She says that although San Francisco has built additional shelter space, it simply isn’t enough to shelter the city’s homeless population.
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While homelessness has turned into an epidemic across the United States, the dilemma is even worse in cities like San Francisco where sky-high rents have forced a large number of people to live on the streets.
The protesters said 3,000 of those in San Francisco’s homeless population are children.
Shekinah Love, 32, said he has several homeless friends and has been homeless himself before, and added that the city was giving the issue the attention it deserves. Police said they will remove any tents that hit the ground.
Premier caterer McCalls, based in San Francisco, has plenty of Super Bowl business cooking.
San Francisco’s Coalition on Homelessness says that “street cleaning” efforts are taking place in other parts of the city that are not part of the Super Bowl festivities.
The group said it plans on setting up a homeless Super Bowl City.
Protesters carried signs saying “house keys not homelessness”, and “Hey Mayor Lee, no penalty for poverty”. “So they are barring homeless people from a public event through virtue of their banned items list”. “There is things like there’s one shelter bed for every 5.5 homeless individuals sleeping on our streets”. “This is because areas where homeless have traditionally found shelter-Tenderloin, Civic Center, South of Market-are in the center of a new massive development of the “MidMarket” area that surrounds Twitter headquarters”. Angela Lawrence, a 50-year-old woman who said she became homeless after losing her job with Microsoft, said she and her boyfriend have dealt with an increased and more aggressive police presence in recent weeks. The facility provides people with 24-hour access to food and showers with no curfews, minimal rules and consultations with social workers and benefits counselors to help them move to more permanent housing.
The San Francisco Bay Area is hosting this year’s Super Bowl, with a week of events underway in San Francisco and the Denver Broncos due to take on the Carolina Panthers at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California. “If you talk to any tourist who has come to San Francisco, I’m sure they will attest that San Francisco is not hiding its homeless”, Dodge said.
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Critics of the San Francisco’s Super Bowl preparations cite the city’s $4.8-million spending on the event’s festivities.
