[ Golden Gater Online - September 11, 1997 ]
The city's housing crunch has squeezed many SF State students out of places to live, and now it can claim a professor as one of its victims as well.
Humanities professor Saul Steier spent more than a month living in motels, other people's homes and SF State's Guest Center with his two young sons while looking for a place to live in San Francisco.
"I felt like a homeless person," he said. "I felt turned around, and I didn't know at the beginning of the day where I would stay that night."
Resting on his forearms in his Humanism and Mysticism class on the top floor of the Humanities building, Steier stares at his students with intense, red-rimmed eyes. His rumpled shirt and the dark circles under his eyes betray weeks of anxious nights. But when Steier speaks, his fast-paced, baritone voice reveals nothing but enthusiasm for his class and students.
"He definitely leaves a good impression," said film major Matt Hale. "I thought it was perfectly understandable (that he couldn't find a place), finding an apartment in this city is impossible."
But students said that on the first day of class, they were a little startled.
"I thought he was a crazy grad student," Kia Ninos, a clinical psychology major, said. "But being homeless strikes me as completely normal in this city."
Steier came to SF State in late July after a two-year stint as an associate professor at the University of Hawaii. There he lived with his wife, who still works there as a professor, and their two children. Before that, he had been teaching at SF State since 1982 in the humanities department. But even in a city notorious for its low vacancy rate, Steier said he always had a place to live.
"I've done it before -- I've been out (of the country) and every time I've come back, finding an apartment has been no problem at all," Steier said.
When Steier walked into a summer session course he was teaching carrying a suitcase, a student immediately offered him a room in her house. After spending a few days there, he slept on a couch of a colleague and other students before moving to the Guest Center on campus. But his extension was denied to make room for international students attending SF State and was left searching again.
His days were spent scouring the classified sections of local newspapers and hustling to housing bulletin boards both on and off campus.
"Then," he added, "as a silly ritual everyday, I would come into class and ask my students if they'd heard of anything."
In the end, an apartment became available at Parkmerced and he now lives "about four minutes" from his classroom.
But because he had to load his family on a plane back to Hawaii the next day, he said, he didn't have much time to celebrate or move in much of his belongings.
"It's never been like this before," Steier said. "This time, what happened was it simply reached a point where there was nothing, absolutely nothing."
[ Golden Gater - September 11, 1997 ]