View the San Francisco for Sunday, October 8, 2023
Gregg Johnson standing in front of the Vincent Hotel in San Francisco, which has been converted into single room occupancy housing. Johnson said that while the housing played a vital role in keeping him off the streets, he’s concerned about the long-term impacts of the poor air quality inside his room.
Johnson’s worries are shared by many residents in The City’s single room occupancy housing, a decades-The dwellings provide vital shelter to much of The City’s most vulnerable population, but come at a cost: SROs are often located in the most polluted neighborhoods — the Tenderloin, Bayview, SoMa, Mission and Chinatown — making air quality a largely unseen but constant threat, heightened exponentially during wildfire season.
“Personally, it’s right up there with the top echelon of needs — because that’s health,” he said. “Why is it so overlooked? Well, how long does it take for someone to develop lung damage from breathing poor air? If you don’t see it, you’re not going to know until it’s literally too late.”For many San Francisco residents, air quality concerns only arise when wind pushes wildfire smoke into their neighborhoods. But for SRO tenants, air quality is an invisible and ever-present threat.
“My concern is: What is it that I’m breathing, and what is it doing?” Johnson said. “Since I can’t get an answer to that, I’m kind of dumbfounded. It has to be something harmful. It’s hideous. It cannot be good.” Tennis, 74, considers himself “fortunate” because the building he lives in was recently refurbished. Now, each room has a heater and air-conditioning unit that cleans and cycles the air.
California’s wildfires have set back the state’s clean-air goals, dispatching plumes of toxic smoke into the atmosphere. Last month, winds carried smog from a series of blazes along the Northern California border towards the Bay Area, sending the air quality index soaring to Roughly the size of kitchen trash bins, these contraptions pull in unwanted particles from the air and recirculate clean, refined air back into the room.
The projects are ongoing, but they so far haven’t been nearly enough to aid residents in need in The City or throughout the region’s nine counties. Instead, she said The City plans to do “an assessment based on the case managers who are working with this population.” Though Breed told The Examiner the plan is not to drug-test recipients, Human Services Agency Executive Director Trent Rohr said at the press conference that Breed’s plan could include testing.
“If she can’t find the way to prevent several hundred brazen criminals from selling deadly drugs, how does she think she will find the resources to drug-test thousands of welfare recipients?” Peskin said in a statement. “The answer is she can’t, and she won’t, and this would simply be silly politics if the issues we face as a city were not so serious.”
Asked if she has philosophically shifted on the issue since taking the mantle of mayor, Breed told The Examiner she had just previously not put much thought into it. San Francisco is looking to its sister city Zurich for strategies on how to manage public drug use and overdoses.As policymakers and advocates argue about what the best strategy is to quell San Francisco’s incessant drug problem, and amidgrab attention around the world, Swiss law enforcement and health officials say their country’s largest city charted a path that San Francisco could follow.
“ got the most addicted population of drug users off the streets and into controlled environments,” he said. “The important thing is to put pressure in the right places — for example, not in front of our consumption facilities or our check-in places. Otherwise, people will lose trust in us and no longer come to our facilities,” she said.
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