By Rachel McDonald and Jennifer Friedenbach
Special to AsianWeek
Filipino American Raymond Nemenzo* has been homeless on and off for three years now. He says it is still hard to survive, even with the little assistance he gets from the city of San Francisco. “It’s hard, you know, I only have enough to just get by. I have barely enough now to pay for the room I share with my brother and his wife, for food, for medicine.” His face crumbles as he looks down towards the sidewalk. “If I did not have the money to do that, then I don’t know what I would do.”
With Proposition N, San Francisco voters are faced with a controversial piece of legislation that could drastically cut the assistance that Raymond currently receives from roughly $350 to just $59 a month. “But why?” he exclaims and adds “I really need that money to eat, buy medicine and save for a stable and safe place to live.”
Proposition N would cut General Assistance for homeless people by 87 percent, leaving the poorest among us with only $59 a month to live on. This change could easily mean hunger and lack of funds for medicine for thousands of poor San Franciscans. In essence, Proposition N would translate into millions of dollars in losses to already strapped low-income communities struggling to survive in a city with high housing and living costs.
The benefit in question, General Assistance (GA), is a cash assistance program of last resort for San Francisco residents. To be eligible, you must have low to zero income and not qualify or receive any other type of assistance. The majority of recipients receive assistance for less than six months and need the cash assistance until they can stabilize their lives. Program participants are primarily people of color (70 percent), people with disabilities (50 percent), and seniors (74 percent are over the age of 40 and 35 percent are over the age of 55). Under the dubious legislation proposed by Proposition N, the livelihood of the people who rely on this money is in jeopardy. Because this legislation targets poor Filipino and Asian people like Raymond Nemenzo, Asians will be disproportionably hurt.
All able-bodied recipients of GA are required by law to participate in a workfare program for their pay. They are obligated to work at least eight hours a week doing tasks like street sweeping, graffiti-removal from buses or grounds maintenance work in parks. However, if Proposition N passes, then these poor people and homeless will be working for an hourly wage of only $1.84, far less than California’s mandated minimum wage of $6.75 and certainly less than a livable wage in San Francisco.
Proponents of Proposition N state that the money saved from the GA cut will be replaced with “in-kind” services such as housing, food, treatment programs and job training. However the legislation itself does not guarantee that these funds will actually be used on homeless services, much less on the very same homeless people who had their GA cut. The funds cut go into a baseline budget that is saved for the following year — the individual homeless person gets nothing in return for money taken out of their check.
The proposed legislation states that the city of San Francisco cannot remove funds from GA payments if no in-kind services are available. If the city pays for food programs or has one shelter bed available, then cash can be taken out of every individual’s check. Those who do get services now, such as a shelter bed, would have to start paying for it — up to $300 a month for a mat on the floor. Proposition N does not include additional funding for new services — and services such as shelters and treatment programs are already full.
If this initiative passed, it would mean that homeless people would no longer be able to save up money for move-in costs, nor be able to rent housing on their own. Proposition N would mean homeless people would have to wait until welfare housing becomes available. This proposition would set a dangerous precedent by tying public assistance to city programs such as shelters. A youth being sexually harassed in a shelter would lose his or her benefits by leaving the shelter. Likewise if a woman comes across a batterer and leaves, or an individual is five minutes late for curfew — all these causes would be grounds for losing public assistance. Those who are now using their checks to pay program fees at drug treatment programs would no longer be able to pay their fees and would lose their treatment. While the legislation is supposed to address addiction, in reality it will exacerbate the impact addiction has on our communities.
San Francisco, even during a recession, has sky-rocketing rents and high housing and living costs. For those affected by homelessness and poverty, the economic situation is even more dire. The number of people who receive GA is inversely related to the prosperity of the economy, that is, the number of recipients who receive GA increases when the economy started to falter. Proposition N targets those least able to provide for themselves, the poorest of the poor. Proposition N is designed to strip cash from homeless people who receive assistance from the city, but despite its title, it is not designed to provide care. At best, Proposition N is a poorly thought out plan that is likely to backfire. At its worst, Proposition N is a bad-faith measure designed to play on our anger about homelessness.
Rachel McDonald and Jennifer Friedenbach are working on the No on N campaign. For more information, visit www.nomorehomelessness.org, or call 415-346-4808.
*Actual name has been changed as requested.
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