SAN FRANCISCO—On Sunday, September 1st, a local San Franciscan announced her proposal to turn a public parking lot into a homeless shelter in the Tenderloin District.
Amy Farrah Weiss, homelessness advocate and 2017 San Francisco mayoral candidate, has been working towards funding the Stewardship Village pilot in order to provide Safe Organized Spaces (SOS) to act as temporary housing options for those living on the streets.
According to the pilot’s GoFundme page:
“Safe Organized Spaces are transitional villages administered by service provider organizations, that
- Meet CA State codes for emergency shelter and service standards;
- Operate in partnership with property owners, neighbors, and village residents in coordination with existing City services;
- Activate underutilized public/private land with license agreements, insurance, baseline health and safety standards, a built-in process for multi-stakeholder input & evaluation, and site-specific agreements.”
Weiss took to Facebook on Thursday, September 5th, to rally for her cause: “I have now interviewed 4 people who want to be resident stewards or volunteer stewards in an SOS Stewardship Village… Thousands of people live on our streets and thousands of people are housing insecure while available land for triage shelter and tens of thousands of available housing units lie fallow.”
The SOS pilot is a project out of the Saint Francis Homelessness Challenge and is annually funded by San Francisco’s Intersection for the Arts, a nonprofit organization that works with members to fund and help cultivate creative cultural projects.
In the pilot’s brief, it states: “There are tens of thousands of unsheltered people throughout California in immediate need of SOS to belong on their pathway to housing, while simultaneously there is an abundance of underutilized and neglected land in need of proper stewardship… This project will impact people in need of emergency shelter, whether due to a shortage of shelter/affordable housing… individual/interpersonal challenges… or displacement by natural disasters/extreme weather.”
For more information on the project, visit Weiss’ community facebook page at www.facebook.com/amyfarah.weiss.
