Kaine moved into Golden Gate Park sometime in the late 1990s. He’s vague on the date or details that led to him living outside. But he remembers exactly what he brought with him: “a big-ass backpack,” two sleeping bags, and a 12-person Coleman tent that was so hard to set up he got thoroughly drenched his first night. 

Kaine, whose real name is Kevin Horton, settled into the woods surrounding Hellman Hollow. For more than 20 years, no one could figure out how to help him get a real roof over his head. Kaine became a fixture of the park, known by locals for carrying a staff he’d carved from fallen trees, accompanied by his yellow Lab, Honey. He knew all the park’s hidden trails, the best places to pick blackberries “as big as my pinkie finger,” and the hive in an old cypress where he could collect honey to mix with his vodka. People would tell him, “Damn, Kaine, you know more about that park than the park rangers do,” he recalls. 

It was a semi-wild way of life. While most of his food came from Safeway, he occasionally caught fish in Metson Lake to grill, or made stew from raccoons or squirrels caught by Honey. He used the park’s restrooms when they were open and kept a bucket by his tent for when they weren’t.

He was sometimes friendly and chatty, sometimes ranty. And he was always deeply protective of the meadow, alerting the gardeners to trees that needed trimming or warning parents to keep their kids away from the poisonous hemlock on the hillsides. Late one night, he discovered a naked woman sitting on the curb. He gave her a sweatshirt, let her sleep in his tent while he slept outside, and, in the morning, went to the police at the horse stables so they could call her parents. In turn, many who played in the meadow looked after him, sharing food from picnics and barbecues. 

For years, park staff tried unsuccessfully to dislodge Kaine. Recreation and Parks Department rangers would cite him and tell him to move. The department’s environmental services crew, who clear abandoned campsites, would tear down his tent when he was out and haul away his possessions. Members of the Homeless Outreach Team, or HOT, the city program that controls access to shelter beds, would occasionally stop by and ask Kaine if he wanted a placement. His answer was always an emphatic no. Hellman Hollow was his home. 

In March 2021, a woman named Amanda Barrows became a park ranger, joining a special detail focused on unhoused people. Inevitably, that meant dealing with Kaine, who by then was nearing 60. Barrows slowly learned that he’d had a rough childhood and had grown up in a foster family. The park was his childhood refuge, a place where he’d spend afternoons wandering around and riding the carousel. She understood then why he had such a deep attachment to the place. 

For Barrows, trying to forcibly remove Kaine from Golden Gate Park seemed both ineffective and cruel. “I was like, clearly this is not working. He rebuilds, he comes back. What we’re doing is harming this person who’s obviously just stuck. So let’s try something else.” And so she did.

I spent two years following Barrows and some of those she calls her “clients”  to better understand what it takes to unstick someone who’s been stuck on the streets — or in a park – for a long time. A welter of problems can make someone chronically homeless: addiction, mental illness, disabilities, trauma, poverty, not to mention failures of the system. None are easily or quickly solved, even after the person is housed. To do more than just clear a person off the sidewalk demands persistence, patience, coordination of services, and intense personal engagement. Which raises the difficult question: If this is what it takes to help one person, can the city find the resolve to help the thousands living rough? 

Instead of applying force to get Kaine out of the park, Barrows offered a helping hand. She embarked on a slow campaign of earning his trust and shepherding him through what one Recreation and Parks Department official described as the “arduous and achingly bureaucratic tasks” necessary just to be eligible for housing.

Kaine had no ID. All of his required public documents, from a birth certificate to criminal records, were under a different name, and they all had to be aligned to move his housing applications forward. Getting everything in order meant trips to various agencies — and the only way to ensure Kaine went was if someone accompanied him: either a member of HOT or Barrows and another ranger who was her partner at the time. Even then, Kaine repeatedly balked. For him, “it was overwhelming,” Barrows recalled. 

All the while, she tried to help him see that leaving the park didn’t mean losing his connection to it. “This can still be your home, but just in a different way,” she’d tell him. He could gain the comforts of living indoors and still enjoy the park. “It can be like a choice, something you come and go from, versus something you’re stuck in.”

After seven months of cajoling, hand-holding, and advocacy by Barrows, Kaine in October 2021 was granted a room at the Civic Center Hotel Navigation Center, where he could stay until he was assigned permanent housing. Barrows and her partner helped him pack and hauled his two suitcases — heavy with gear, broken electronics, and sticks and rocks he’d collected in the park — up to his fifth-floor room. They helped him settle in by donating furniture and clothes, including the boots and pants worn by rangers. “We knew that’s what it was going to take to make it happen,” Barrows said. 

But when they went back the next day to check on him, Kaine was gone. Barrows had a hunch about where to find him. She drove to Hellman Hollow, to the last spot where he’d had a tent. He was lying under the bushes, barely conscious and near-frozen from the previous night’s pelting rain. He had left the shelter, he later explained, because “some idiot began smart-mouthing me, and I felt like I was going to punch his head off. I didn’t. I went back home.” 

Barrows called an ambulance. Kaine fought the EMTs when they tried to sedate him for the trip to the hospital, but when she visited him at the navigation center a few days later, he was back to his genial self. He told her with a chuckle, “I’m not doing that again.” 

And he hasn’t. 

The number of unhoused people living in city parks is a tiny fraction of the city’s 8,000-person homeless population, numbering in the few dozens at most. According to the city’s quarterly counts of homeless people’s tents and vehicles, which fluctuate considerably, there were nine tents and 32 vehicles in Golden Gate Park in February 2021 and just one tent and five vehicles in January of this year. But while the numbers are small, the rangers field complaints related to homelessness on a daily basis.

Historically, the rangers dealt with unhoused people by making them move along and issuing citations. Most times, the person would simply pack up their things and move to another spot in the park. It was “a really bad game of hide-and-seek,” said Barrows.

In 2015, Rec and Parks decided to tackle the issue another way and created the special ranger detail devoted to homeless outreach. “This approach aims to balance enforcement with compassionate outreach,” said department spokesperson Tamara Aparton. The outreach rangers work with city and private agencies to connect people living in San Francisco’s 220 parks with services they need: a shelter bed or permanent housing, medical or mental health care, a detox program, a bus ticket home, a new ID. The hope is that every bit of assistance will move someone closer to stable housing. 

The approach is similar to a pilot program the city deployed in the Castro in 2022. Caseworkers and Public Health employees worked intensively with 34 chronically unhoused people. After five months, all had accepted services they’d long resisted. 

Barrows, 32, is the more senior of the two outreach rangers on the detail and knows first-hand the precarities that can land someone on the streets. She grew up in public housing in a Boston suburb and moved to San Francisco at 19 “with $200 and two bags.” For five years, she lived in “a dodgy SRO,” and for another five years, she was “transient without a permanent address.” Her father died of a fentanyl overdose in 2021, the same year she became a park ranger. “I can relate t