At a demonstration outside San Francisco City Hall called Sweeps Free, several homeless groups advocated for the right to build intentional communities on public land.
Their Tuesday protest was in response to the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the case City of Grants Pass v. Johnson that said local bans of camping on public land are not considered unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment.
The groups are asking for the right to establish what they call “sanctuary communities” on public land. They also ask for a permanent moratorium on rental evictions and foreclosures, and the defunding of CARE Courts, a state-run program that allows social services to intervene when a person is experiencing a mental health crisis.
Members of Sweeps Free had previously built a community of hand-made architecture called the Wood Street Commons under an interstate highway in Oakland. Modeled after the self-sustaining back-to-the-land communities of the 1970s, the community had established its own governance and trade economy. They have since established a new self-built Oakland project called Homefulness located at 8032 MacArthur Blvd.
Tiny Gray-Garcia of POOR Magazine said that 22 residents live at Homefulness in rent-free housing, which was built and created by fellow poor and houseless people. She called Gov. Gavin Newsom’s threat to cut state funding for cities that don’t clear homeless encampments from public land a form of state-funded violence.
“Another solution is to walk with our First Nations relatives, which we do — land back reparations, Black land theft,” Gray-Garcia said. “It’s not an accident that thousands and thousands of people on the streets are black and brown or indigenous. There is no such thing as public land, if it’s only public for certain members of the public.”
Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the nonprofit Coalition on Homelessness, admires the Homefulness project.
“They were able to pay for up to over 30 units of housing that they purchased themselves without any government assistance,” said Friedenbach. “That’s pretty amazing. It was started by a bunch of unhoused people. We always support self-determination whenever possible.”
Friedenbach is a member of the oversight committee for the Our City Our Home Fund administered from San Francisco’s Controller’s Office. The OCOH fund was created by a 2018 ballot proposition for a tax on the city’s wealthiest businesses. There was a tax on gross receipts for businesses with over $50 million in gross annual receipts, or 1.5 percent of payroll expenses for certain businesses with over $1 billion in gross annual receipts and administrative offices in San Francisco.
That allowed the city to fund housing, mental health services, homeless prevention programs and short-term shelters. The proposition was passed with a majority vote, but it was delayed with a lot of lawsuits.
Members of the Homefulness and the Wood Street intentional communities demonstrate against encampment sweeps and for public land at San Francisco’s City Hall. Dec. 17, 2024. (Gera Gonzalez, Israel Munoz and Momii Palapaz via Bay City News)
“The tax included about 300 businesses,” said Friedenbach. “Those first couple of years, it actually generated $340 million a year.”
The COVID-19 pandemic also decreased the number of wealthy corporations with offices in San Francisco, as tech employees and others began working remotely. The ordinance has recently been adjusted to lower the threshold to include companies with gross receipts of $25 million.
According to the OCOH recent annual report, the fund has allowed the city to create 3,859 housing solutions since 2018, with 774 added in 2024. That includes permanent supportive housing, where a person pays 30% of their income on rent and then the city subsidizes the rest, as well as rapid rehousing solutions that can provide subsidies for up to five years if needed. There are other programs for families who cannot pay 30% toward rent. All of these options are combined with support services.
Too many qualification obstacles
When asked whether the OCOH fund has helped her community, Gray-Garcia said the city’s housing program has too many obstacles.
“You have to have an assessment,” she said. “Then they require a psychological evaluation, and they require you to do a 32-page proof-of-income form, and they require credit checks. Most of us have bad credit. We’ve lived through poverty. That’s a given. I do not have good credit.”
“The way qualification works is that people are given a score,” said Friedenbach. “The city then ranks folks and offers the number of units available to the top tier.”
According to the city’s 2024 Point in Time Count, in which teams of volunteers scan the city to count the number of unsheltered, 8,323 homeless individuals were observed, with 13% fewer people sleeping on the streets than in 2022. The count report said that more than 20,000 people seek homeless services in San Francisco over the course of a full year.
“Since Grants Pass, you no longer have to offer shelter. You still can, but you no longer have to offer shelter before citing and arresting people,” said Friedenbach. “Once the decision came out, the city just started doing a bunch of stuff that really had nothing to do with the decision necessarily.”
There’s been this overreliance on criminalization for decades, and it’s been proven to exacerbate homelessness… It also disintegrates trust with the community you’re trying to help.
Jennifer Friedenbach, coalition on homelessness
When the city started clearing encampments, she said, it got harder to keep in contact with the people that OCOH funds are meant to help house. People have lost their phones and their connection to their communities.
“It’s just exacerbated homelessness in a really dramatic way,” she said. “Folks with mental illnesses are having much more frequent psychiatric incidents that last longer and are more debilitating. It’s been really difficult on the health of the community.”
“There’s been this overreliance on criminalization for decades, and it’s been proven to exacerbate homelessness. It’s a waste of resources,” said Friedenbach. “It also disintegrates trust with the community you’re trying to help.”
