Vestiges of Economy: Polk Street Homelessness

By 2006, the City instituted a “Polk Street Commercial Corridor Revitalization and Stabilization Community Action Plan” to plan for “regular sidewalk power-washing…increased police presence…in specific hotspot areas such as drugs and prostitution…[and work to] fill vacant storefronts.” “It’s very safe here now,” said Myles O’Reilly. “And I think the city will start looking at the undesirables who really cause a lot of problems around here.”

The vestiges of the drug/sex work Polk Street economy include street youth who have aged into the general homeless population and, like the Market Street beautification efforts of the 1970s, now perceive themselves to be targets of “cleanup” efforts.

“It’s changing, the way the neighborhood wants it to change,” said Deeth, a thirty-year old who came to the street as a teenager and now sleeps in a squat off the street. “There’s a lot of rich people coming up here, a lot of condominiums going up. They want to get all the street people out.”

When she came to the street in the 1990s, Deeth slept in the alleyways with other youth, running drugs and being protected by the older drug dealers. “I just got stuck here,” Deeth said. “Because I got to knowing all the hustlers and as I got older, you know, they still kept me in their hearts and stuff and in their minds they always thought about me. So every time I came up here I had some kinds of means of support. I was still selling drugs and using drugs and I didn’t really have to worry about too much.”

She now feels that it is unsafe to sleep on the streets: the “family” she knew is no longer around, and newer kids are going to the internet instead of the street. At the same time, the evaporation of the street economy led to further division and competition. “There’s a lot of greed out here right now,” she said. “I guess it’s since the economy has gone down so much, so there’s not as much money to throw around…for drugs, for panhandlers, for anything.”

Reverend Megan M. Rohrer, director of the Welcome Ministry, which serves the homeless and marginally housed in the area, estimates that “98 percent” of the homeless who live in the Polk Gulch and come to the Welcome Ministry have been part of the Polk Street sex work industry.

Many of the homeless have found housing in a nearby SRO hotels through the Homeless Outreach Team, instituted in 2004 as part of Care Not Cash — part of a dramatic move indoors for the homeless in the area. Most of this segment of the homeless population on Polk Street is addicted to methamphetamine and heroin, and many also suffer from mental health issues. Governmental agencies appear ill equipped to serve.

This segment of the Polk Street homeless population stems in part from the collapse of the area’s community-based economic and social safety nets in the 1990s, combined with the absence of a viable alternative from the city, the neighborhood, or the city’s gay political establishment.

The current Polk Street of the rich and poor also reflects national trends: a 2006 report by the Brookings Institution found that only 23 percent of central city neighborhoods in twelve large metropolitan U.S. areas were middle income in 2000, down from 45 percent in 1970. The study defined middle income as areas where families earn 80 to 120 percent of the local median income.

In an effort to better understand the actions and attitudes of Polk Street denizens, personal histories from stakeholders who are living through and shaping changes in the area are presented in the section “Polk Street: Lives in Transition.”