Happy Holidays Lizzie and have a wonderful Y2K ..Too
We received about 3 lbs of Sees, which we will gladly consume without guilt while the poor people in this SF hotel
barely manage..
In an article in the Examiner that Christine linked to me, The Staticians and the Bueros study the problem while the "problem" suffers. Maybe a direct pipeline of the moneys spent to study now would help alleviate the need to study in the future. Or I would settle for half the money for the study to go to the study..
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Statistic paint troubling picture of S.F.'s hotel residents
By Emily Gurnon
OF THE EXAMINER STAFF Sunday, December 26, 1999
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Walk down any street in the Tenderloin, South of Market, Chinatown or the Mission, and you'll pass by the homes of thousands of low-income residents.
They can't afford apartments or lofts or single-family houses. Many float in and out of homelessness. When they do have shelter, it is in one of The City's 500 residential hotels, buildings often unnoticed by passersby.
"What's interesting is that when you're going through the Tenderloin, you see the storefronts, but no one ever looks up," said Richard Clark of the UC-San Francisco Epidemiology Department and senior project coordinator for a study of single-room-occupancy (SRO) hotel residents in San Francisco.
Many of those buildings, Clark said, are SRO hotels that house some of The City's poorest residents. "I think a lot of people don't even know these hotels exist," he said.
As part of their research into rates of tuberculosis and HIV infection among low-income San Franciscans, Clark and a team of colleagues at UCSF have compiled what may be the only substantial information on SRO residents in The City, if not the nation. The first version of the study was completed in 1998; another is due to be finished this summer.
What they found, in a survey of 1,042 residential hotel dwellers in the Tenderloin, Mission and South of Market, was that most (75 percent) were men, about an equal number were African American and white, and the median age was 44.
Other details:
21 percent have a history of mental illness.
73 percent have at least a high school education.
38 percent are military veterans.
A large proportion receive some form of public assistance, such as General Assistance welfare (40 percent) or Supplemental Security Income disability payments (29 percent).
Most live on about $600 a month.
47 percent said they believed they had an alcohol or drug problem in the last year.
Overall, said Andrew Moss, director of the research team, SRO residents are a "damaged" population -- damaged by mental illness, drug use, experience in prison or childhood traumas. Public policies, such as those regarding the treatment >>>
And the story continues..
sfgate.com
Take care.. c
|
