Column: Newsom and mayors meet to discuss homelessness. Have we hit rock bottom?
Published: Friday, Jan. 18, 2013 11:56 a.m. CDT
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It was a meeting of two leaders of the city’s homeless community, David Kates and Michael Saffore.
Saffore and Kates have served as leaders or advisors to at least four mayors, including the current mayor, Martin J. Walsh, and, yes, Jim McGreevey.
This all started last May, when a group of people came together after the death of Kates’ father, who had been homeless.
Kates has been homeless for years and says he and his father had to sell their cars, give up their homes and move in with friends.
“We were homeless, homeless, homeless,” Kates said. “It was the worst thing in the world.”
He remembers when he woke up on a couch in a friend’s living room the morning of his father’s death. The place was so quiet and it just felt right.
“You don’t expect to come home,” he said. “There’s no place you ever want to go. But it was the right place at the right time.”
Kates’s friend was taking care of him in the days after the death, and he eventually moved into his father’s old home.
The home was on the second floor of a single-family home in the Central Side neighborhood on the South Side. He had to pay $200 to the friend who was doing his father’s laundry, which was “the biggest amount of money I ever saw,” Kates said.
In March, he and two friends were able to afford a bed, but Kates was still sleeping in his friend’s living room, sharing the couch with him.
On June 28, Kates’ father died at his home. Now, Kates was homeless.
“I had everything all over again,” he said. “At the time I felt like a failure. I just felt like everything had gone wrong with my life, the best thing was to get out of it.”
Kates said his
