we need more affordable housing for the homeless. i see more homeless people sleeping on the streets at night. the supervisors do not know what is going on out there. what they need to do is come out and take a look at themselves and see what the situation is. we need to set aside things to help the homeless to afford rent. you need to step up. i ask you to support housing for the people who need it most. thank you. supervisor kim: thank you, mr. webb. >> hello, supervisors. hello, my name is jason frazer. i have lived in san francisco for 30 years. before, i have been to new york, hawaii, europe, and i liked san francisco so much that i moved back to live here. i have lived in the tenderloin for about one year.

i like it. in 1996, i was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and got on social security. my income is fixed, which makes paying rent on my income but not the market rate difficult. i pay about 65% of my income to rent. it leaves less than $300 per month for food and everything else. because i live in one type of building, the benefits are really good for me, but if it were not for affordable housing, i would not be able to live in san francisco at all. what is great about the city is that it has places for people like me, but i am worried that san francisco is becoming so expensive that people like me are being kicked out. so affordable housing should be

one of the city's ultimate goals, to allow divorced people to live here and have a reasonable means to enjoy life. i ask the supervisors to adopt better policies for what kind of housing is being built in plant so that it is just not for the super wealthy and takes away from san francisco because san francisco is about people like me, and that is what makes it a great place. thank you. supervisor: thank you, sir. next speaker. >> my name is steve wu, and i am here with brothers and sisters from housing organizations and also here with our sister agency, the community housing partnership.

we are here with our residents to tell you about the human cost of the affordability of san francisco. if you come down to our neighborhood, you can witness every day people sleeping on the streets or sleeping in overcrowded situations, six, seven people to a studio or an sro, and it is an ongoing cost on the human lives in our neighborhood and other residents of san francisco. at the same time, we are faced with all the information provided in front of you today by city staff, but projects like 8 washington, which are accessible to multimillionaires and only the wealthiest of san francisco, and so we have a problem which really needs to be addressed, which is the out of control development of market rate housing, which becomes more and more expensive, and the lack of production of affordable housing, and so we know that

there is a proposal in front of you and in front of the city about better monitoring of the housing element, better monitoring of the city's production of how affordable versus market rate housing, and we support that proposal for better monitoring, but we need additional steps, additional actions to take beyond monitoring the production, beyond monitoring the developments, but what are we going to do to ensure that enough of the affordable housing is created in out of control market redevelopment, that it is mitigated of this so that the cost of the and affordability of san francisco is addressed adequately, some think you for your time. supervisor kim: thank you, mr. wu. >> good afternoon. good afternoon, supervisors. hello. my name is gloria. i am lived here since 1989.

about 25 years in san francisco. i am in the tenderloin, and it is a one-but apartment, and i share it to help pay the rent. we only depend on our social security. that is all of our income. if they say it is an affordable units, then it should be lower rent, but we pay one-third of our income from social security, which is still kind of expensive. affordable housing is important to me because of low rent, and we can save some money for our food and clothes. i think you can make some

improvements for affordable housing for low-income people. we must think about a lower rent for seniors and lower income people that cannot afford housing. i ask you, supervisors, to support us and find a way for more housing for people like me as opposed to continuing to build expensive housing. thank you. supervisor kim: thank you, ms. salazar. >> hello, supervisors. i am -- 81 years young.

a retired teacher. i had been teaching in the public school for 45 years. i arrived here in san francisco in 1989 after my retirement. i have lived in the tenderloin ever since for 24 years. i lived in the alexander residents, where most of the seniors live. they are all low income. i am very much interested in affordable housing, as i can hardly make both ends meet, so affordable housing for seniors like me is very much welcome in my life. i think the city is doing well to help seniors to live, but there is a problem, and that is rent. i think it could be cheaper, and to do that, the supervisors should find means to fund the

housing. to help seniors like me to pay less for rent. there is less money for affordable housing from the state and the federal government. it is time for san francisco to create local money to build more and keep affordable housing for low-income people. i ask you to help us stay housed in san francisco. thank you. thank you. supervisor kim: thank you. i am going to call 10 more names. i am sorry. 10 seconds. i am going to call some more people can line up after you speak. kile, ben, joshua, derryl, and

tony. thank you. >> good afternoon, supervisors. my name is -- i live in the tenderloin for 24 years now. and i am a member of the tenderloin filipino american community association. i live in alexander residents, too. it has been 15 years. i pay a large percentage of my income for rent, and i think it is still expensive for may because i am only on social security. but maybe without the affordable housing, i would not be able to live here in san francisco, so i am very thankful for that. i have been here for a long time.

i ask you, supervisors, to help us in building more affordable housing for the poor and the seniors that have low-income. it is also important to have money set aside to build housing for the people. please support the housing. please support this for low- income communities. we need affordable housing to live in san francisco. thank you very much. supervisor kim: thank you, miss. >> that afternoon, supervisors. my name is denise, and i have lived in san francisco for 25 years and in the tenderloin for 24 years, and i have also lived in affordable housing for the past 24 years. for low and in -- low-income people, it is hard to find housing in san francisco. we need to keep affordable housing here now and in the

future. please, let's keep affordable housing in san francisco for everyone. thank you. supervisor kim: thank you. >> good afternoon, supervisors. my name is victoria, independent living in san francisco. if you do not know our agency, we work with people with disabilities of all ages, all kinds of household configurations. i actually did a little information paper for housing for people with disabilities, and i also emailed a copy to the clerk. i do not want to read it. i gave a couple of suggestions about what to do. funding wise, i hope the federal funding for people with disabilities will get funded. i am hoping that our nonprofits will be able to take advantage of this.

the state wants to do this, but they want to put it into vouchers, which is problematic in san francisco because it is hard to rent here. people with disabilities, most of my clients have an income that is less than 20% of ami, and even the lovely housing, and believe me, i think it sounds lovely. it makes me want to almost cried. they cannot afford it. i do not think they have income that can qualify. we need some form of subsidies, and we need some way of making the existing older housing accessible, and i have made some recommendations. i will not take a lot more of your time. i will leave you this, you can also see what i emailed to the clerk of the board. thank you. supervisor kim: thank you. >> good afternoon, supervisors.

my name is tom. i have been living in the tenderloin for six years at the ambassador hotel. prior to that, i was homeless for about one year. one major problem of housing is it can be as much as 60% or more of your income if you are on social security or ssi and there is a lot of crime, of all, and prostitution. i think what we need in san francisco is not more expensive housing beyond our grasp of affordable housing for those with fixed incomes. i am not just speaking for myself but on behalf of the thousands of people that are in the same boat as i am. also, i know that there are about 7000 homeless on the street right now, and also families with kids are moving out of san francisco because they cannot afford to live here. this means that we lose money from the state for public education. we need to have a heart with

those with small incomes so they can have a reasonable housing costs. i would like to see the supervisors have a measure to dedicate more funding for the low income. thank you very much. supervisor kim: thank you. >> my name is -- , from the tenderloin. for the past six years. my family had been wanting to buy housing for us in the tenderloin, but said he said, after many years, we still live in different places because we cannot find a place that is supportable and can accommodate all of us. because of this, i would like to call upon our supervisors to

ensure that affordable housing will not only be retained in san francisco but would go to support this fund. the affordable housing and the families in the tenderloin. thank you very much. supervisor kim: thank you. >> good afternoon, supervisors. my name is lorenzo. i am a community organizer and a member of the tenderloin. there is the need of affordable housing in the tenderloin. i know for a fact there are many filipino families of 6 to 10 people sharing one-bedroom and sometimes studio units in the tenderloin. had it not been for the

affordable housing, my own family would still be sharing a small room with relatives. the reason for this is because working families like this cannot afford rent and sharing rooms with relatives or friends is our only option. what would happen in san francisco did not anymore invest in low-income housing? seniors, people of color, and working-class families like us will be pushed out of san francisco or will be living in overcrowded apartments with relatives so that they could stay in san francisco, or worse, they could end up homeless. we believe that investing in affordable housing will create more benefit than harm to the city. affordable housing will prevent displacement. affordable housing will create great jobs. affordable housing will stabilize our schools, and affordable housing will keep san franciscans in san francisco.

there are compelling reasons for affordable housing that our city should report, and we urge our board of supervisors to support this project and the inclusionary housing and the creation of a housing trust fund. thank you so much. supervisor kim: thank you. >> good afternoon, supervisors. good afternoon to everybody who came out here to support affordable housing. my name is antonio. i am here to support the mayor, the trust fund proposal. i think affordable housing is very important because it does not only affect the poor. it also affects the rich. i come from a standpoint of safety. people who live in san francisco, they are going to

contribute in terms of emergency and disaster. we get hit by earthquakes. how are you going to find people to come and help out, to rescue the victims and stuff like that? so a big shout out to everyone who came out today to support affordable housing. i am here to support the funding for the trust fund. supervisor kim: thank you. >> oh, i am -- and and with the sro and live in the mission. debra rights, for my personal experience, i got injured at work, and i could not work. my benefits were exhausted, which caused me to become promise. i cannot pay rent. i slept on the streets and shelters. i had to do footwork and stand

on my to get where i am right now. now, i am in mercy housing, and i pay 30% of my income for housing. we need help for those, seniors and the mentally ill. it would take people off of the street and out of the sro's. we need to do something about these empty buildings in the mission, so that people will not get tickets for trespassing just to sleep somewhere. i currently pay half of my money for a tiny room, where i do not have a place to hang my courage. i live out of boxes because i do not have room for a dresser. it is not a dump. it is just not that much space. people do not need to live on the street. we need more affordable housing. maybe more people would stay out of jail or off of probation. it is hard to find housing for people living on ssi or ga.

and just on a personal note, working at the mission collaborative, i have seen people transition from living in shelters and the daily sro's to actually having subsidized housing where they have a place to live permanently, and it has made a tremendous impact on people's health as well as their quality of life, so i urge the supervisors and the mayor's office on housing to look for other ways to have permanent housing with a very specific emphasis on income levels and keeping it at the very low income level. thank you. supervisor kim: thank you. >> good afternoon, supervisors. my name is bin shaker. i also work with the collaborative, and i am in district 9. since i am on fixed income like thousands of others of san franciscans, there is an extreme

struggle, especially in the time of rising rents and disparity. my partner and i can only afford to live and an sro's, an icy definitively out of our range condominiums being built and not places for people like us. affordable housing is important to myself and the larger mission community. it keeps the community diverse and interesting and does not further homogenize and gentrify it. having low in come housing does not count as affordable low- income housing for the mission as well as the tenderloin and other neighborhoods, like bayview and hunters point, in which genuinely low-income people live. in conclusion, what i would love to see the board of supervisors do is approved bonds to subsidize generally very low to middle income housing for the mission and other neighborhoods using the existing model of places like valencia gardens as

a blueprint for creating genuine housing opportunities for people who fall into income levels that are currently at or well below the current ami projection of 20%, which is the majority former san franciscans. thank you for your time. >> thank you, mr. shaffer. >> how are you doing? my name is darnell boyd, and i am an organizer from an sro glenarden and and also at the mission hotel. i live in the mission district. it is a community of divorce people, and we cannot displays the mission district where high- income housing because we would be displacing our families, our friends, our brothers, our sisters. we need to keep them in affordable housing. if we displaced families, we know what happens. they fall apart. the mother ends up one way, the mother ends up another place,

and the kids and up somewhere else. we need to stop catering to high and people and help the lowest of the low. we need to go around the neighborhood and hand out keys to all of the people who sleep under tarps and in doorways and on the streets. we need help for these people. thank you for listening to me. thank you very much. >> good afternoon. i am josh. i am also from the mission sro collaborative. just like kendra, i am going to read a statement from someone who could not be here. he writes, myself, i recently coming out of homelessness from being on the streets and parks to shelters. i will be getting an sro on geary street, but it has been quite an experience, not the best one, i might add. the system is broken and

mismanaged in needs to be fixed. people like us who are low- income on the poverty line, that we can have a good quality live, and needless to say and quality of life that is affordable to us. and then, what he wants the supervisors to do, he really wants to reach out to the community and not judge and to try to experience what it is like to go through and to see if, if they like it, and then maybe then everyone will understand what it is actually like, so i want to say apart from that, my own experience working out the collaborative, a lot of people when they hear where i work, they ask me questions about affordable housing, and the first thing that i say to them is that many of the tenants who live in sro's are not living in affordable housing. it is very, very hard for them to live there. you continue your about people's spending 60% or more of their

income, and there is not that much left over. i was doing some outreach in a building, and the tenants were asking me whether it was legal to withhold rent because of some rats that were in their room that had actually eaten their food, and they had totally run out of food. they had exhausted the remainder of their income after rent and had no more food for the rest of the month, so really what it is a question between clean housing and food, that is something that people should not have to choose among in san francisco. supervisor kim: thank you. before our next speaker, i want to call some more names. [reading names] omar, whitney jones, arthur chang, dying and,

and bill hanigan. >> my name is tony. i am an advocate with the senior action network and also with the the heritage foundation. there is really no surprise that we are building more and more prisons and prison cells than we are affordable housing. since 1995, the entire country has lost almost 300,000 existing units of public housing and 360 units of section 8 housing with a little bit over 7000 approved for demolition since march 2011, and you couple that with decriminalization of poverty, it has been a very deliberate process when you look at this push towards privatizing of land

that is under our feet. i come from two communities that have been affected by gentrification and removal. my family was originally from the western addition. my grandmother had a house there, and through urban renewal, she lost that house. we had relatives at a mattel which was demolished, and it is fitting that we are going to be celebrating the 30th anniversary of that eviction at that hotel, where now are 105 units of affordable senior housing, so i went to really call the spirits of those ancestors into this room because a lot of that negotiation took place in these chambers, and i want to bring their memory here to let you know that we do need to build affordable senior housing, affordable housing for elders, for disabled people, a lot of

homeless folks. i think the coalition on homelessness came up with figures, i think 58% of the people who are without houses are that way for the first time, so we need to realize that the soul of our community does not belong to corporations or to private business. it belongs to people, and we need to advocate for them, and we need housing that we can afford, and i am a fourth generation sovereigns -- san franciscan. i need to stay here. i do not want my family to move. we have roots here. we have family here. as far as the mayor's plan and plans for further funding of affordable housing, we do need that. the housing that we do have, not to let it be converted into hotels or demolished. also, a senior-specific sro housing.

we also have to have owners to put them back on the market. and in regards to 1 woman, an elder with the senior action network, she wanted to give the message that the ventilation in units needs to improve, because oftentimes when elders, it the event is not good, there is a lot of smoke, and there are fire hazards and what not. thank you. supervisor kim: thank you. >> my name is daniel. i have lived in san francisco since 1996, and i got squeezed out, so i spent three years in exile. i am not planning to move out again. but my question is about the rent participation. how long will san francisco