Homeless Give Up Shantytown for Hotel

Times have changed for Thomas Troy Dalton, who had lived for five years in one of several shacks tacked up among weeds and refuse in a vacant lot near San Francisco’s skyscrapers.

City bulldozers leveled the shantytown in January, and Dalton lives in a sixth-floor hotel room with a comfortable bed, a private bath, a carpeted floor and three square meals a day.

Alternately sipping a warm Budweiser and dipping snuff, he observes: “The people here certainly go out of their way to be very helpful. They treat us good here.”

Dalton, 52, is one of 19 people whom city officials moved from the squalid shacks to the Hotel Midori.

Program Accelerated

The handling of the squatters, whom Mayor Dianne Feinstein had promised would not lose their shacks until other housing was found, was accelerated, acknowledged John Stallkamp, who heads the city’s emergency shelter program. But it exemplified how San Francisco’s homeless are cared for every day.

For the past five years, San Francisco has provided shelter for the homeless by putting them in hotels, mostly in the seedy Tenderloin district. About 3,000 people are sheltered each night, and the annual cost for food and shelter is about $6 million.

Stallkamp termed the shantytown, where officials found health and fire hazards, “a crisis.”

“Feinstein got wind of it and was concerned about the people,” he said. The squatters’ lot was city-owned property.

“The shantytown group, generally speaking, seems to be a notch up on the people who normally use the emergency shelter system,” said a social worker who has counseled the squatters.

“They’re a moderately independent and self-reliant group,” said the social worker, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified by name.

Pete DeDolce, 24, who lived at the shantytown for nine months, said he appreciated his hotel accommodation but added: “There’s a whole lot of other people in the streets who could have used these rooms more than I could because I was happy where I was.”

For most people in the emergency shelter program, sleeping in doorways or in parks is the only alternative in a metropolitan area where the median house price last year was $152,000.

Many are mentally disturbed but have been released from hospitals. Many have drinking or drug problems. Some are young, single mothers.

City officials estimate that 4,000 to 4,500 people in San Francisco are homeless. Advocates for the poor, like the Rev. Cecil Williams of Glide Memorial United Methodist Church, estimate that the figure is closer to 6,000.

The housing program began as a way to save money. Six years ago, city supervisors changed an ordinance governing payments under the general assistance relief program. The new ordinance called for giving recipients vouchers instead of cash.

Offer of Room, Food

The idea was to stop “frivolous applications for general assistance just to get the cash,” and instead to offer a room and food, Stallkamp said.

The hotel system was established and, to meet the needs of other homeless people, the city tried emergency shelters.

“People were coming in and sleeping on floors,” Stallkamp said. “In the short term, that’s not a bad way to go. But month after month, it’s no way to live. That’s when they came to me and asked me if I could expand this hotel situation.”

Two adults occupy most of the hotel rooms. Homeless people receive two-day vouchers that give them a place to stay while they apply for general assistance. Others can stay in four emergency shelters.

Meals are provided through Williams’ church, which has a $1-million contract with the city. The city also has a $1-million contract with the private Conard House to help the mentally unstable in hotels.

“These are the guys who don’t even have sense enough to get in bed at night; they just flop right down on the floor or in doorways. It seems totally hopeless,” Stallkamp said. “But with this program, I can go back in a couple of weeks and the guy will be clean and shaven, and, instead of mumbling, he’ll have a bit of coherence.”

200 Families Served

The program also serves about 200 families, including 350 children; some have lived in the hotels for three years. Stallkamp is negotiating with the city Housing Authority to find them permanent homes.

“Until we provide permanent housing for people on the street, we’re spinning our wheels,” Williams said.

Still, he said, some homeless people prefer to be on their own no matter how bad their situation.

“We’ve got to be realistic about the fact that there are some people you can’t help,” the minister said. “The reality is that any person who wants to do anything has to start doing it himself. There’s no miracle to this.”