As much as anyone in San Francisco can be, I am securely housed. And I know the contrast between myself and people sleeping in tents and shelters includes a palpable emotional distance that inhibits acts of common decency. In my experience, little more than roaming eye contact can draw menace whether from rage or something else—and very quickly the wellbeing of someone in a crisis is outweighed by instincts calibrating the dangers of engaging with an unpredictable stranger. My practice has been to move on.
Times I have not moved on, I called 911. In one case, EMTs recognized the man whose wheelchair had tipped over. “Hey Charlie, what’s going on?” They set him upright, confiscated his vodka bottle, and asked him where he was staying. Charlie refused to get into the ambulance.
Back in 2016, when local government coordinated its most ambitious response through the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, reporting on the “homeless crisis” had been in the news for over a decade. Maybe the agency’s most visible program is the biennial point in time count when every two years, on a January or February night, teams of workers and volunteers gather in the early evening winter dark and walk digitally mapped sectors of the city. They check cars, tents, sleeping bags, cardboard shelters, and count the people they see. The simplicity of the exercise signals credibility and the nocturnal effort underscores the functional practicality of finding unhoused people when they have bedded down. The last count from February 2022 found 7754 unhoused people. The total for this year’s January 30th count has not yet been tallied.
These days my inbox hums with emails from non-profit and for-profit businesses promoting social consciousness baked into development, communication, and hiring strategies. VTO or volunteer time off is an employee benefit in approximately 60% of American companies according to Cultureamp.com. The Delancey Street Foundation, HomeRise, San Francisco Night Ministry, St. Anthony Foundation, and The Salvation Army are a few of Bomba’s® listed giving partners within a five-mile radius of my zip code.
One morning a friend and I on a walk beyond our zip codes stopped and talked with Nol at the corner of Stevenson and Fourteenth. Nol had greeted us with candid charm. “Look out there—you’re going to step in it!”
Nol lived out of a three-car shopping cart train and showed me how the carts were coupled together with bungee cords. The densely packed shopping carts covered with tarps that obscured their contents suggested both immobility and impermanence. Nol scoffed about lacking brakes then leaned across the top of the middle cart to scissor a sandwich into shareable sections when two friends stopped by to chat.
“Did you forget the napkins again?” Nol joked.
One woman referred to Nol as “she” and Nol evenly explained: “You know that’s not me, Honey.”
The next morning I opened a sack of Yukon Gold potatoes and washed them. The small, dense Yukons made good bakers. Arranged on two oven racks, they finished in about forty minutes. I slit the baked potatoes with a knife, slid a chuck of butter into the cut, ground salt and pepper over the melting butter and wrapped each potato in aluminum foil. With the potatoes loaded into shopping sacks, I put my driver’s license in one pocket and my phone in another. Left my wallet at home.
“Good morning. Would you like a baked potato with butter?” I asked a man outside his tent on Division Street.
“I am not homeless,” the man said. “I’ve been a San Francisco resident for fourteen years.” He accepted a baked potato. “I’ve been unhoused for five years. A long time.”
Nol greeted me cheerfully when I arrived at their corner. They forked into a baked potato and grinned. A neighbor from a nearby tent wandered over. “Do you know where potatoes come from?” Nol asked the neighbor.
“Trader Joe’s!”
Nol laughed, “True enough.”
Bolstered by the visit with Nol, I approached a cluster of tents in a parking lot. A few men who were talking and smoking grew quiet as I drew near. I called across the asphalt, “Would anyone like a baked potato this morning?”
“Yes, I would,” one man said and carried potatoes back to his companions.
The two sturdy men in sunglasses and khakis could have been having beers in a North Beach bar. They faced each other on upturned crates and their animated banter broke with snorts of laughter. They amicably declined baked potatoes as if doing me a favor and I wondered if they were brothers. Then one tapped a needle while the other watched.
A lone woman occupied a tiny encampment on the concrete meridian between traffic lanes. Only her intricately inked face and throat were visible. Cocooned into her sleeping bag with a backpack positioned on either side like little walls, she did not open her eyes, move, or speak and I left a baked potato on one of the backpacks. By the time I reached the sidewalk, the potato was gone.
Baked potatoes rank as comfort food to my sisters Carol and Stephska. When we baked a few dozen Yukons and headed toward Stevenson, I looked for Nol, but the three-cart train and its conductor were gone. We found an unconscious person on the narrow sidewalk, waited, watched them breathe. Left a baked potato.
My sisters liked the simplicity of offering someone a baked potato. “It’s pure,” Stephska said. “You get a moment where there are no barriers.”
With only a few warm potatoes in the bottom of one sack, we walked east to a tiny community where a tall campground tent surrounded by pup tents and a cardboard and tarp chateau hugged a chain link fence. Someone had collected water and placed plastic jugs near each dwelling. I approached the large tent: “Good morning!” I called out. “Would you like a baked potato this morning?”
The flap snapped open and a lean woman stepped out. Her dry skin crinkled along her arms. She wore bangle bracelets and giant hoop earrings. She took in the three women at her doorway. “I had these before,” she said.
She nodded in the direction of the nearby tents. “No one’s home.”
“Do you want to take these for them?”
“I’ll let them know,” she said.
We handed over the last potatoes. My sisters and I rolled up the empty sacks.
“Hey!” the woman called after us. “Are y’all from Idaho?”
It was a point in time. My sisters and I returned to our homes where we bake potatoes anytime we want. Two months later, I broke my ankle, was issued an air boot and have not offered anyone sleeping on the street a baked potato since. I don’t know whether the baked potatoes we gave are missed.
Nol gave me their name. Others flashed irony, stamina, poise when I briefly crossed the threshold of their lives. Within the zones of illnesses and drug abuse many unhoused people are skilled survivors who share resources, decorate their dwellings, fear the unknown.
At some point in time, when the hard distance between the housed and unhoused is cracked by a catastrophic breakdown, what thoughtfully organized, deeply endowed programs will respond? Should there be a surge of newly unhoused people when a fire, flood or earthquake destroys California’s uninsured homes, the military grade rescue services can only go so far, then families, friends, and neighbors are left. As any unhoused person can tell you, even then, it’s possible that no one is close enough to save you.
