James is selling the Street Sheet on the corner of Suter and Powell. He says,
‘Right, first point. I ain’t homeless, got myself sorted. Attend computer classes once a week. Got a job sweeping these streets twice a week.’
He talks about sorting out welfare, a place to live, that selling the Street Sheet supplements his meagre income. Gets angry about the homeless, talks about how they don’t want to be anywhere else, just here on the street. They hustle money for drugs, for alcohol, he says. Points down the hill, wants to know if we passed Betsie in the wheelchair.
‘She’s been like that for six years, six years. She could get welfare, but she don’t, she just wants to be here with her dogs, on the street. She could, they could, go to the shelters. Three meals, they give you three meals, breakfast, dinner and supper. Each day they give you that but she don’t want it. Just wants to be here.’
He says that introducing proposition L was a good thing. The San Francisco Sit-Lie Ordinance, proposition L, restricting people from sitting or lying on sidewalks between from 7am to 11pm, was introduced in November 2010.
‘It took people off the streets. Before that they were in your face. Getting aggressive, hustling tourists.’
When we part he says,
‘Now you folks have a nice day.’
On Market Street near the cable car turntable I watch a woman, maybe in her early 40s, step gracefully among the tourists queuing for the cable car. She cradles a Ghetto Blaster, but the sound is muted, quiet. Describing a delicate pattern on the pavement, her head is inclined, first to the right and then left. She appears oblivious to her surroundings, caught up as she is in her gestures, her movement. Nearby an elderly Chinese woman, pushing a trolley, rummages through bins. She wears purple surgical gloves, uses a wire coat hanger as a hook to extract whatever is worthwhile from the bins. She works methodically.
Misty and cool earlier, the sun’s shining now, the afternoon air warm. We leave tomorrow; two days flying, back in the UK on Tuesday.
25th September
San Francisco
aahhh what a shame its all over….everything about this project is fantastic. well done!
See you soon.
Lia x
I love this. to my (naive) surprise I met a lot of homeless people in LA when I was working over there. A lot of stories! what an amazing project! x
Thanks Lia, but it’s just this part of the journey that’s almost over. There’s still a lot of material to edit, so keep looking at the site-more to come.
A haunting road movie; fine images and words, which touched me in lonesome ways as you progressed across what so often seems to be a lost country, tinged with sadness. Which in itself is a measure of how you looked, so I guess what we saw is your looking. See you in November, well done, great work.
At the beginning of this journey we had little idea of what we might eventually produce. During our travels we often wondered about the vision of the USA we were creating, but these were the people we met along the way; ordinary people leading what they considered uneventful lives that richly demonstrated resilience. It seemed to us as we wandered through this country that we were witness to an America that questioned its own identity through the stories so freely given and hopefully truthfully rendered. Look forward to seeing you in November.
so true of alot of homeless people, i know some who want to be elsewhere and are working towards an end, i know some who just dont imagine anything but there life on teh street, in shop doorways or squats. its not surprising that people give up when they get to that stage, so demoralising for the person once you used to the routine i imagine you get stuck in it
I think America has in many ways been questioning its own identity since the 1950s, the so-called ‘golden age’.
It is fascinating to see the number of people, who for various reasons, and also connected to the banking crisis have been forced out of their homes and into another life. And while many of them are clearly over qualified for the jobs, for instance the graduate who was walking from job to job, they are getting on with everyday life and are in some way carving out their own identity.
In some way the landscape that you have described sums up a vision of America that seems to have passed, but still holds something special to many who live in the country.