ARTICLES

Come and See My Closet

Jim Reid's Little Houses for the Homeless

By Christopher Zehnder

I was about to light my pipe of tobacco, but I paused. Then I laid it aside.

I was on the phone with maverick San Francisco mayoral candidate, Jim Reid. Reid was describing his first foray into things political, in 1998. "I actually got arrested on top of the tallest tobacco billboard in San Francisco," said Reid. The billboard, which was in clear sight of a high school, he said "was really sexy and was selling addiction with sex -- having some woman become a smoker because she was sitting next to this sexy guy who was smoking." Reid graffitied this billboard and two others, for which he was arrested by six city police.

"I've loathed the tobacco company for decades because my one grandfather on my father's side died three months before I was born, because he had lung cancer," said Reid. "I've always considered the tobacco companies like legal drug dealers."

Despite my brief discomfiture, Reid's views on tobacco haven't cured me of pipes or cigars. Nor, after having spoken to him and read his campaign website (sfmayor.com) would I endorse his candidacy (even if I were a San Franciscan -- for instance, his pragmatic approach to "sex workers" is problematic, at best.). I have, however, come to admire one plan of his -- the one to help solve the problem of homelessness in San Francisco. For Reid, the major factor in homelessness is a lack of homes. His solution: build small houses for the homeless.

"I see homelessness as a housing problem," said Reid. "The difference between a person with severe drug or alcohol problems or mental illness who lives in a really nice neighborhood and one who's living on Market Street is that one has housing and care and the other doesn't. When I ran for mayor in 1999, they occasionally let me go to a big public debate. At the one or two to which I was invited, I talked about building 10 x 10 houses, really tiny and cost effective, that would have everything. I had little blueprints that I had made and gave to every TV and press person."

The press, said Reid, wrote about his idea, "and they sort of laughed about it -- they said it was like a prison cell." But, Reid countered, "yeah, it's like a prison cell -- but in this case, the prisoner has a key and it's substantially cheaper than a prison cell." A prison cell, Reid said, costs about $50,000 to build and about $29,000 a year to maintain; one of his little houses, he claims, would cost about $12,000 in materials and next to nothing in labor, for he could "teach homeless people of my own choosing" to build them.

After losing the 1999 election to Willie Brown, Reid decided he would build one of these houses. A long-time building contractor, Reid went back to work to earn money for his project. "I found a friend who owned a little shipyard, I bought $12,000 worth of materials, and I built a house in 30 days," said Reid. "It has a full bathroom and a bath tub and it has a kitchen that is about five foot wide with a refrigerator, microwave, cook top, little sink and a lot of cabinet space. It has a little desk with a chair, and I've put in a computer. And I've bought a comfortable rocking chair. And above that little sitting area is a loft bed that's just a standard single bed with a little ladder, and behind that is a mirrored closet door that is about four-foot wide with two little doors. When one door opens, there's a tiny, single unit washer and dryer."

Since, said Reid, "the whole purpose in building this house was to educate people -- public officials, the public and the homeless," he also bought a heavy-duty trailer with four wheels so he could take the house to city hall. He took it to city hall three times, and on the last trip he was stopped by a policeman, who gave him a ticket. But then, said Reid, "he escorted me to city hall to get a permit [to transport the house] and a TV station came out that day. About 300 people went through the house that day, and half of the them wanted to buy it, and these were not homeless people, but people who lived in San Francisco who would love to own a house. They said, 'where can I buy this and how much is it?' I told them that if we built this in San Francisco, with union labor, it would cost $50,000. The mortgage would be $615-a-month, which would be affordable by anyone who worked at McDonalds -- and that would be a 15-year mortgage, and after 15 years you would own it." The monthly payment, said Reid, would only be a little more than what people currently pay for "sleazy little bedrooms in SRO [single room occupancy] hotels, where you walk down the hallway and share a bathroom with eight people. In San Francisco, those rent for $600 a month."

Yet, Reid claims, if the city of San Francisco adopted his little house housing plan, each house would cost far less. Materials would be inexpensive. Reid said he has spoken to Home Depot, where he bought the materials for his house. Home Depot, which wants to build a store in San Francisco (against much opposition), told Reid that it would be willing to sell materials to the city at its cost -- "and they have 100 percent markup. So that $12,000, as mayor, would cost me $6,000," said Reid. "So I could build a house for $6,000 -- just get a big pier in the port of San Francisco and build houses."

Some of the beneficiaries, at least, would serve as the labor force -- homeless people and, especially, homeless veterans. According to Reid, the San Francisco organization, Swords to Plowshares, has counted at least 2,500 veterans in the city. With contractors to teach them skills, some of these veterans, Reid believes, could learn building skills. One hundred trained veterans, Reid says, could build 1,000 housing units a year. Each person who volunteers for three years (with food and clothing provided by the city) would, at the end of that period, own one of those houses outright.

But where to put the houses? "I would like to put one on every city block," said Reid. This is quite possible, he said; his own little house, he said, he has put in the backyard of the house he rents. "I happen to live on a hill, and right up at the top of the hill is a corner in the back part of my lot, and I plunked it here," said Reid. He would also have the city buy the Hunter's Point Shipyard from the United States Navy, which, he said, would practically give it to the city. After about $100 million to clean up the pollution, said Reid, the shipyard could be turned into about 50 city blocks of small houses.

Yet, according to Reid's plan, something would be demanded of the people who would live in this housing. They would have "to be clean and sober," he said, and they would have to agree to keep the neighborhoods in the city free of trash and graffiti. "Our city is filthy in terms of litter," said Reid. "We spend $50 million a year and the city is dirtier today than it was 25 years ago when I moved here. I would like to provide a house on every city block for a volunteer who could live there and keep the block clean. It would cost us almost nothing to do that."

Reid believes his plan would be more effective and efficient than the city's current programs for the homeless. "Now," he said, "we spend about $200 million to care for 10,000 homeless people. We find someone who's drug addicted and we put them through a six-week drug and alcohol program and then they're clean and sober and we say, 'you're graduated. Here's your certificate and there's the door.' They put them on the street, and what happens? There are drug addicts there; it's despair. I want to say, as soon as they're clean and sober, 'we're going to give you a reason to stay clean and sober. Here's a little house in this neighborhood, we're going to introduce you to the people, we've given you people skills, and we're teaching you how to maintain the street.'"

Reid admits that, currently, the city has no funds even to pay for his modest proposal. "We don't have any tax money," he said. "San Francisco has a $352 million deficit and it's against the law to have that, so we have to cut things." Yet, this unfortunate pecuniary fact doesn't discourage Reid. "I can get Home Depot to donate the money, and I can get local foundations to donate money," he said.

Reid's idea is not new. "In the 1906 earthquake," he said, "the city burnt to the ground and we had 200,000 people made homeless. Most of them went elsewhere with relatives and all but the poorest, 17,000, were housed within three months because the army and John McLaren, who built Golden Gate Park, said, 'let's build little houses.' And they built almost 6,000, 140-square-foot houses and housed 17,000 people. There were people who were addicted to opium, there were drunks and there were desperately poor people, mentally ill people -- and a lot of them lived in boarding houses and the boarding houses burnt to the ground. They had no relatives, no friends, no money. The city had no money at the time, but found a way. Some of these houses are still here today. In fact, there's one in my neighborhood."

Yet, other problems with Reid's housing plan, besides monetary ones, come to mind. Reid says he wants "clean and sober" homeless to inhabit his houses; but are not the vast majority of homeless derelicts or mentally ill? "There' s a myth that the homeless are all drug addicts and drunks," Reid replied. He said, during his first run for mayor, he stayed in homeless shelters for nine days and nights and "discovered that there were an amazing number of people -- anywhere between 40 and 60 percent -- who were clean and sober and they had a job and they got cleaned up and they got their clothes on and they went to work the next morning. When I saw these people months later out on the street, I could point out a dozen who walked by in half an hour that I knew slept in the shelter, and you would have never guessed that they were homeless. The problems is that the public looks at the drunk ones and says, 'all the homeless are like that.' And they're not. But there's no way to prove this other than have someone sleep in a shelter a night or two and see the same people on the street. And they don't look like drunks."

Though Reid says that the vast majority of homeless are single men, there are a few homeless families. What would he do for them? Could his plan help families? "Of course it could," said Reid. "I call this little house Shelter One. And I've already thought about the blueprints for Shelter Two and Shelter Three. Shelter One is 100 square feet; the second, is 200 square feet; and three is 300 square feet. You could easily put a family -- husband, wife and one or two kids -- in a 300 square-foot house."

Reid admits, though, that some would not want to live in a 100 square-foot house. One homeless woman said she could never stand living in so small a space. Reid said he gave her the same answer that he gave Mayor Willie Brown, who said, "Mr. Reid wants to build 50,000 closets for the homeless." "I said, come and see my closet," said Reid. "He didn't." But those that have, according to Reid, have been impressed by how livable it actually is.

But once the "clean and sober" are cared for, what of the others? After all, there are still the mentally ill, the drug and alcohol addicts, the merely shiftless. How do we help them? "Homelessness is a very complicated problem," said Reid, "and my little house is not the solution to homelessness, but it's a piece of the solution. We need to attack the problem one little piece at a time."

A couple of the pieces to the homeless problem have nothing to do with shelter -- clothing and food. Yet, Reid claims that the public food bank in San Francisco is bursting with food and that donations of clothes people no longer wear would take care of the clothing problem.

Yet, would the public look on Reid's house project as just another government handout? Reid said he has encountered this attitude. A fallen away Catholic, Reid calls it "the Protestant work ethic," which, he said, is "in a very subtle way, a bad thing." He said when he tells people he wants to house the homeless in return for work in neighborhoods, so many say, "they should get a real job!" "Well," said Reid, "maybe they can't have a real job and maybe if we get them this not-quite-real job, then they can actually work a little bit and not be a burden to us. Instead of having street people sleeping in your doorway, they could be sweeping your streets; and we park them in this little nook that you didn't even know existed."

And Reid thinks that, unlike typical government programs to help the poor, his plan will give the homeless a sense of self-respect. "There's great dignity in that," said Reid. "There's great dignity in owning your own house. And there's great dignity in sweeping the street and owning your house as the result of your work. Big government has failed -- it has created ghettoes that cost a lot of money and didn't make peoples' lives enriched."

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