Life on San Francisco's streets is hard, and it's gotten even harder because of COVID-19. Manfred Walzer is trying to bring the city's most vulnerable citizens a bit of healthy homemade food everyday.
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He figures he has prepared 80,000 meals during that time, spending about $150,000 of his own money and serving about 200 to 250 homeless people each week. His guilty conscience couldn't let the other chickens go to waste—"It's the weirdest thing," he says,"being German, we don't throw away food." So he immediately cooked and brought them to the Haight Ashbury area that night.
Many of them have been on the streets for many years. Some were kicked out by their parents. Most of them never share their stories or their real names, even with each other. It's hard to do social distancing with them, he says, because he loves them too much and has been out on the streets with them every day for years. Working with the homeless population has made him realize a few things that he feels local residents and police either don't know or prefer to ignore.
The truth is, San Francisco, like most cities, hasn't really figured out how to keep its roughly 8,000 homeless people safe during the epidemic. Even shelters aren't immune from the virus: This week, one of the city's largest shelters, MSC South, experienced an outbreak of coronavirus among 90 of its 340 guests, according toThe city recently issued an emergency order to open 8,000 more hotel rooms for the city's homeless population, but the order won't go into effect until April 26. In the meantime, hotels have had to scramble to figure out how to handle sanitation and security for their unexpected guests.
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