OccupySF to Take Over Vacant Housing Tonight

​We blogged today about the seemingly lackadaisical agenda of the OccupySF protesters on Market Street -- yoga, meditation, drumming. This morning as we came out of the Embarcadero BART station, one protester was dangling a dollar bill on a fishhook over the commuters walking up the steps. Well, now the Homes Not Jails group is claiming that the OccupySF members will actually take some action, joining them this evening to squat in vacant housing in San Francisco.

Homes Not Jails is a group that protests the lack of housing for homeless and low-income people by breaking into vacant buildings in San Francisco. They claim to have opened up hundreds of vacant buildings, giving homeless squatters a place to live since the organization was founded in 1992.

Tonight, they're planning a coup for World Homeless Action Day starting with a 5 p.m. protest. Then members will "occupy" at least 10 buildings simultaneously.

With the two groups teaming up together, Homes Not Jails spokesman Brian Wilkes promises a big crowd tonight.  "It's most likely going to be hundreds of people. It could be even more than that," he said. "It's going to be big. It's going to be huge."

Wilkes says that in the past, protesters have occupied buildings for up to 36 hours, and earlier this year, protesters targeted a building owned by Kaiser Permanente.

So how long they stay tonight? That really depends on the will of the people involved, Wilkes told us. "We can't really predict what they're going to do," he says.

Stay tuned.

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