Street Speak

The election is right around the corner! Still undecided or want to learn more? Listen to this episode where we talk about local and state measures and break each one down. This episode's guest is Sunny Angulo, former legislative aide to Supervisors Aaron Peskin and Jane Kim, and director of PROPEL San Francisco, a progressive advocacy group. She works closely with the League of Pissed off Voters and is here to talk to us more about the election, how we can fight the billionaire agenda at the ballot box and how we can't stand up for a better San...

More Affordable Housing! Join us to talk about Prop I: Affordable Housing Guarantee Act with Tuesday Rose Thorton, Anti Eviction attorney and DSA member, alongside Scott Feeney; member of the steering committee of the Democratic Socialists of America, San Francisco. On this episode we discuss why San Franciscans should vote for the Affordable Housing Guarantee Act, what social housing is and how it exists here already in San Francisco and how you can join the fight to secure affordable housing and protect our city’s democratic values. Go to www.yesonisf.com or follow @sfguaranteedact on Instagram to learn ho...

Join us on this episode with guests Christin Evans community advocate and former member of the Homeless Oversight Commission and Ajai Nicole Duncan– a community advocate at TODCO to discuss the city’s attempt at charter reform— to propose amendments to the city charter on the ballot this November. 

On this episode we will be breaking down these charter reform amendments, outlining the threats to democracy here in San Francisco and hopefully activating listeners to engage in protecting San Francisco's local democracy from the attempted billionaire takeover!

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Join us to discuss the opening of the RESET center in San Francisco, essentially a $21 million dollar illegal drunk tank and the city's latest attempt to criminalize homelessness and substance use. We are joined by Apple Cronk, an artist, activist and policy advocate working towards community care and evidence based solutions here in San Francisco. 

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On this episode we are talking about San Francisco’s city budget, specifically the People's Budget Coalition, the group that is advocating for a budget that reflect's the City's values. We learn about some of the community organizations part of PBC, what is at stake for them and how they are fighting back against the city's billionaire agenda and advocating for a budget that reflect's the City's values. To learn more and take collective action. go to peoplesbudgetcoalition.org. 

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Join us for a fun gameshow edition with hilarious guests Tom Ammiano, (activist and former member of California State Assembly), Sarah Shortt, (Director of counseling programs at the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco) and Mary Howe, (Executive Director at the Homeless Youth Alliance). During this episode these seasoned San Francisco social justice advocates get to buzz in as they guess which local politician, tech bro or online grifter made each ridiculous claim or remark. Did Trump say this or Mayor Daniel Lurie? 

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After years of having their belongings destroyed by city workers while homeless in San Francisco, Apple Cronk and her partner fought back through the courts.

Join Apple and her partner Josh with our Host, Street Sheet editor TJ Johnston as they explore how this settlement protects ALL unhoused San Franciscans from routine property destruction, as well as their journey fighting back against the city's attack on unhoused people's human rights, their dignity and their vital and precious belongings. 

Check out Apple's op-ed in the Chronicle telling her story about why she joined the l...

On this episode we are joined by Lukas Illa, Human Rights organizer with the Coalition on Homelessness and Armando Martinez, RV resident and End Poverty Tows activist. 

As part of the RV ban, RV residents who were counted by the City in a May 2025 count may be exempt from the 2-hour enforcement for only 12 months unless they are offered a housing subsidy or shelter placement. But the plan only has 65 family housing subsidies allocated for an estimated 427 RV households.   

The mayor’s RV ban comes at a time when immigrant communities are threatened by increased crimi...

In this episode we host Laura Guzman- the Executive Director at the National Harm Reduction Coalition and Shakema Straker, human rights organizer and harm reduction advocate at the Coalition on Homelessness. Our guests discuss the basic tenets of harm reduction and the data and research that champions harm reduction as an evidence based practice. We explore the harmful misconceptions and stigma that surrounds the overdose crisis, drug use and substance use disorders and the harmful narratives and policies that we are seeing at a local, state and national level. Our guests end with discussing how we can continue to...

Join us this episode with Lauren Hall to chat about DISH's commitment to providing high quality permanent housing to San Franciscans who suffer from serious health issues. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, theres is a nationwide shortage of affordable housing and permanent supportive housing. We explore the political attacks on the Housing First framework that stigmatizes drug use and users and call for the prioritization of treatment before housing. "It is hard to make positive change in your life if you don't have a home," 

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On Today's episode we will be speaking to the Lucia Obregon, the director at the San Francisco Latino Party and Equity Coalition (SFLPEC) a citywide coalition of more than 22 Latinx-led and Latinx serving community based agencies, she is also the appointed commissioner for the immigrant rights commission of San Francisco, a volunteer with the Building Community Collective and lastly an artist and of the lead singers of the band Inti Mystica. We will be discussing how SFLPEC'S member agencies center unhoused communities in their work, the rise in family homelessness within the immigrant community and the ways that SFLPEC...

In this episode, we delve into the intersectionality of homelessness and the Black experience with two prominent leaders in the fight for social justice and housing equity: Shellena Eskridge, Executive Director of the Homeless Prenatal Program (HPP), and Joe Wilson, the Executive Director of Hospitality House. 

Shellena, a San Francisco native who is a passionate advocate for families, is leading HPP into a new era of hope and transformation for the Bay Area’s most vulnerable families. Joe Wilson, who leads Hospitality House with over 40 years of experience in community based solutions. Together, they’ll discuss the chall...

Today's episode features some incredible poets reading their pieces aloud. To read these poems and many others, check out our full 2023 poetry edition of the Street Sheet, available at streetsheet.org

Featured Poets:
Virginia Barrett
Dee Allen
Johanna Elattar
Detroit Richards
Aaone Enosa
Revolt
Martine Khumalo
Lisa Willis

Submit Your Writing!
Street Sheet is always accepting submissions of poetry, personal stories, and news articles for our bi-monthly newspaper, which supports the survival and well-being of over 100 hundred vendors. To submit your work or to...

On September 27th, the ACLU, Lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights, and the Coalition on Homelessness—the organization that creates this podcast—filed a lawsuit against the City of San Francisco. They, and the seven homeless plaintiffs they represent, allege that the constant "sweeps" of homeless encampments carried out by numerous city agencies are unconstitutional.

We speak with Zal Shroff and Hadley Rood, lawyers with the Lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights (LCCR), as well as with plaintiff and homeless activist Toro Castaño, about what this lawsuit could mean for the thousands of unsheltered San Franciscans who call this...

This podcast is created by the same people who bring you the Street Sheet, San Francisco’s street newspaper.  This year's April Fools Day issue hits the streets of San Francisco full of comics that were compiled and submitted by A.B.O. Comix, a collective of creators and activists who work to amplify the voices of LGBTQ prisoners through art.

On today’s episode, we speak with Casper Cendre, the director and a co-founder of A.B.O. Comix,  a project dedicated to supporting queer and trans artists in prison and creating a world beyond our carcer...

Today's episode features some incredible poets reading their pieces aloud. To read these poems and many others, check out our full poetry edition of the Street Sheet, available at streetsheet.org

Featured Poets:
Kevin Madrigal Galindo
Detroit Richards
Jonah Raskin
Judy Joy Jones
Johanna Elattar
Revolt Right Now
Virginia Barrett

Submit Your Writing!
Street Sheet is always accepting submissions of poetry, personal stories, and news articles for our bi-monthly newspaper, which supports the survival and well-being of over 100 hundred vendors. To submit your work or...

The overdose crisis claimed the lives of 700 San Franciscans in 2020—twice the number of COVID-19 deaths during the same period. Poverty, criminalization, and the demonization of people who use drugs has put our community members in greater danger, and the stigma surrounding drug use has stalled meaningful efforts to create services and implement policies that will save lives.

We speak with Ashley Fairburn—a harm reduction worker at the San Francisco AIDs Foundation—about what the overdose crisis is, the disparate impact it has on homeless San Franciscans, and how we can practice harm reduction in our own co...

At the height of the Delta variant spike, the City of San Francisco announced plans to close down the Shelter in Place Hotels that had kept about 2,000 people safe and off the streets over the course of the past year. We spoke with Lina Khoeur, a fourth year medical student at UCSF, and with Naomi Shoenfeld, a medical anthropologist and nurse practitioner who has been working and researching in the SIP hotels. Both of them shared what they have seen of the benefits the SIP hotel program  has offered to tenants, and why they are asking the City to #K...

This episode features an interview with Paul Boden of Western Regional Advocacy Project, a local organization coordinating a regional response to the criminalization of homeless people. We talk about Business Improvement Districts, the shadowy private entities that are turning neighborhoods across the country into outdoor malls - and determining who has access to spaces that were once public.

Get Involved!

Western Regional Advocacy Project: https://wraphome.org/

Learn more about Business Improvement Districts (AKA Homeless Exclusion Districts): https://wraphome.org/homeless-exclusion-districs/

Weather report brought to you by Mega Bloom...

This episode features an interview with Celestina Pearl, the Outreach director at St. James Infirmary. She spoke with Street Speak about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on sex workers in San Francisco, the history of SESTA/FOSTA, the connections between homelessness and sex work, and the incredible mutual aid work that is sustaining sex workers during this challenging time. 

Get Involved!

St James Infirmary: https://www.stjamesinfirmary.org/

RAD Mission Neighbors: https://radmissionneighbors.org/

Learn about SB 357 to decriminalize sex work in California: https://sd11.s...

This episode is a pre-recorded panel hosted by the Housing Justice Workgroup of the Coalition on Homelessness, San Francisco exploring the panelists own experiences with racism and homelessness. The speakers draw connections between racism, structural causes of homelessness such as neoliberalism and the defunding of housing investments for poor communities, the use of homeless people as a political wedge by monied interests as a smokescreen for racism, the disproportionate impact homelessness has on brown and especially black communities and why/how racist policies such as redlining have led to the lack of accumulated wealth in the Black community and...

This episode dives into the reality of life inside San Francisco's Shelter in Place (SIP) Hotel program. There are 2,400 formerly unhoused people currently staying in SIP hotel rooms in San Francisco, and while the City has committed to housing most of them, the details of where and how that will happen are unclear.

We'll hear first from Mary Crisis, a former SIP hotel worker who penned a damning open letter about the conditions in the hotels which you can read on their twitter page @jfchrist. Then we speak with SIP hotel tenant Nicholas Garrett about the necessity...

Episode 4 - Why Do You Need Housing?
September 22, 2020

HOUSING IN THE TIME OF COVID-19, AND WHY IT MATTERS
A panel discussion hosted by House the Bay with unhoused San Franciscans speaking about the urgent need for housing. This conversation happened August 13th and the full video can be viewed on House the Bay's Facebook or Instagram.

PANELISTS:

COUPER ORONA
https://www.couperwashere.com/
Couper is a disabled firefighter and street medic offering care to other unhoused San Franciscans. On May 1st she was part of the home...

Episode 3: What Are Shelters Like in the Time of COVID-19?
August 13, 2020

In this episode we speak with Meghan "Roadkill" Johnson and Ben Baczkowski, both Shelter Client Advocates who work at the Eviction Defense Collaborative to protect the rights of people living in San Francisco's shelter system. They offer a brief history and overview of the program before diving into the nitty-gritty details of how COVID-19 has changed everything. 

The weather report for this episode is brought to you by the Timothy O'Neil Band. Timothy O'Neil is a songwriter from Temecula, C...

Episode 2: What is an Encampment Sweep?
Feb 14, 2020

What happens when enough 311 complaints come in and the city decides to clear out a community of people? What happens to their belongings? And importantly, with over a thousand people on the shelter waitlist, where are people supposed to go? Today we answer the question, what is an encampment sweep? 

To get a better sense of what an encampment sweep is, we sat down with Couper Orona, who has experienced sweeps firsthand during her ten years of homelessness and who is a team member of t...

Episode 1: What is Street Sheet?
Dec 09, 2019

We start off with the headlines impacting homeless people, from Trump's atrocious new pick for the federal Interagency Council on Homelessness to the "Love Our City Eco-Blitz" announced by Mayor Breed's office, to the impending eviction of mentally ill people living at VanNess Manor. Then listen to a conversations between Street Sheet editors Quiver Watts and TJ Johnston about the history and mission of the Street Sheet newspaper as it celebrates its 30th year in print.

Acknowledgements:
Ramsey E. Dunlap brought us the Word on...