THE UNITED STREETS OF AMERICA

San Francisco’s ‘Street Sheet’ has a Phil Collins origin story

BY MAGGIE YOUNGS

Street Sheet is the street paper of San Francisco, designed to empower the unhoused in the city.

The paper was birthed out of the Coalition of Homelessness in San Francisco in 1990 during a Phil Collins’s concert where he performed his song, “Another Day in Paradise.” Collins contacted the coalition, asking if they would set up a table for the event. The coalition agreed and printed a newsletter about The Coalition of Homelessness, but struggled to move the product on the day of the concert. Then, an idea sparked –– to have the unhoused distribute the paper, allowing vendors to keep any profits earned. Street Sheet was born.

The paper is currently lead by editor Quiver Watts, assistant editor TJ Johnston and vendor coordinator Emmett House, empowering 200 hundred active vendors in the city. I had the opportunity to join Johnston on Zoom as he shared about his experience with Street Sheet, particularly over this last year.

How did you become involved with Street Sheet? Why?

I became involved around 2001. I decided to attend a local workshop held in the city. I assumed that it was going to be about short stories or something, but instead it was about journalism. In the workshop, we investigated nonprofits that help the impoverished while receiving extensive salaries. The final project was published by Street Sheet.

I became assistant editor in 2015. When becoming editor, I had been involved with the coalition in various capacities for about 20 years.

California has been particularly prominent in the news over the last year. What would you say have been the biggest challenges and victories of the homeless community in San Francisco?

There have been many of the same problems that there have always been, but now they’re more visible. Before the pandemic, the shelter reservation wait list was about a thousand people long, meaning it could take six weeks for someone to get on the list. There’s a scarcity of accessible services for unhoused people and those living unhoused are well aware of it.

When people refuse services, it’s often not that the people are service-resistant, but that the services are people-resistant. In other words, there are often long wait lists and additional restrictions that make it difficult for people to receive proper services.

When the emergency order came down in San Francisco, the focus was on the public health emergency — making sure that unhoused people stayed healthy. The coalition’s efforts were to make sure they had access to hygiene items. We also saw the pandemic as an opportunity to get people housed. We had to push the mayor to open up hotel rooms, but we were able to get about 2,000 people housed in shelter in place hotels.

How did Street Sheet have to pivot?

We printed our last issue in March of 2020. We were still able to publish articles online, but this posed a problem for vendors of the paper, particularly those for whom it was their only sense of income, so we had to rethink our distribution model.

A lot of our focus was on protecting unhoused people and making sure they stayed alive and healthy. One way to keep vendors afloat was through a vendor grant program where we fundraised to help vendors get money. We started distributing physical copies of the paper again [in July of 2020], but are currently issuing once a month instead of twice.

What are your hopes and expectations for Street Sheet and those experiencing homelessness in San Francisco moving forward?

The hotel program is currently being phased out and will end sometime in the fall. The current challenge is figuring out how to move people into actual housing instead of back into encampments and shelters.

It’s like the old saying that crisis equals opportunity. We are hoping that the city sees the opportunity in this crisis to house as many people as possible, finding viable exits out of homelessness and opportunities for the unhoused to regain status in the community. Myself and the coalition believe that housing is a human right, and it’s up to the city and country to recognize and grant those inherent rights.