S.F. Liaison to Homeless Brings Experience to Job

Nearly a decade after he managed to get off the streets, memories of spending his nights getting high on cocaine and his days sleeping on BART trains are still sharp in George Smith’s mind.

“I fight every day of my life not to have to return to the street,” said Smith, who is Mayor Willie Brown’s liaison to the myriad groups in the city that deal with issues of homelessness.

Appointed to the job in July, Smith is the mayor’s point man for a crisis that has bedeviled San Francisco mayors for more than a decade--the several thousand people who each night crowd city shelters, sleep on downtown sidewalks and camp illegally in city parks.

In public opinion polls, San Franciscans consistently rank homelessness as one of the city’s most pressing issues. The army of homeless people pushing shopping carts through the financial district and panhandling at intersections has become an embarrassment for Brown, who is battling to win a second term as mayor.

Smith finds himself helping to fashion--and defend--the policies of a mayor who was bitterly attacked by homeless advocates for doing too little to help the down-and-out.

In a city enjoying almost unprecedented prosperity, Brown’s opponents have criticized him for failing to narrow the yawning gap between haves and have-nots. The ubiquitous presence of the homeless, they say, underscores the division.

“I’m under a microscope,” Smith acknowledged. “I’m not looking to solve homelessness in San Francisco; I just want to have a system that responds successfully to a crisis and that is constantly developing to meet the changing needs of homeless people.” They are needs, Smith insists, that he understands in a way few big-city bureaucrats ever could, because he spent more than two years living on San Francisco’s streets, lost in drug addiction.

“One of the most impressive things about George Smith is that he understands whereof he speaks,” said Kandyce Bender, a representative for Brown. “He’s been homeless, he’s gone through the system and he has very clear ideas about what works and what does not work. People on the street know George, they respect him and they trust him.”

Smith says he still runs into people he knew during the years he wandered the city searching for a fix or a free meal. Some are still on the street, but others, he points out, have left the bad old days behind and are leading productive lives.

“It is unusual that I made it into the mayor’s office, but people forget that people do recover and people do get off the streets,” he said. “You can’t tell me that the system is not working, because I’m the product of a lot of hard work by people in the system”

Born in the city’s predominantly black neighborhood of Bayview-Hunter’s Point to a large, working-class family of Southern Baptists, Smith says he was brought up in a solid home.

For several years after graduating from high school, Smith said, he supported himself and worked as a retail clerk at a grocery store chain. But in the 1980s, he began smoking marijuana, then started using cocaine. By 1988, he had quit his job and lost his apartment.

For more than two years, Smith said, he was lost in his addictions, taking temporary jobs when he could find them to feed his habit, staying away from shelters and treatment programs.

“For months, I never slept at night,” he says. “I rode BART trains during the day--I would take what was then the longest line, from Daly City to Concord in the East Bay, starting at 4 or 6 in the morning. I never showered, just washed up in train station bathrooms. Once a week, I would get a complete change of clothes,” from donation bins at a local church.

Smith was driven into city shelters by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. A case manager at a center persuaded him to take a job at a shelter. It was there that Smith decided to seek treatment.

“What kept me grounded was my gratitude,” he said. “I was always thinking: ‘One day I will run this place.’ ” At the urging of his boss, Smith entered a two-month residential treatment program. He has been off drugs, he said, ever since.

When he came out, Smith went back to work at the shelter, where he eventually became a supervisor. From there, he worked for nonprofits that dealt with the homeless. Smith became a counselor for HIV-infected and drug-abusing clients.

He worked as a precinct-walker in Brown’s first campaign because “Willie Brown was always considered a hero, a role model in my house.” Shortly after Brown’s election, Smith was hired to work on a project in the mayor’s office for homelessness. When the second coordinator resigned last summer, Brown gave Smith the job.

“I felt it was healthy and good to have him in that office,” said Paul Boden, director of the Coalition on Homelessness, a nonprofit advocacy group. Smith, Boden said, “is a really decent person in a really terrible job, so his reputation in the community is going downhill. What George proves to me is how dysfunctional that position is,” Boden said.

Some advocates for the homeless said Smith’s appointment is little more than a gimmick by a mayor short on ideas and compassion when it comes to dealing with the crisis. They fault Brown for canceling a summit on homelessness during his first term, for cracking down on homeless squatters in the city’s parks, and most recently, for saying that the police should confiscate shopping carts from the homeless and replace them with duffel bags.

Boden and others point to the fact that Smith and the three staffers who work with him have no budget and serve at the pleasure of the mayor as inherent weaknesses.

“That office cannot tell the mayor, ‘That is a really stupid idea,’ ” Boden said. “I’ve yet to see them bring forward community concerns that go against what the mayor is planning to do.”

Although Brown said early in his first term that there may be no solution for the city’s homelessness problem, the mayor insists that no city in the nation does more than San Francisco to help the down-and-out.

In campaign speeches, Brown, who grew up poor in rural Texas, says that the city spends $60 million a year on treatment programs, clinics, shelters, affordable housing and other services aimed at getting people off the streets and helping them rebuild their lives.

“We spend more per capita on homelessness than any other city in this nation,” Brown insisted in a recent debate with Tom Ammiano, the Board of Supervisors president who is his rival in the Dec. 14 runoff election.

Most criticism is aimed at Brown, but sometimes the attacks are aimed pointedly at Smith.

“I thought it would help that he had been homeless,” said Jackie Henderson of the nonprofit Coalition on Homelessness. “But based on George’s behavior, it did not help. I guess he doesn’t want to remember that time of his life. I would never have known he had been homeless if others hadn’t told me.”

Such accusations hurt, Smith said. And when people say the mayor doesn’t care about the homeless, it angers him.

“What mayor haven’t they been critical of?” asked the 40-year-old Smith. “I went from homelessness to a job where I can be influential. To me, that says the mayor cares. He put me in a position to facilitate policy changes and do hands-on management.”

Smith said his priority is to implement the mayor’s plan to address homelessness as a regional issue.

“We’ve become a city of last resort for a lot of people,” Smith said. “We have a history of open doors and of helping people, but the affordable housing just isn’t there. We want other counties to participate with us in dealing with the problem, and to join us in lobbying the state and federal government for more dollars.”

Being on the hot seat during the mayoral campaign hasn’t distracted him from his primary focus, Smith said.

“I bring passion to my work,” he said. “I still have family members dealing with drug addiction, even homelessness. And I’ll never forget what it was like having my life on the line, being unsafe on the street.”