(Photos: Bonnee Waldstein)
At a neighborhood event this past weekend, the Glen Park News caught up with Supervisor Mandelman and asked for his reaction to the circumstances of the fire, whose cause is still under investigation. Here’s what he said.
At a neighborhood event this past weekend, the Glen Park News caught up with Supervisor Mandelman and asked for his reaction to the circumstances of the fire, whose cause is still under investigation. Here’s what he said.
“The reality is there are people living along freeways up and down California. We have a significant problem inside San Francisco, encampments where fires are breaking out and posing a danger to the people who are in those encampments and to neighbors. We have to do a much better job than we do at moving people out of those encampments and into other kinds of shelter. I think even in Covid we could have done more to set up safe sleeping sites. If we wanted to prioritize having exits from the streets or, in this case the freeway, we could. We’re a wealthy city and I think we should.”
Pressed a little further on what’s next, Mandelman replied, “I introduced legislation more than a year ago to put San Francisco in the direction of having ‘shelter for all.’ I’m going to have another go to see if my colleagues are willing to support that.”
Why wouldn’t they support it?
“Homeless Advocates and the Coalition on Homelessness don’t support ‘shelter for all’ policies because they believe in ‘housing for all’ and they believe that if we put significant additional resources into shelter we will lose sight of solving homelessness. And they also believe, and this is true, that if we provide safe, humane exits from the streets there are a lot of laws against camping that become enforceable at that point and they don’t want us enforcing those laws.”
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Monday morning KQED radio’s Brian Watt had a brief interview with two of the survivors of the fire who’d showed up at the site, Paul Durden and Jesse Montgomery. Montgomery just painted several red hearts on the wall to commemorate the woman who perished. They said they’d been sheltering in the freeway soffit on and off for the past five years. Recently they took the woman in because she’d been evicted from her apartment in 2018.
KQED’s website then posted a detailed report on the woman, 40-year old mother of three Zarina Pimshin, and the fire, written by Joe Fitzgerald Rodrigues and Annelise Finney.
CalTrans has been contacted and is working on a bid for the necessary work to secure the location. In the meantime a check of the site revealed no change except for more trash and debris and a single young man asleep amongst it.