A few blocks from Twitter’s fancy corporate headquarters, a wheelchair-bound woman sleeps every night on the sidewalk. She is hardly alone.
This is San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, a focal point for the city’s gentrification struggles. It is home to over 6,000 homeless people, who until recently had access to only one working shower head, which was not handicap accessible. Now, a group of passionate people in the Bay Area is using old MUNI buses to bring bathing facilities to this underserved population.
Called Lava Mae (similar to “wash me” in Spanish), the project from the Tides Center, seeks to provide showers and toilets to people in the Tenderloin and San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood who lack access to these basic necessities.
When I visited on a Friday, dozens of people were lined up to use the facilities in the tenderloin. A staff member was hanging a clothesline in front of the bus to display wool hats a guest had made. I met regulars and first timers. The wheelchair-bound woman finally has a shower that can accommodate her needs. She comes every time the bus is in service.
Lava Mae’s founder, public relations executive Doniece Sandoval, says her passion for the project was sparked after passing a woman in her neighborhood who was crying because she had not been able to clean herself for days. Moved, Sandoval went without a shower for several days.
Last year, the team retrofitted a decommissioned bus with two showers and two toilets, and as of June 2014, now offers services to people in the Tenderloin and Mission areas during the week. Since the city is planning to transition to bio-diesel hybrid vehicles, the SFMTA donated a decommissioned bus for the project.
As a finalist for the 2014 Google Impact Challenge, Lava Mae received $100,000 to begin funding the project. Google started the Impact Challenge as a way to support community projects and mitigate damage done to its reputation in the wake of controversies surrounding its shuttles using public bus stops for free.
Run like a non-profit, financed like a startup, and welcoming like a neighboring food truck, Sandoval says Lava Mae is in the hospitality business, emphasizing collaboration above all else.
Inside, the bus feels much larger than it is. It has two showers (one handicapped) and two toilets. Though there is room for more showers, each bus has only two to maximize privacy, explains Community Engagement and Mobile Services Manager Leah Filler. In shelters, it is difficult for families, women, and LGBTQ individuals to feel completely safe bathing or using the restroom. Lava Mae wants to create a safe, comfortable environment. Skylights and cove lighting make the stalls very bright and cheerful inside.
Kohler donated a water and heat control system. The staff hooks up a large hose to a fire hydrant to pump water for the showers. The second half has a non-handicapped shower and toilet in addition to the water heater, hose, and engineering room at the back. There is also an intercom and emergency call button system, which sets off the “Stop Requested” sign at the front (a feature that the staff does not intend to change).
Then there’s the signage on the exterior of the bus. Brett Terpeluk---the lead architect for Piano at the California Academy of Sciences and chief designer for Lava Mae---and his design team noted that a progressive organization like this one demands equally progressive, gender-sensitive visuals.
Visible along the side of the bus are signs welcoming handicapped, male, female, and all-gender guests.
Guests can register for showers ahead of time or arrive as a walk-in. Staff and volunteers use an iPad app for registration. Families, handicapped guests, and those requiring assistance use the wheelchair-accessible shower at the front; others use the narrower one towards the back. Guests have access to soap, socks, and can even write messages on the whiteboard in the second shower. Both Filler and Sandoval emphasized that they trust their guests to respect the time limit. Guests having issues can call in via the intercom, and a trained staff member will respond.
On Thursdays and Fridays, the bus is parked in the Tenderloin. Everyone gets 10 minutes at this location. Saturdays in the Mission are not as crowded so guests are allotted 15 minutes for a shower. When whole families sign up, the team allots an hour in the larger stall.
The idea is to eventually divide the city into four quadrants, with four operational buses. Sandoval estimates the next buses will cost no more than $75,000 each now that the design phase is over. Through the help of a private donor, Lava Mae has already reached its funding goal for the second bus offline. The team hopes to have built the third and fourth buses by next Fall, and to have provided 50,000 additional showers.
Sandoval also hopes to organize a deal with mobile network providers to add extra time on smartphone plans for guests. It is a common misconception that the homeless population does not have access to smartphones or WiFi. Many do have smartphones, but they can no longer pay their benefits. The team is also developing a GPS-enabled app to make registering easy on everyone. They will also start utilizing Adobe Voice for storytelling purposes, creating a non-threatening outlet where guests can share their stories.
