When the Park is Your Home
Given the housing crisis in San Francisco, it’s probably not surprising that there are people who live in the park. In fact, it’s been refuge for unhoused people since its earliest days. Mallard Lake was once called Hobo Lake for the transient workers who camped out there while working the MidWinter Fair in 1894. And of course, a whole tent city went up in the park to house the thousands made homeless by the 1906 earthquake.
I found a news story in “The San Francisco Call” from May, 1890 that described the arrest of a “woman tramp” named Susan Marshall who’d set up a campsite in a secluded corner of the park. She was about 60, according to the story; ”old, grizzled and gray with a head of long white hair which fell around her shoulders…and appears to be slightly demented.” Her only possessions were an ax, a knife and a bundle of clothes wrapped in a blanket.
She reportedly told the police that her home was in Kansas and that she’d come to San Francisco a few days earlier with the hope of getting work, but hadn’t found any. She said she didn’t like cities. “So I found a place to sleep out and be free in fresh air. You know I lived in the open air on a farm nearly all my life. I had enough money to buy bread and cheese, which was all I wanted.”
(The image of a woman camped out on her own in the wilds of the park was evidently so bizarre that the newspaper described it “an uncanny picture, suggestive of witchery” and headlined the story “A Modern Witch.”)
Minus the weird witch references, the story could have been written today.
It’s hard to know how many people live in the park. The most recent official “point in time count”– a count of all those sleeping outside on a given night -- found 183 people sleeping in the park on February 23, 2022. That number was up from the 83 counted in 2019 (probably reflecting the stresses of the pandemic) and less than the 313 found in the 2017 count. Most were probably short-termers, passing through the park for a few nights or weeks or maybe months.
But there’s a hard-core group -- again, it’s hard to know how many in all -- who have lived in or around the park for years. Some pitch tents, others sleep in cars or vans or RVs. On occasion some get more creative. Park superintendent David Iribarne told me about a couple who built a two-story dug-out complete with working electricity hidden from sight with plywood. One man, who I’ll you about in a later post, spent 25 years in Hellman Hollow before park rangers, gardeners and homeless services outreach workers teamed up to convince him to move into an SRO a couple of years ago.
It’s never easy living outside, but a place like Golden Gate Park arguably has even greater challenges. You’re even more exposed to the elements--to wind, rain cold and fog. The bathrooms close at night, and there’s no place to wash or shower. You’re forced to move frequently by rangers or police, since it’s against the law to spend the night in city parks. Any long-term park resident can tell you about the times their possessions have been hauled away in one of the periodic crackdowns. Losing your things over and over is exhausting.
Late at night the park can be dangerous, especially for women. Still, most of the park residents I’ve talked to say they feel safer tucked away in the urban forest than on the sidewalks or shelters of the concrete jungle downtown.
People end up living in the park on account of the usual factors that have fueled the vicious problem of homelessness across San Francisco, including: loss of work, lack of affordable housing, abuse, mental illness, substance use. Some of the people I’ve talked to insist they are outside by choice. Others are trying to secure a place inside, but that means navigating a frustrating, often confounding bureaucratic maze to secure a place inside. That’s especially hard for those living in the park, as almost all the services for unhoused people are downtown. Which can feel impossibly far away, if you don’t have a car and are worried about leaving your things for fear they’ll be confiscated.
I’ve wanted to write about this issue for a long time. But this is too big, complex and difficult a subject to handle in a single post. If there’s anything to be learned from the city’s housing crisis, it’s that the problem is not monolithic. There are no easy answers or one-size-fits-all solutions. So I’m going to tackle it in pieces -- writing about different folks I’ve met who are affected by the issue or who are grappling with it in some way.
Today let me tell introduce to a few of the long-time park residents I’ve been talking with over the past year.
Marques Jackson
Marques Jackson has been living outside off and on for 15-20 years, most recently starting last May. “ I was on a drug program in Harbor Light. I ended up getting kicked out. I went to a shelter. I relapsed again. My dad died. and I've been out here since then…I get lucky. People look out for me. I got a portable bed. people give me food. They give me money. I do the right thing with it.”
Jackson grew up in the Bayview, served in the Navy, but got kicked out for using cocaine, so he has limited veteran’s benefits. “I’m 60, but I feel like I’m 80,” he says.
I first met Jackson in October, when he asked the ranger who does homeless outreach services for help. Weeks earlier, he’d fallen out of a tree while high on crystal meth, landed on his jaw and broke several teeth. The pain was so severe he could scarcely eat. “I’ve lost so much weight,” he kept saying, pulling at his baggy sweatpants. The ranger, Amanda Barrows, arranged for an ambulance to take him to St. Luke’s Hospital to have the teeth pulled and found a space for him at a detox program for his alcohol addiction.
But when I ran into Jackson again in late November, he said he was still plagued by those broken teeth. He explained that he had waited at the hospital without being seen for so long that he lost his bed at the detox program. “I had nowhere to go. I had to come back to being homeless again.”
That day he told me he was planning to go back to the hospital again to get his teeth pulled and then onto a detox program. But first he wanted to do his laundry. “I don't want to go smelling homeless and all that stuff. That’s my thing. I was on the bus one time with a dude that was homeless. Oh, man. I didn’t say nothing bad about it. He was embarrassed. I seen it all on his face.”
As of this week, he still hadn’t gotten to the hospital.
Update as of 2/12/25: Marques did finally get his teeth repaired and went into a sobering facility. But I don’t know how he is doing these days.
C
When I first met C more than a year ago, he had a small camp near the end of JFK Drive, behind the rock that announced the entrance to Golden Gate Park. The rangers had told him he had to move, though, and he was in the process of packing up.
C (he prefers to just use his first initial) is 57. He grew up in San Francisco, and describes a prior life with a big extended family of siblings, nieces and nephews, a house, a well-paying job at Star Glass. He walked away from it all about eight years ago, following his third divorce. “ I came out here literally with the clothes on my back. And I think $1,500 in cash.”
His first night he parked himself by a wall near Ocean Beach. ”And when I was sleeping there -- I'm not squeamish. I'm not a pansy or anything -- mammals came up and warmed up to me. Rats, raccoons…They came up and they snuggled. I didn't know until I felt them. And I was like, oh, oh, well, they're not biting. So that's alright.”
At our first meeting, he sounded confident about the life he’d made outside. He’d always managed to get ahold of good things to eat-- “people throw away food like you wouldn't believe.” He kept himself clean with “whore’s baths” and the occasional dousing with anti-bacterial stuff or even Clorox. He accumulated things easily -- bikes, tent parts, tarps, clothing, tools, pots and pans -- and just as easily gave them away “to the next person that comes along needing it.”
Even so, outside life was hard on his health, as I found out when I met up with him again a few months ago. After a series of heart attacks and hospitalizations, he said he’d decided to try moving back inside. He went to 711 Post St., a former hotel turned congregate shelter in lower Nob Hill that has a mix of one-bed and four-bed rooms. It’s meant to be a transitional place for people trying to move into permanent housing. But he couldn’t transition: his application for housing kept being lost in the system. “Not once, not twice, not three times, but four times,” he said. Each time he had to start the process all over again.
Meanwhile, other residents kept OD-ing. “I was just watching people die left and right.” After nearly a year, he left and went back outside. Now he’s living amidst the RVs on the Lower Great Highway.
Update as of 2/12/25: C’s health deteriorated to the point that he eventually was hospitalized and then granted a spot in transitional supportive housing. I don’t know if he then made it to a permanent placement.
James Morris and Alan
Alan, in the wheelchair, moved to San Francisco from Cincinnati and has been outside “off and on since 1976, the bicentennial.” He’s now 70. At one time, he had a tent and lived out by the archery field. “I even had a compound bow” he said and practiced shooting the targets there. ”Actually, I had two different camps that lasted me five years each. I didn't have to break camp every time I needed to go somewhere, you know and carry everything with me. I was using camouflage techniques, I kept it very, very clean. I didn't leave any rubbish around. That can be spotted like from 100 yards away.”
He and Morris only recently met and began hanging out together. “Someone’s got to take care of him because his legs are messed,” Morris said.
Morris is from Plano, Texas and after moving to San Francisco was unhoused for a decade, from 1999-2009. Part of that time, he and his wife lived in a cave they built near the Laguna Honda Reservoir. He went back to Texas and was inside from 2012 to 2022, taking care of his mother until she died. Then he returned to the city and the park. “It's a lot better now than it was. Not as many people, not as much drugs.”
He’s 65 now, and despite the difficulties of being outside, he doesn’t want to get help with housing. “Because they send you downtown. You don't want to go downtown. You don't want no part of downtown. There's at least 2,000 to 5000 fentanyl people down there. You know how you can tell fentanyl people? They're bent over. It does something to you where it bends you over.”
Hard as it must be getting around in a wheelchair, Alan agreed. “I'd rather be where I'm at too. Like, it never fails when I lived indoors -- nothing but trouble happening…I do stupid things, you know, when I'm indoors, because I got all that much more privacy.”
Alan had subsidized housing at one point. Then he took in an acquaintance who needed a place to stay and the acquaintance ended up kicking him out. Alan opted not to call the police. “I didn't even like that apartment anyway.” The building wasn’t wheelchair accessible. “It was just bad news from the beginning.”
The pair spend their days at the Big Rec ballfield, but collect their things every evening and move to a doorway on Ninth Ave. As Morris explained, “It’s against the law to sleep in the park.”
Update, as of 2/12/25: I still see Morris occasionally in and around the park. I haven’t seen Alan since last year. I don’t know where he is.
Thank you Susan for this valuable post for people to see the true, human side of homelessness that begs for our compassion.
Thank you for this post and attention give to the unhoused living in Golden Gate Park. I loved reading this and look forward to learning more about those who live there, their different stories and how and why they chose the park that offers different comforts and considerable challenges.