Tracking tales of seven swept off Division Street
Lucky ones moved inside, others still on their own
It’s there in her eyes — a quality that could never come when she was huddled under thin blankets in the rain, hard concrete beneath her and predators of the night prowling the alleys for things to steal or a face like hers to kick in.
It’s peace. Drug-free, worry-free, fully housed, stable peace.
Five months ago, Angelique Mayweather capped off a tortured odyssey that began 2½ years ago in the biggest homeless camp San Francisco has ever seen — the Super Bowl-era sprawl of 350 people along Division Street — by moving into a studio at the Hotel Isabel supportive housing complex on Mission Street. She was one of the lucky ones. Mayweather is one of seven people The Chronicle has followed since January 2016, when the teeming Division Street camp was at its peak, through a city sweep on March 1 that year and beyond to show what happens to hundreds of chronically homeless people who choose to take help or just move along. Until she moved into her studio, Mayweather was among the majority of that group of seven who remained lost on the sidewalks — homeless, hopeless.
But that’s changed now. When Mayweather turned the key to her new home for the first time, she not only ended the fear and hunger and uncertainty that had haunted her on the street, she gave herself the first real shot in a long time at rebuilding her life.
“Just look at this place,” she said, marvel bright in her eyes as she gazed around her studio. “It is so quiet, so clean. Last time I really had a place of my own, with a real key to a real door,
was 20 years ago in Oakland, and that seems so long ago I can barely remember it.”
At one edge of the room, a clothesline held neatly hung shirts and coats, and on another was a tiny kitchen with a stove and a refrigerator. Piles of clothes and suitcases lined a wall, but with every month the mounds have gotten smaller and the neatness of the place more closely matches the tone set by her tidily made bed.
Last year at this time, Mayweather’s home was typically a tattered tent pitched in fields or sidewalks south of Market Street. Sometimes it was just a tarp tied to a tree and a cart. Or a blanket on the concrete where she’d sit, usually crying, sometimes smoking methamphetamine to dull the pain of living outside as a vulnerable, middle-aged woman. Men beat her. At times she was too weak to make it to a soup kitchen.
But that all ended when she accepted a spot in a Navigation Center, where she got tied into intensive housing and drug counseling programs. In May, Mayweather turned 50 in her new home. No crying, no dope, no hunger or fear.
“I’m pretty all right now,” she said with a smile as she prepared to go out to a birthday dinner with a friend.
With Mayweather’s evolution into stability, four of the seven Division Street campers can now say they live inside.
It’s a remarkable salvation considering what they came from.
The winter leading up to the Feb. 7, 2016, Super Bowl was drenching and cold, and the wide road beneath a mile-long stretch of Highway 101 around South Van Ness Avenue drew homeless campers from all over the city. That strip — commonly called Division Street, but actually encompassing parts of other streets including 13th — had always been a sleep haven because of the protective concrete ribbon overhead. But that winter, as a long drought surrendered to rain, tent settlements proliferated as never before.
The Super Bowl took place in Santa Clara, but the international spotlight fell upon San Francisco. Which meant it also fell upon the newly huge homeless camp, which by then had become a sprawl of trash, rats, needle-jamming addicts and daily fights.
Rescuing the four campers from that gritty mess not only saved their humanity, it saved the city money. It wasn’t easy. It never is.
“Getting folks inside like this shows that engaging with people on the street, over and over and not giving up, can work,” said Sam Dodge, a longtime homeless-aid worker who knows most of the seven campers and runs homeless services for the Public Works Department. “It doesn’t always work right away, but you have to be there when they’re ready to change.
“It’s a wonderful, wonderful feeling when you can see that happen in someone.”
Every chronically homeless person — i.e., long-term and very troubled — costs San Francisco as much as $85,000 a year in police, ambulance and other emergency services.
But living inside? It costs about $30,000 in state, federal and local poverty funding to keep a formerly homeless person in supportive housing. And there, along with a roof, they get counseling to help them conquer the mental illness, addiction or other problems that had pitched them into the street.
Back in 2016, when an army of police, counselors and street sweepers erased the Division Street tent camps, about 200 of
the displaced homeless people went into shelters or drug rehabilitation centers or accepted bus tickets home to family or friends. Some wound up in permanent housing.
But many of the campers —
the city was unable to determine exact numbers — simply did what campers have done for decades in San Francisco. They stayed away awhile, then came back. For more than two years after the sweep, tent
colonies sprouted throughout the old Division Street camp area, dissipating and reforming as city street crews swung through regularly to clean them out.
It was only in April, when
Mayor Mark Farrell ordered the Mission District definitively wiped clean of big homeless camps, that Division Street truly looked free of settlements. It’s not like the area is entirely cleared of homeless people, but the transformation is remarkable.
What becomes of every homeless person in San Francisco is impossible to know in a city with more than 2,000 chronically homeless people on any given night. But tracking seven people for 2½ years is illustrative.
Three of the former Division Street campers are still outside within a few blocks of the original settlement — one in a tent, two in a ramshackle RV.
It took Mayweather a long time to trust that the offer of housing was real. After just five months in a studio, the change in her has been radical.
“Living out there, I was out so long I couldn’t remember what normal was,” Mayweather said. “Out there it’s scary, and the drugs are secondary to staying alive. Methamphetamine? It’s what you do to keep away the pain, to numb yourself.”
She was getting ready to go to dinner with a friend, and as she spoke she primped her hair — neatly washed hair, framing a face so calm it’s unrecognizable from the perpetually anguished one she presented to the world two years ago, one year ago.
“It’s different now,” Mayweather said. “I’m a tough girl, and that’s how I stayed alive. But this is a new life now. I finally have my life back.”