A San Francisco Park Ranger Replaces Citations With Patience to Move Homeless Residents Indoors

For more than 20 years, a man known as Kaine lived in the woods around Golden Gate Park's Hellman Hollow. He arrived in the late 1990s with a large backpack, two sleeping bags and a 12-person tent. Over time he became a familiar figure, carrying a staff carved from fallen branches and accompanied by his yellow Lab, Honey. He warned parents about poisonous hemlock, alerted gardeners to trees needing trimming and, in return, was often fed by families who picnicked in the meadow.

City efforts to move him failed repeatedly. Rangers cited him, the environmental services crew removed his tent and belongings, and outreach workers from the Homeless Outreach Team, which controls access to shelter beds, offered placements he always refused. Hellman Hollow, he said, was his home.

That changed after Amanda Barrows became a park ranger in March 2021 and joined a detail focused on unhoused people. She learned that Kaine, then nearing 60, had a difficult childhood in foster care and had treated the park as a refuge. Forcing him out, she concluded, was both ineffective and cruel. "He rebuilds, he comes back," she said.

Instead she spent seven months earning his trust and guiding him through the bureaucracy required for housing. He had no ID, and his records were under a different name, so each document had to be reconciled. Someone had to accompany him to every agency visit. She also told him leaving the park did not mean losing it: "It can be like a choice, something you come and go from, versus something you're stuck in."

In October 2021 Kaine received a room at the Civic Center Hotel Navigation Center. Barrows and her partner carried his two suitcases upstairs and donated furniture and clothing. The next day he was gone, and she found him under bushes at Hellman Hollow, nearly frozen after a night of rain. He later said a confrontation at the shelter had made him want to lash out, so he went home. After he recovered, he told her, "I'm not doing that again." He has not returned to the park.

The number of people living in city parks is small compared with the city's roughly 8,000 homeless residents, at most a few dozen. City counts found nine tents and 32 vehicles in Golden Gate Park in February 2021, and one tent and five vehicles in January 2025. Rangers still receive homelessness-related complaints daily. The Recreation and Parks Department created its outreach ranger detail in 2015 to pair enforcement with services, from shelter beds to medical care, detox programs, bus tickets home and new IDs.

Barrows, 32, grew up in public housing in a Boston suburb and moved to San Francisco at 19 with $200 and two bags. She lived in a single-room-occupancy hotel for five years and was transient for another five. Her father died of a fentanyl overdose in 2021. She sympathizes with gardeners who clean up garbage and drug paraphernalia, but does not believe homelessness should be treated as a crime. She estimates she has helped 50 to 60 people accept services since 2021. Of the 28 long-term residents in the park when she started, more than half are now indoors. In 2024 she and fellow outreach ranger Robert Ramey helped house eight people.

Her methods can be slow. With Ronnie Morrisette, who became homeless in 2004 at 18, she offered small favors: phone charging in her truck, trash bags and a DMV voucher for an ID. She also did wellness checks and talked with him about life's big questions. It took more than two years before he agreed, in July 2022, to an assessment through the city's coordinated entry system.

Barrows says better coordination would help. The city once assigned two Homeless Outreach Team workers to parks, but now a call for help can take up to 72 hours to be answered, by which time the person has often moved on. Department officials praise her work, and General Manager Phil Ginsburg said, "Rec and Parks — and all of San Francisco — is lucky to have her."