powers have to start listening to you. I want to open up my own law firm—a nonprofit law firm—educate people.
It’s the most simple thing. To take genuine interest into someone’s life: Your life, your human life, you are a precious human being. And I love everything about you. That mind frame: companionship is essential!
And once you surround yourself with those people, then you get what you deserve. I mean, you get what you want.
* On January 1, 2009, at the Fruitvale BART Station, Oscar Grant was handcuffed by the police
, forced to lie facedown, and was shot in the back. His death sparked protests throughout the Bay Area, anticipating the Black Lives Matter movement.
† A measure passed in 2002, sponsored by then Mayor Gavin Newsom, that cut direct cash assistance to the homeless in favor of funding shelters and other programs.
PART V
IF WE CAN MERGE THE TWO WORLDS
“Tech” is not a monolith, the public sector is not a single body, and those who fight for social justice do not speak in a common voice. As tempting as it may be to describe San Francisco as a tale of two cities, there is no single fault line that describes how the city is being divided.
The Bay Area has weathered the social and economic equivalent of a great earthquake: A shock, born of friction building beneath our feet, that shakes everyone’s foundations but leaves the most vulnerable structures broken. There are cracks in the pavement everywhere. Important issues are pulling public attention in so many directions that none get the support they need. And, just as San Francisco did after the earthquakes in 1906 and 1989, it will have to build again.
It will take time to heal, to rebuild infrastructure and institutions, common ground and communal will. It will take time and presence, the ability to wait, to listen, to learn from others, and to see the important nuances. The smallest cracks are easy to overlook and will only grow larger.
Happily, the region has many healers, folks who picked a rift in the ground and are patiently coaxing it to close: activists push large companies to create a more diverse workplace, labor movements forge unexpected alliances to fight for fairer wages, engineers partner with government to defend the environment, and leaders try to build bridges (sometimes literally) to knit the community back together.
NICOLE SANCHEZ
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