As President Trump delivered his first address before Congress Tuesday night, Jesse Jackson donned his reading glasses and pulled out his notepad, flanked by families housed for the time being at a San Francisco nonprofit.

The 75-year-old reverend and leader of the civil rights movement by and large kept a straight face as President Trump softened his tone and promised to follow through on a number of proposals: removing two federal regulations for every one added, overhauling the Affordable Care Act and cracking down on undocumented immigrants.

To Jackson, watching inside the Hamilton Families shelter on Golden Gate Avenue in the Tenderloin — which provides families with medium-term housing and other resources — Trump’s remarks were mostly more of the same.

Speaking over the cries of a handful of children, crunching a foot over the crumbs of dropped snacks and abandoned juice boxes, Jackson repeatedly denounced the president’s proposal to increase military spending by $54 billion and cut funding from other federal programs to pay for it.

“Well, it was full of loaded one-liners but I still didn’t (hear) a plan to finance affordable health care, a plan to reduce the cost of public education, a plan to build affordable housing and a plan to lift up the poor,” said Jackson, a Baptist minister and two-time candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in the 1980s, who was a driving force of the civil rights movement and worked closely with Martin Luther King Jr.

During the speech, as more than a dozen people clustered inside a children’s play room at the center, a resident and mother of three, Yolunda Reed, 36, said she was more struck by what Trump didn’t say than what he did.

He mentioned the middle class, and there was “all this talk” of corporations — people and businesses who were already doing “just fine,” or better than her, she said.

“I’m waiting to see what he says about homeless,” Reed said. Those remarks never came.

Reed, who has been homeless for about a year, was living in her car with her children before she entered the center just before Thanksgiving. She said she had planned to vote for Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico and Libertarian nominee for president.

But her two daughters, 8 and 10, “got wind of Hillary Clinton,” and convinced her to change her mind, and her vote to the Democratic nominee, Reed said.

Though she didn’t trust Clinton much, she trusted Trump less, she said. As the president promised to “keep our promises to the American people,” Reed leaned back in her metal folding chair, and she scoffed.

“I don’t even know what he promised,” Reed said. “All I know is he wants to put up a wall.”

Others searched for a bright side. Ashley Moten, 29, said Trump’s promise to bring “law and order” to the border could help cut down on drugs, crime and gangs.

Her “heart goes out to some of the people” who would be affected by a border wall, though, she said. But she took some solace in Trump’s calls to increase infrastructure spending and add more jobs in the process.

“I think that’s very good, especially for people in poverty,” Moten said.

Jeff Kositsky, the former executive director of Hamilton Families and the current director of San Francisco’s Department of Homelessness, said at the center that Trump “talked a lot about tax cuts,” but not enough about fixing the “broken” housing market.

“I’d like to see a future where we don’t need homeless shelters, but until we have a new American housing policy we’re going to continue to need to work with individuals and families who aren’t able to afford housing.” Kositsky said.

Michael Bodley is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mbodley@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @michael_bodley