Brian HoweyThe lack of fresh water available to homeless people in San Francisco during the COVID-19 pandemic constitutes a “human rights abuse,” a community organizer said as the city’s shelter-in-place orders drag into a second year.
Before the pandemic, many of the city’s homeless residents relied on bathrooms in restaurants, libraries and other public facilities to bathe, collect drinking water and use the toilet. The shelter-in-place order shuttered many of those spaces, leaving homeless residents without water access when good hygiene was paramount to containing the spread of the coronavirus.
A year later, many homeless residents still face the same hurdles to water access, a report by the Coalition on Homelessness says.
“This is a human rights abuse,” said Carlos Wadkins, a coalition organizer. “Homeless San Franciscans are living at a standard beneath what any organization that focuses on water would call adequate access.”
Read the full story here.
