‘Uniquely vulnerable’ women losing refuge
Seniors, abuse survivors fear streets as funding expires
“You try sleeping outside after you’ve been assaulted.” Kara Zordel, CEO of housing nonprofit Community Forward SF
The stiff plastic chairs were supposed to be a last resort. Instead, they became part of a dreaded nightly ritual for dozens of homeless women seeking safe harbor from the streets of San Francisco.
Connie Pelkey slept in a chair at A Woman’s Place dropin center after she moved to the city from Georgia during a gender transition. Taijah Minnifield stayed there after her tent was set on fire. Susan Sakura, an abuse survivor who asked to be identified by a pseudonym, spent months after she lost her apartment cradling her dog in her wheelchair amid the rows of plastic.
“I hated every minute,” said Minnifield, a 50yearold transgender woman who worried about her few belongings being stolen while she tried to sleep. “What was the point of getting off the street?”
The point, in a region increasingly numb to tent cities, was to avoid at least some of the violence
that plagues up to 92% of homeless women, according to one estimate by the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence. But everything changed last spring when the pandemic hit. Dozens of homeless transgender women, abuse survivors and seniors who used to sleep
in the boxy, steellegged chairs were moved to emergency hotels and a women’sonly shelter — a 15month retreat to clean sheets, safety and stability that many say made their lives better.
Now, checkout day is looming.
Pandemic aid programs are set to begin expiring at the end of September. After that, advocates worry that San Francisco’s most vulnerable women will once again be left behind amid an unprecedented flood of funding for homeless services.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has pledged $7 billion to convert some motels into permanent housing, and San Francisco Mayor London Breed committed $1 billion for new housing, vouchers and other homeless programs. But neither plan calls for genderbased housing, which advocates say could undercut their success with hardtoreach women.
“There is money there, but it’s probably going to go to a more onesizefitsall solution,” said Kara Zordel, CEO of housing nonprofit Community Forward SF, which runs A Woman’s Place dropin center and several shelters. “That’s not going to get these women off the street.”
In a bid to get rid of stopgap measures like the chairs for good, Zordel is pitching a firstofitskind $20 million plan to convert a Lower Nob Hill hostel into a 120room women’s center with counseling, yoga and new dropin showers, emergency beds and health services. Whether it works will test not just the pandemic’s lasting impact on a tattered social safety net, but also the city’s willingness to confront stark underlying issues like street violence, trauma and rising homeless deaths.
While homelessness is increasing across all genders, the number of individual women living outside has risen faster in California than any other state, to 29,190 people in 2019, up 50% from 19,452 in 2016, according to an analysis by the National Alliance to End Homelessness. Across the country, the number of unhoused transgender people surged 113% during the same period.
The drastically shorter lives of women on the street are a primary concern for advocates and health researchers.
The average age of death for a homeless woman was 47 years old in one recent Sacramento report, compared with 80 for all women and 51 for homeless men. Public data on homelessness and age isn’t broken down by gender in San Francisco, but 51 was the average age of death for an unhoused person in a 2019 city report. The majority of San Francisco’s homeless residents, about 57%, were over age 40, and many local service providers now define homeless seniors as people age 55 or older.
“Astronomical” is how UCSF Professor of Medicine Margot Kushel explains the rate of violence impacting homeless
seniors, women and transgender people. After two decades of studying high rates of assault and health impacts of homelessness, she’s watched Bay Area seniors placed into hotels during the pandemic transform, to the point where staff didn’t recognize some of them.
“It’s been a lifechanging experience,” Kushel said. “When people regain housing, everything gets better.”
As San Francisco shut down in March 2020, Sakura settled into a new life full of clean towels, organic laundry detergent and the occasional essential oil sample. As a 52yearold woman living with one eye and severe spinal disease, she’d qualified for a pandemic housing program that allowed her to stay beyond the usual 180day limit at Community Forward SF’s women’sonly shelter in SoMa.
“It was like coming to ‘Fantasy Island’ for women,” Sakura said. “The creme de la creme of the homeless système.”
While the perks were nice, what she really valued was the security. Around the time she got into the ’80s punk scene as a teenager, Sakura remembers sleeping with a homemade knife under her pillow in case she had to fend anyone off as she bounced among shelters. She eventually made it through college and rented a small apartment until it became impossible to get her new wheelchair upstairs.
With nowhere else to go, she turned to the homeless dropin center. After a lifetime of abuse and institutions, she now sees a women’s center with longterm housing, therapy and a sense of community as her best hope for a future.
“I want to live in a women’sonly apartment complex,” Sakura said. “There is a sense of safety that I’ve never in my entire life experienced.”
With the clock once again ticking for women like Sakura, several factors will determine whether the proposed women’s center actually becomes a reality. Community Forward SF is circulating a petition and raising money from private donors. But when it comes to
government support, officials have been inundated with competing homeless services proposals, and securing federal funds to house any specific group of people can be complicated by antidiscrimination laws.
The city of San Francisco declined to comment directly on Community Forward SF’s plan, but said in a statement that it already offers several dozen women’s shelter beds. Mayor Breed’s budget proposal also includes a call to extend more housing vouchers to domestic violence victims, the San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing told The Chronicle in a statement.
“We recognize that women experiencing homelessness are uniquely vulnerable and have specific shelter and housing needs,” the statement read. The agency added that it aims to serve people of all gender identities, and that an influx of new funding “will give us the opportunity to experiment and try new models.”
For women like Pelkey, 44, who was born in San Diego and grew up mostly in the South, San Francisco was always the light at the end of the tunnel. Her work hosting live events in the city vaporized during the pandemic, but she also qualified for an extended stay at Community Forward SF’s women’sonly shelter, which the nonprofit now expects to end around October as pandemic health orders lift.
With the extra time under a consistent roof, Pelkey started reading up on working in the cannabis industry, since it seems more recessionproof. She ordered a long, braided wig and rastacolored dress on Amazon to look the part. Figuring out where she’ll live next is less clearcut. Pelkey said part of the challenge with existing housing programs and support groups is how they can seem to force participants into specific molds.
“With being transgender, people just assume you’re either a prostitute or you’ve been to jail,” Pelkey said. “You’re pretty much kind of the oddball sticking out, and you’re going, ‘Why am I even here?’ ”
As state and local officials debate where to go from here on homelessness, one nagging challenge is how invisible the struggles can be for women who resist traditional mixedgender shelters. Reliable data on gender and homelessness has long been scarce, but government agencies have started asking more demographic questions in recent years.
Based on survey estimates widely viewed as an undercount of the real street population, there were roughly 2,800 homeless women, 320 homeless transgender people and 80 homeless nonbinary people in San Francisco as of 2019.
Still, localized data on the risks of physical and sexual violence for unsheltered people doesn’t exist. What Kushel and other researchers have found is that 32% of homeless women and 38% of homeless transgender people had been seriously assaulted within the previous year, and that people without stable housing often develop a range of health complications.
Drug use is another fact of life on the street that is impossible to ignore but hard to generalize. Advocates like Zordel grow frustrated by stereotypes about women becoming homeless because of drug use, since she often sees substance abuse take hold later.
“One goes with the other,” Zordel said. “You try sleeping outside after you’ve been assaulted.”
In many ways, the stories of women like Minnifield illustrate why it’s been so hard to find lasting solutions for San Francisco’s crisis of street homelessness. She weathered the pandemic in a hotel in a quiet corner of the city, donning a silver rhinestone face mask for Janet Jacksoninspired dance routines as a way to get others to share in her infectious, fullbody laugh.
But when Minnifield talks about the darker periods of living on the street since 2007 — the long nights in the plastic chairs, the constant fear of rape — her voice gets quiet and her eyes dart to the ground. She didn’t come out as transgender until 2002, when she was in prison for a sexrelated offense. Since her release in 2007, the selfdescribed addict has bounced among tents, shelters and psychiatric facilities.
With just weeks left in her pandemic hotel room, a lasting refuge set aside for women like her seems like one option that might finally be too good to pass up.
“Hell yeah, I’d go,” Minnifield said. “I’d be in my own room.”