By Julia Zrihen on June 15, 2026
Note: This article was originally published by Beyond Chron.
“A Place for People to Start”
Spencer Hughes, 62-year-old resident of the Graystone Hotel, came to San Francisco in 2021 without a dime in his pocket. He figured he wouldn’t need one, as he had something more valuable to him than money: he could work. Spencer was a welder, and he was good at his job:
“I’m a custom fabricator, which means: I can build it. I’m the guy, you go in the shop, they take the blueprints from the architect and the engineer, they hand it to me… I can go from there and build it, whatever it is, whether it’s a skyscraper or a mud tank, or a car, a custom car. I can build it.”
But if welding granted Spencer his self-sufficiency, it just as soon took it away. One day on the job, he was working on stainless steel and didn’t notice when someone moved the fan, which was blowing the poisonous fumes away, from behind him. By the time he poked up his head and noticed his fan was missing, “it was too late, man. I started getting sick.” He dragged himself home, drank milk, and slept until the next day when he staggered, nauseous and barely able to stand, back to work.
That was back in 2019 in Utah, and the sickness subsided with the help of some inhalers and Z-Paks. But over the next months and years, it came back more frequently and more violently. It was just around the time that Spencer landed himself in San Francisco, dime-less, undaunted, and primed for adventure (he had left his 4500 square foot house with his ex-wife, preferring to invest in his freedom, body, and skill than his assets), that his sickness rendered him unable to work.
At first, being poor in San Francisco wasn’t so bad, even without work. “That’s just another adventure to me, that’s all.” Spencer went and got a tent, sleeping bag, and EBT card. “I was having fun, man. I was camping around. It wasn’t like I was on the streets. I was out there in Golden Gate Park.”
This was a man who relished the harsh cold winters in the oil fields of Wyoming, where his welding career began. “It’s pretty wild but I loved it man. Loved it. The rain and the sleet.” They sent him out there as a roustabout, repairing pipes in trenches where the wind would blow 50 miles an hour all day, testing his welding chops and his ability to improvise:
“We’re going out in the middle of nowhere, nobody’s coming to help us, nobody. We run out of supplies, we don’t bring the right stuff… figure it out, man. You gotta find a way to make it work. And we did. That was cool, man. I love that. It’s hard, it’s difficult, it’s like figuring out a puzzle.”
Before he was a welder – indeed, for the first 50 years of his life – Spencer was a rancher with his mom and dad at their family home in Indiana, until they both passed away. “Being around animals my whole life made me a calm person. And determined. You see the animals don’t have no choice… they have to get up and go. They don’t have a choice. Well, neither do I!”
If ranching in Indiana was his first life, and welding in Utah and Wyoming was his second, journeying through California was to be his third.
But all at the same time, things started getting worse. Spencer’s health deteriorated and he could barely breathe, let alone walk, let alone work. A park ranger told him he’d have to stop camping and go to the city. He started smoking meth and his easy-going rancher personality turned “aggravated.” He got arrested, and when he got out of jail, found that his ID, passport, and birth certificate had been thrown out.
“A guy on the streets, smoking meth, disabled, has no ID. That’s me. No ID, no passport. Where do you start? You have to have a starting point, a focal point.”
In the next months he went to jail several times. Finally, he went to Harbor Light Center’s treatment program and from there got in touch with the Tenderloin Housing Clinic (publisher of Beyond Chron) and was placed in the Graystone Hotel.
“That’s what the THC is, a good focal point. A place for people to start.”
The last couple of years have done a number on Spencer’s respiratory system. There were times where he couldn’t walk, couldn’t drink water, couldn’t breathe, (“my lungs were pullin’ on me”). But when he got out of the hospital and was offered a walker, he said “I’m not doin’ that man. I’m gonna get up and walk.”
“It goes either way, Julia. Only two ways it goes. You either get up and you start doin’ it or you slowly degenerate a little more every single day.”
Today Spencer lives in a building with an elevator, exercises on a stationary bike every day, has a new ID and passport, goes to the dog parks (“I know this dog named Eli, man, I bring him snacks and treats”), and has medical help.
And there was one point he wanted to make sure I got down:
“THC made all that possible. Now I have a residence, an address, which means I can have an ID again… You have to have an address before you can get income like that from social security. Other than that, I’d have $500 a month, be on the streets at 60 years old… that’s not cool. None of that would have been possible without a stable place of living first. That’s what THC did for me. I mean, I’d never been in that position. You don’t want to be.”
And this has not been Spencer’s last adventure:
“Oh, I’m gonna have some more. My life is not over. I’m gonna get my quality of life back, and with that everything else will come with it. I know I’m gonna find adventure out there, I know it’s gonna be exciting. I know I’m gonna find pots of gold, I just know it.”
Julia Zrihen writes regularly about SRO tenants