News

Homelessness in S.F.: The Lonely End to a Lifetime of Unrealized Promise

12/22/2015

Dec. 22--The end for Vina Villegas came just as her family and friends always feared it would. Death from a heroin needle, with a cornucopia of other drugs in her veins. Penniless, alone.

She lay unidentified at the San Francisco medical examiner's office for four months until a Chronicle reporter learned of her death and contacted her family. Even then, because she'd been using an alias in her longtime off-and-on homeless street life, it took another couple of weeks before her daughters could confirm she was truly gone.

What Villegas, 50, left behind when she died July 11 was a lifetime of promise, crushed dreams, grinding poverty -- and people who loved her and never gave up trying to ignite the inner goodness she radiated when heroin and crack were not screaming in her body for attention.

For the past decade-plus, Villegas was one of the best-known panhandlers in San Francisco as the city struggled with a street indigence problem that, to the casual eye, never seems to ease despite fervent efforts at housing and counseling. She wove through traffic at South Van Ness Avenue and Mission Street in a wheelchair, holding a sign reading, "Anything helps" -- and for several years, she was part of a colony of street addicts who slept at that corner and dubbed the traffic median they slept on "Homeless Island."

She'd lost her left leg in the 1990s when a boyfriend shot it off, and with her bedraggled look and tight-lipped smile, she could pull in $100 on a good day.

But there weren't many days like that. Most netted a few bucks to fuel desperate hunts for dope, even after she'd moved during the past year into a government-funded residential hotel room -- which is where she died.

Sometimes she still slept outside. Sometimes she cold-turkeyed off heroin, especially when she went to jail for low-level indigence or drug charges, but it never took for long. The life was too hard to shake.

Evident intelligence

Obscured by the addiction was a Villegas who could sit for hours, when her head was clear, and talk about anything from Shakespeare to Freudian theory. Who became a tender mother when her two daughters visited her, cleaning up her room or her tent and carefully preparing peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for them. Who could still draw beautiful horses and trees as she did as a young woman, when she made greeting cards to sell at craft fairs in her native Oregon.

"I wasn't always like this," Villegas said in the spring, sitting in her wheelchair at Homeless Island. The colony there dispersed in 2004 after city street crews changed the landscaping to discourage sleeping, but it's still a popular begging spot.

"I was a mom with a place to live," she said. "I was an artist. I was a good student." She stared at the spot where her leg used to be and sighed. "A lot has happened. I would love to get clean, I love my kids, but ..." She didn't finish the sentence.

Old friends reconnect

Villegas' childhood friend Gina Lindow of Talent, Ore., lost track of her in their 20s but refused to discard their bond. After reading a Chronicle story about Homeless Island, Lindow reconnected with Villegas in 2004 and continued to contact her every year, begging her to come back to the state they grew up in and give stability a chance.

"I told her I cared for her, I'd do what I could to help her, but I guess I've known for a long time she would never come back here," said Lindow, also 50. "She could have done anything she wanted in her life. She was smart, did amazing artwork. She could have gone to Harvard or Yale. But the drugs took her long ago."

Lindow remembered her first visit to Villegas in San Francisco in the mid-2000s, after she'd learned she was homeless. "Vina popped out of her tent and said, 'Hey, Gina,' and it was like it hadn't been years and years since I'd seen her. It was the same Vina.

"We talked mom stuff, and she sat there and brushed her hair like she always did, and smiled and had that same big heart. She scared the crap out of me wheeling that chair in traffic like that, and I told her, 'Vina, this is pretty hard-core.'

"She just said, 'Oh, Gina,' like it was no big deal," Lindow said. "She was brave. Always still the same Vina I'd known."

'A tumultuous life'

Villegas was born in Southern California and grew up in a wooded cabin in southern Oregon with her single father, Peter Villegas, who worked in logging and highway maintenance. She left home at 16 in search of adventure and worked as an artist -- but wound up in a drug crowd that led her to homelessness in the late 1990s in San Francisco.

"It was a tumultuous life," said Peter Villegas, who is retired and lives in Eugene. "I cleaned up long ago and did everything I could to dissuade Vina from drugs, but it was hard. I just tell myself she's at peace now."

Vina Villegas had one son and two daughters, all raised by others after heroin addiction set in. One lives in Los Angeles, another in Fresno. Her 29-year-old daughter, Ashley Farrell, who overcame her own rough patches, works at a bakery in Chico -- and treasures memories of her mother pulling together her dignity when she visited her in the street.

"She was always honest with me, and when I'd come with my friends she'd make us lunch, tell us to eat right, be her funny, energetic self," Farrell said. "I know what it's like to be homeless, to feel the worst hatred you can from people, to feel there is no hope left. But there is hope."

Efforts to help

President George W. Bush's advisers used the story of Villegas and the others on Homeless Island in the 2000s to encourage the creation of supportive housing throughout the nation. In San Francisco, Human Services Agency Executive Director Trent Rhorer took the lesson of Villegas personally.

"I used to see Vina and say, 'Hey, come on, you know you can get indoors, we've got rehab,' but years went by," Rhorer said. "Her death is terribly sad. With her, we had elements of success, but there was too much to overcome in the end."

Some 160 homeless or recently homeless people like Villegas die every year in San Francisco. If unclaimed, they are cremated by the city and their ashes tossed at sea. Studies show it costs about $60,000 a year in ambulance, police and other emergency services to leave a chronically homeless person in the street -- but about $20,000 a year to have that person in a supportive housing unit.

"This all speaks to those costs, but most importantly, it shows the human cost," Rhorer said. "And in cases like Vina's, that's a very high human cost."

Memorial planned

Farrell said she hopes to get her mother's ashes from the medical examiner before Christmas, and to hold a memorial for her sometime in 2016 in San Francisco. Lindow, who raised more than $1,000 for the family to retrieve Villegas' remains from the city, has tentatively planned a separate memorial in Oregon for March 27, 2016.

"Maybe ... if we can get people together to remember my mom ... we can give someone hope that people have families out there, that they don't forget," Farrell said. "Ever."

Kevin Fagan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: kfagan@sfchronicle.com