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Shelby, a 52-year-old who has lived on the streets since being robbed three years ago on his first day in San Francisco, prays at a shrine inside St. Mary’s Cathedral July 30. He contacted Catholic San Francisco via Facebook this summer to share his experience of being homeless and Catholic. (Photo by Christina Gray/Catholic San Francisco)
Aug. 5, 2019
Christina Gray
More than 8,000 people were identified as being homeless in San Francisco’s biennial homeless population census report released in May. Shelby may or may not be one of them.
“I’ve never been counted once, I’ve never been asked,” he said after meeting Catholic San Francisco on the steps of St. Mary’s Cathedral July 30.
Shelby could pass for any middle-age tourist in San Francisco, which is what he was when he arrived here three summers ago, an Ohio farm boy looking for a new life on the West Coast. But his “fresh start” turned to what it is today – mere survival.
He’s neatly dressed with an organized backpack that holds, among other things, three blankets and a folded slab of cardboard that does double duty as a sleeping pad, and on days when he must beg for a meal, a panhandling sign.
On July 11, Shelby wrote on the newspaper’s Facebook page that many of the homeless including himself are hungry for more than just food.
“Catholics need to come out on the street and pray with us because we lose faith sometimes,” he said. “Please don’t forget about us … we are homeless but some of us are Catholic.”
Shelby, 52, represents the largest and fastest-growing segment of the city’s homeless population – single adults over 25. Just two years ago, 4,983 people were counted as homeless in that bracket; in 2019, 6,254.
Shelby, who asked that his full name and photo not be published, said he feels at home at St. Mary’s, and with good reason. He has routinely bedded down in the cathedral’s downstairs halls, which serve as temporary shelter for homeless men run during the cold and rainy season and has worked in the kitchen serving meals.
He gets by on roughly $500 a month thanks to “odd jobs,” he said, a small circle of trusted friends and associates, and his faith – the only positive remnant of a childhood spent in a Catholic orphanage in Cleveland.
He goes to Mass and confession, mostly at St. Patrick Church on Mission Street or St. Boniface on Golden Gate Avenue because they are aren’t far from the Embarcadero where he often sleeps.
Shelby said that a lot of homeless people do believe in God, “maybe even more than the people who live in the towers.” But walking into a church to pray is not something most homeless people feel welcome to do.
He said if he’s approached, it’s usually with a sense of “the homeless guy is going to steal the candlesticks or something.”
Shelby wonders why more Catholic priests don’t go out among the homeless to hear confessions.
“Do you know how many people on the streets would love to confess their sins?” he asked.
As Shelby tells it, his life literally began on the street. He was abandoned as an infant and left in the backseat of a parked Shelby Mustang, a high-performance 1960s sports car. He was named, though by whom exactly he does not know, after the car and a Cleveland police officer named “Alan” who found the baby boy.
He was sent to an orphanage in Cleveland but ran away at age 11.
“You have no idea how miserable I am now,” he said. “But I was more miserable as a child. I can never be that miserable again.”
He ended up on the doorsteps of a farm run by a couple. He lived with them and worked on the farm for most of his adult life. They were the closest thing to a family he ever knew.
When the couple got old and the farm was sold, Shelby was given a small share. It was all the money he had to his name and he said it was stolen on his first day in San Francisco.
“I thought you go in someplace and say you’re homeless and they give you shelter,” he said. “Well you know, it just ain’t that way.”
He described the shock of seeing “needles, the people, the poop” in the Tenderloin district where he was directed for services. It was the first night he slept on the street.
Most days he rises early and sets off to look for work, and “try to figure out what I’m going to eat that day.”
Shelby said that his biggest daily challenges, aside from finding food, are finding a bathroom to use when he needs one, a place to charge his cellphone – a gift from a formerly homeless man – and drinking water.
“Right now, where would you and I get a drink of water if we had no money?” he asked.
Shelby’s survival appears to be the result of the trust he has earned in the homeless community and outside of it.
A security guard at a local grocery store lets him use the bathroom because, “he knows I don’t steal and I won’t mess it up.” A Good Samaritan pays for a $17.50 a month YMCA membership where Shelby showers some days in exchange for him detailing the man’s car. A local librarian packed him a “really nice” lunch one day. A bar owner lets him sleep in the relative safety of her doorway in exchange for cleaning the bar windows.
Most days he is able to feed himself thanks to a number of church and nonprofit organizations, but occasionally he does panhandle.
“I don’t steal, what else am I going to do?” he asked.
He called cardboard “the number one friend of a homeless person.”
“If you put a battery on cement, it drains it,” he said, and that’s what it does to your body. “That’s why you always see homeless people digging in the garbage for cardboard.”
He believes that most homeless people do drugs to cope with the rigors of homelessness, rather than becoming homeless because they do drugs. And “once they’re on the dope it changes them.”
“I take my misery out in different ways,” he said, admitting he’s living “day-by-day” in a city where he can’t save up enough money to leave.
He used to pray the rosary until someone stole his beads.
He is grateful to all the organizations and individuals who hand him a sandwich or a pair of socks but said he longs for something else.
“I can survive without money, I can get food somewhere,” he said. “But I can’t get spiritual guidance and someone to pray with me.”
Homelessness in San Francisco
The city’s 2019 homeless head count found homelessness on the rise, predominantly among individuals 25 and over. Among the key findings:
Since 2017, homelessness in San Francisco has increased 17 percent.
The point-in-time survey counted 8,011 people experiencing homelessness, up from 6,858 in 2017.
More than two-thirds (6,254) of the homeless population were single adults over 25, with almost half aged 41-60.
The homeless population is concentrated in supervisorial Districts 6 and 10, which include downtown, the Tenderloin, South of Market, Potrero Hill and Bayview-Hunters Point.
35 percent of homeless individuals were sheltered, and 65 percent had experienced homelessness for more than a year.