For a few years, San Francisco Quaker meeting has been meeting Christ outside its doors, literally. The voiceless, forgotten, and politically marginalized gather outside our building to seek refuge. We welcome them to service on Sundays, make sandwiches and food, and charge their phones on Fridays, and that’s all needed. Another quiet ministry is the washing of laundry – which a few Friends take back to their places to wash and return.
In San Francisco, only the newer apartment buildings offer in-unit washers or on-site laundry. Most of the laundromats in San Francisco are concentrated in the Tenderloin (a fifty-block area with a median income that’s about half of the rest of the city). San Francisco suffers a trending issue: laundromats are “essential,” yet these businesses are closing at an alarming rate. In fact, the problem has become so widespread that in Fall 2021, the San Francisco Planning Commission issued an ordinance to slow the conversion of laundromats into any other type of business that would result in gutting infrastructures like water lines, etc. After these arteries are pulled, it’s nearly impossible to justify the business expenses of reinstalling them in the future; once it’s no longer a laundromat, the site won’t ever be a laundromat again.
If one spends time in any laundromat in the Tenderloin, one will see the full tapestry of life walk in. I’ve seen people carrying all their possessions in shopping carts, sunburnt faces walking overladen with tents and rolled-up equipment, and the entire spectrum of active mental health crises. Laundromats are social spaces that everyone uses. That includes working-class folks who have been recently evicted, single mothers who find it hard to buy detergent, and the dark-skinned folks who make up a disproportionate part of the unhoused population in San Francisco.
Laundry services exist for those who sleep out on the street, but they are not always free. Several programs charge between 25¢ and 50¢ to wash and dry clothes; this may seem negligible, but it is a barrier. A natural extension of laundry is the need to take a shower; it is unfortunate that some programs, which begin with the intention of offering showers, develop unnecessarily restrictive policies that make showers difficult. For example, I’ve seen signage on the doors of some shower programs which restrict showers to seven minutes. My vision is to provide a social laundromat, which would also have a few showers to offer that form of care.
We need to pivot our prevailing models. In January 2022, San Francisco opened a “linkage center” pilot program to triage folks in crisis – providing social services, (unofficial) safe injection sites, showers, etc. The location was just a few blocks from the San Francisco Quaker meetinghouse. The results of that pilot showed the model was ineffective at mediating the trauma of persons on the street. For every ten visits to the linkage center, less than two ended up in referrals. The center was closed after only a year of operations. It isn’t that the funding shouldn’t be spent. Rather, we should listen to the data and imagine other models. Maybe instead of a model that offers a fire hydrant of “services,” we could try a more steady-state, low-flow model.
What if, instead of creating long queues of traumatized persons, we actually listened to them? What if we took the time – let’s say the hour or so it takes for their clothes to wash and dry – to hear some of their life narrative, to develop trust and personal relationships? Humor me and imagine if there was a cultural chaplain at that laundromat, someone with clinical pastoral education who could be present during business hours. Imagine the chaplain focused on those who needed someone to talk with them – whether they could afford to pay or not. This chaplain might be the best person to care for persons with severely damaged self-perception and perhaps even some middle class, paying customers might also avail themselves of the chaplain. According to Pew Research, San Francisco is the most “unchurched” city in the United States.
Living out on the streets is a severe form of financial trauma; an entire material “world” has been destroyed. Even so, an apartment is not a magic wand. The data shows us that almost twenty percent of the drug overdoses in San Francisco last year were people who were already off the streets and in managed care. I do not deny the urgent need for housing; housing is about survival. But active listening is also needed, so that we can get beyond basic subsistence to the full potential of all God’s children.
Now that you’ve stepped into this alternate, big-idea world, let’s imagine what might happen with this slow-growth model. After a few visits to the social laundromat, persons out on the street might trust the chaplain enough to walk with them to a case worker’s office. Physical accompaniment would be a critical departure from other resources. The chaplain serving as a physical presence would take longer per person, but the “return” for that time would be trust. What if, let’s just guess, referral rates in this model were 10% higher than what we see in traditional interventions? The city could save money and actually improve outcomes.
Friends are very good at quiet, slow-going, patient waiting; our practices might help improve a nearly intractable crisis. It seems that the cultural chaplaincy, the care of damaged souls, suits our skillset. Early Friends did well in business (Lloyds of London) and used enterprise as a method of shifting collective consciousness (e.g. “free produce” during abolition). Business products and services shape our world; new businesses can expand the spaces we have for spiritual care. Recently, I have been inspired by the technologists and entrepreneurs whom I have met at the Edge & Node House of Web3 in the Presidio in San Francisco. Every Wednesday, “We Heart SF” brings us all together to tackle issues such as conservatorship, homelessness, and workforce development.
I have learned many lessons that I hope to translate into community services and events, hosted at the social laundromat.
Helmet of self-care on; breastplate of righteousness strapped on; and double-edged, flaming sword of Truth poised to strike. I refuse to believe that a world of mass shootings, peppered with spatial computing or metaverse-avatars, is the best we should envision.
I am unashamedly optimistic about the potential of San Francisco and remain deeply inspired by the social fires that have been lit in the Bay Area; especially our ancestors in the queer and black power movements. I am particularly inspired by the “Digger” movement of the 1960s, with their revolutionary values of hospitality. The original Diggers of 17th century England arose to protest the enclosure movement; a social laundromat is another way of resisting enclosure – the enclosure of our hearts in the damp, sullied t-shirt of “freedom” offered by neoliberalism. Let us all be baptized in the water and emerge with transfigured eyes which can “see” new social structures and ways of being together in community. ~~
Zae Illo currently serves as the Operations Manager at Youth Spirit Artworks and facilitates the Bible study at Glide Church in San Francisco. He has an M.Div. from Earlham School of Religion, lives in a tiny house in Oakland, and is a member of San Francisco Friends Meeting (PacYM).