By Women Occupy San Diego

DELIVERY OF PETITION FOR EMERGENCY HUMANITARIAN ACTION FOR HOMELESS SAN DIEGANS TO MAYOR KEVIN FAULCONER

WHAT: Press Conference & Rally
WHEN: TUESDAY, January 3, 2017, 10-10:45am
WHERE: Civic Concourse by San Diego City Hall (200 C St @ 2nd)

On Tuesday, January 3, 2017, at 10:00 am, Women Occupy San Diego will host a Press Conference and Rally on the Civic Concourse by San Diego City Hall, before delivering over 1,000 signatures on a Change.org petition calling for Emergency Humanitarian Action by Mayor Kevin Faulconer to suspend the ticketing, arrest or stay-away orders of homeless people.

As Mayor, he is responsible for the safety of these San Diegans who are left to our streets as a direct consequence of the decisions and actions by him and other San Diego government and business leaders over the past decade, which have decimated San Diego’s affordable housing stock. This is a man-made Disaster, and requires Disaster Relief, NOT ticketing, arrest and stay away orders from services and resources desperately needed by homeless people.

• The Voices of the City Choir will perform, with co-founder, Steph Johnson, speaking on her work with people experiencing homelessness. PBS NewsHour featured the Choir earlier this week.
• The Hon. Lori Saldaña, Member of the CA Assembly (Ret) representing San Diego 2005-2010 and San Diego Community College Professor who works with homeless people and others struggling to survive, will speak on what our City could be doing more constructively.
• Suzanne Morse of Heartfelt Voices will speak on the continuing trauma to victims of domestic violence who often wind up living on our streets.
• The Rev. Shane Harris, President of National Action Network-San Diego, will speak to the 19% of homeless people in San Diego County who are African-American, contrasted with being just 5% of the population – and why this is on the agenda for the King Day March here on January 16^th.

As reported by the San Diego Union-Tribune, in the past 6 years, decisions by San Diego leaders of government and business eliminated 10,000 “affordable” units of housing, canceling out the entire amount added going back to 1979. Even worse, just 543 permanent units designated for homeless people have been added in the past 10 years. Since 2003, over half of the City’s single-room occupancy units have been replaced by market-rate hotels, apartments, condos and office buildings. As a direct result of these policy decisions and priorities by San Diego officials, the population of homeless people in San Diego has spiked in the past two years, with a 19% increase in people who are unsheltered Countywide from 2015 to 2016. San Diego now has the 4th largest population of homeless people in the U.S.

School districts report thousands of students who have no place to call “home”. Emergency shelter for families with children is non-existent. The number of people aged 55+ living on the streets has doubled in the past year. People of color are disproportionately represented.

As bluntly put by the San Diego Union-Tribune’s Business columnist:

“No, the magnets of great weather and lavish welfare don’t explain such growth. Los Angeles County, with the same climate and larger subsidies, has cut its chronic population by 29 percent (to a still-catastrophic 12,354 people). Salt Lake City is down 98 percent, Houston is down 86 percent, and the U.S. overall is down 32 percent.”

“In our burgeoning failure to house the most vulnerable, San Diego stands alone. We are a national disgrace.”

The Mayor of San Diego’s answer to the burgeoning population of people forced to live on the streets due to his own decisions and actions over the past decade (2 years as Mayor, 8 years as City Councilmember) and those of his fellow officials and business leaders? Direct the San Diego Police Department to engage in an escalating campaign of ticketing and arrests for obscure offenses in the Municipal Code, as well as plea bargains by the City Attorney to include “stay away orders” to keep people with no home nor shelter away from the very services intended to help them.

Concurrent with this campaign escalated in organized fashion this past March (leading up to the Major League Baseball All-Star Game and Comic-Con in July), a downtown San Diego business group’s monthly census shows a 68% spike in street homelessness since January of this year. So clearly, criminalizing homeless people for harmless, unavoidable behaviors of sleeping and sitting, has not worked to reduce homelessness on the streets of downtown San Diego.

The use of San Diego Police officers to address the consequences of elected officials’ policies and actions has been criticized by many — including officers themselves — as contributing to the growing tension between law enforcement and the residents they are sworn to “protect and serve.”

On Monday, December 12, 2016, before the formal inauguration of the Mayor to a full 4-year term, a new City Attorney, two City Councilmembers to additional 4-year terms, and three City Councilmembers to new 4-year terms — a “People’s Inaugural” was held in an adjacent public square to call attention to this failure of City leadership, and ask for the incoming leaders, old and new, to do better.

Specifically, we called upon all of these elected officials to support the following:

“The Mayor of San Diego has the authority to direct the San Diego Police Department to suspend the Ticketing and Arrest of, and Stay Away Orders for, homeless San Diegans.

“We request that the Mayor do so as an Emergency Humanitarian Action until permanent and safe housing is provided to every San Diegan in need of shelter.

“This Emergency Humanitarian Action would be limited to the safe living conditions of unsheltered homeless people, and does not apply to any activity beyond that.

“We respectfully request that the City Council support this Emergency Humanitarian Action by the Mayor, and call upon Mayor Faulconer to take this Action immediately.”

We also delivered this request to the newly-inaugurated City Council at its first meeting that afternoon, before it adjourned for the rest of 2016. And we delivered it to Mayor Faulconer’s office immediately afterward.