San Francisco’s sprawling Golden Gate Park is about 3.5 miles long and claims the title of the third-most-visited park in the United States.
It’s also a bit of a microcosm for the city’s homelessness crisis.
In 2024, an estimated 8,323 people were experiencing homelessness in San Francisco, up more than 7% from 2022. While only a tiny fraction of that population set up encampments in Golden Gate Park, its rangers field complaints related to homelessness every day, according to reporting by Susan Freinkel for San Francisco Standard.
One such case was Kaine, a man who has called the park’s Hellman Hollow home since the late 1990s, per San Francisco Standard.
After years of receiving citations, having his campsite cleared, and his possessions taken away, he still kept coming back.
This is how rangers historically dealt with unhoused people sheltering in encampments: making them leave and issuing citations.
Most unhoused people followed Kaine’s footsteps: Packing up their belongings and setting up camp in a different area in the park.
Members of the Homeless Outreach Team, the city’s program that helps unhoused folks access shelter beds, repeatedly asked Kaine if he wanted to find shelter somewhere else. Repeatedly, he said no.
But then he met Amanda Barrows, a park ranger who works on a special detail to help unhoused people. Barrows connected with Kaine and learned that the park was a special refuge for him that had carried him through a rough childhood and into his 60s.
“I was like, clearly this is not working. He rebuilds, he comes back. What we’re doing is harming this person who’s obviously just stuck,” Barrows told San Francisco Standard. “So let’s try something else.”
In 2015, the city’s Parks and Recreation Department decided to onboard a specific homeless outreach detail.
“This approach aims to balance enforcement with compassionate outreach,” department spokesperson Tamara Aparton told San Francisco Standard.
Barrows and one other outreach ranger do what the department calls “arduous and achingly bureaucratic tasks” to help set people up for success across the city’s 220 parks.
This can be anything from helping them acquire a new ID and bus ticket home, to getting them a shelter bed, permanent housing, or much-needed medical care.
Even still, it’s hard work. Barrows eventually got Kaine to move to a room at the Civic Center Hotel Navigation Center until he was assigned permanent housing. He disappeared before morning, and Barrows found him “barely conscious and near frozen” the next morning back at the park.
“This can still be your home, but just in a different way,” Barrows would tell him. “It can be like a choice, something you come and go from, versus something you’re stuck in.”
Finally, he was convinced to make a change.
Barrows said she is sympathetic to the complaints she fields from parkgoers but also doesn’t believe in “treating homelessness as a criminal activity.”
The ranger detail is similar to a pilot program in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood that began a few years ago in which caseworkers and employees worked intensively with 34 people facing chronic homelessness. Within five months, all had accepted the services offered by the city.
With just two rangers focused on this work, it can be especially challenging for Barrows, and her colleague ranger Robert Ramey, to do as much good as they’d like.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the number of encampments in Golden Gate Park has “decreased 10-fold since 2017,” though it’s not clear exactly how much the rangers are responsible for this improvement.
Barrows said that since 2021, she estimates that she has helped 50 to 60 people accept services to help them leave the park. In 2024, she said that her work with Ramey helped eight park residents find housing.
Ultimately, outreach work like this is a long-term strategy that, ideally, centers the humanity and nuance of homelessness — not the policing of it.
“It’s important to understand that people experiencing homelessness are individuals with unique and complex circumstances,” Kevin Ruby, a homelessness outreach specialist in Tacoma, Washington, told The News Tribune.
“Declining offers of help, while it might seem counterintuitive, often has underlying reasons rooted in personal experiences and challenges.”
Whether abuse, addiction, violence, or grief, any form of significant trauma can make it exceedingly difficult for a person to feel safe in a shelter environment. Mental health challenges can also make it difficult for people to navigate the major transition required to live in a shelter or transitional living environment.
“It’s crucial to remember that an individual declining services is not a sign of their unwillingness to change,” Ruby added. “It’s often a complex response to difficult circumstances and past experiences.”
The same is true for folks living in San Francisco’s parks.
“You have to actually dig in and build relationships with these people and understand their needs,” Barrows said.
Barrows’s dedication to her city’s parks is not only evident in her work with unhoused communities, but also in a project she debuted in 2023. She created a “poetry nightstand” for parkgoers to take and leave poems after she enrolled in a free poetry class at City College of San Francisco during the pandemic.
“I’m in the parks all the time, and I see the many different ways people utilize them,” Barrows told The Washington Post in 2023.
Hundreds of hand-written poems were exchanged as she moved the nightstand to various sites in San Francisco.
The project became another way for Barrows to engage with her city — and looking back on the brief project in relation to the work she has done to help her homeless neighbors — is a kind of poetry itself.
As her class instructor, Tanea Lunsford Lynx, told The Washington Post: “It’s an invitation to slow down and participate and connect in a way that we don’t often have the opportunity to do.”
Header image courtesy of San Francisco Department of Emergency Management
