April 22, 2024 (SFChronicle.com)
San Francisco is changing. These are people whose decisions will shape that change — for better or worse. You might not know them all. But you should.
Jennifer Friedenbach
- Job: Executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness
- Age: 57
At the height of a battle over street encampments, Jennifer Friedenbach stepped out of a federal courthouse last August to find a man holding up a photoshopped image of her in an orange prison jumpsuit and handcuffs. Nearby, Mayor London Breed told a crowd that Friedenbach’s Coalition on Homelessness had “held San Francisco hostage for a decade” and that it was “time for their reign to end.” Friedenbach saw a clear message that day: She needed to fight much harder.
As executive director of an advocacy group that serves as a union of sorts for San Francisco’s more than 7,000 homeless residents, Friedenbach has made herself a loud, accessible and unyielding voice for that population amid a severe housing shortage. As such, she routinely condemns policies she says harm unhoused residents and rob them of dignity even as critics paint her as the linchpin of a “homeless industrial complex” that keeps people — their clients — too comfortable on the streets. No fight has become as polarized as the lawsuit the coalition filed in 2022, which has restricted the city’s ability to clear encampments.
Friedenbach, who makes $56,600 a year, according to the Coalition on Homelessness’ latest tax filings, frustrates her adversaries with a cheerful demeanor and an encyclopedic knowledge of the city’s homeless policies over the past four decades. “I’m constantly chipping away at the injustice,” she says, “and I’m just trying to keep at it until the wall completely falls.”
— Maggie Angst
