Name: She told her story to CNN. The network treated it like San Francisco poverty porn
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She told her story to CNN. The network treated it like San Francisco poverty porn

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“What happened to San Francisco?”

It’s a provocative question, one that news media outlets across the country are parachuting into our city to get a piece of. Embedded in the question is a key conceit: San Francisco used to be a great place, but now it’s Gotham City without a Batman to save it.

CNN recently devoted a primetime special to allegedly trying to find an answer. Its takeaway treaded a familiar path: San Francisco is too compassionate toward unhoused people, who are also drug addicts and criminals. More criminal prosecution is the answer. 

To arrive at this determination, host Sara Sidner sat down with former and current city mayors, pundits, political activists and a few unhoused people. One of those people was Couper Orona, an unhoused woman who often acts as a liaison between the media and her community. A former firefighter, Orona spends much of her time treating the wounds of her neighbors, volunteering with groups like Rad Mission Neighbors and advocating against sweeping, the practice of sending sanitation workers to clear homeless encampments. She has an intimate view into the lives of many unhoused people — not just from experiencing homelessness herself but in hearing the stories of the people she helps.

But you don’t see that breadth of experience on camera. Instead, what mostly made it through were comments that made her and her neighbors seem like vultures.

Orona is interviewed in an encampment, as Sidner incredulously grills her on why she wouldn’t take single-room occupancy housing known as SROs over life on the streets.


“Take the housing, it’s safer!” Sidner says.

“No, it’s not,” Orona says.

Moments like these are where a media entity genuinely invested in presenting the multi-layered complexities of San Francisco’s troubles might linger. Instead, the show cut the interview short.

So, I reached out to Orona to ask her what she meant.

She told me that living in a city SRO often means dealing with everything from rat infestations to dead bodies to the constant threat of sexual assault and harassment. “People die every second in there and they just scoop the body aside and let the next person in.” A man kept breaking into her sister’s room in an SRO building and her complaints fell on deaf ears: “The people in the front were like, ‘Nothing happened.’ 


“I explained all of it to (Sidner),” Orona said.

If CNN was skeptical of Orona’s story, it could have just as easily cited The Chronicle’s Pulitzer-lauded investigation of the city’s SROs, which found that many buildings are plagued by hazardous conditions and violence due in large part to a lack of funding and staffing support from Mayor London Breed’s administration.

When living conditions in the city’s SROs are so bad that people feel safer sleeping on the streets, it more than hints at an urgent solution to one of our city’s most intractable problems. And it makes clear that an overabundance of compassion might not be the only problem here.

Orona told me her conversations with CNN reporters demonstrated that they were perfectly fluent with these realities. Instead, she said, the network willfully glossed over them.

According to Orona, Crystal Erickson, an unhoused neighbor, told her story to Sidner for almost an hour, but all that came through was a 13-second snippet about how she was a drug addict who couldn’t stay housed because she kept missing curfews.

Sounds like Erickson was just an irresponsible person, right?

What was missing from the final cut was the full explanation.

“When Crystal lost her last housing, she’d gotten an infection in her neck, in a lymph node,” Orona said. Like many SRO buildings, Erickson’s residence required residents to check in every 72 hours or else they’d lose their spots and, sometimes, all of their physical possessions. “But she was in the hospital for two weeks!” Orona said.

In response to these claims, a CNN spokesperson told me, “It was important to CNN to highlight these issues facing the city, and we stand by our reporting.” 

While working with CNN initially seemed like a chance to bring people’s stories to light, Orona told me she ultimately felt duped by the network.

Whenever homelessness is a part of public conversation, it’s all too easy to hyperfocus on reasons to not care about the people involved. But media can and should be able to hold multiple complex ideas simultaneously in service of meaningful solutions to problems that are themselves complex. Unfortunately, simple and inflammatory notions are often more appealing to viewers. Orona’s story shows how CNN abused the city for easy ratings.

Yes, San Francisco has real issues, like any city that’s ever existed. But we’d get further in solving them if we stop cutting the inconvenient facts out of frame.

The more seductive angle is always going to be the one where those with privilege aren’t made to feel bad or complicit. We can keep living the way we do, comfortable in believing that suffering only comes to those who deserve it.

But telling the whole truth is essential if we genuinely want to figure out meaningful solutions to social issues that are, like it or not, much closer to engulfing all of us than we’d like to admit. Orona was a professional firefighter, married and living in a house in San Francisco before she became homeless. The fact of being unhoused shouldn’t undo the sense of personhood she had before; she and her peers deserve the basic respect of having their full stories told.

“What happened to San Francisco?”

It’s a provocative question, one that news media outlets across the country are parachuting into our city to get a piece of. Embedded in the question is a key conceit: San Francisco used to be a great place, but now it’s Gotham City without a Batman to save it.

CNN recently devoted a primetime special to allegedly trying to find an answer. Its takeaway treaded a familiar path: San Francisco is too compassionate toward unhoused people, who are also drug addicts and criminals. More criminal prosecution is the answer. 

To arrive at this determination, host...

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Soleil Ho

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She told her story to CNN. The network treated it like San Francisco poverty porn

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