With social distancing crucial to blunt the deadly spread of the coronavirus, San Francisco wants to put thousands of its most vulnerable residents, currently in group shelters and living on the streets, into hotel rooms.
The clock is ticking. Hospitals across the country are under siege. New York City has become the U.S. epicenter, with 385 deaths as of Thursday morning. San Francisco’s latest update: 223 confirmed COVID-19 cases and two deaths.
Hotel owners, city officials, and homeless advocates all want to open up rooms. There are more than 30,000 left empty by the pandemic, and they won’t be filling with tourists and business travelers anytime soon. After a request circulated among hotel owners last week, the city said Monday there were more than 8,000 rooms on offer, but it’s not clear how many have been leased.
Even if thousands of rooms become available the next few weeks, there will be an overflow of candidates to fill them. Some kind of selection system is necessary to avoid confusion and move fast. But there isn’t one right now. It’s not even clear who would create the system.
An aide to Supervisor Matt Haney, one of five supervisors who wrote a resolution this week to push for faster, broader action, told The Frisc that the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH), the city’s Human Services Agency (HSA), in charge of hotel rentals, and homeless service providers should be working together on with a system.
‘I shouldn’t get to decide who jumps to the front of the line. It has to be a mutual process, and the ultimate decider should be the public health officer.’
— Joe Wilson, executive director of Hospitality House
But providers contacted by The Frisc haven’t heard from the city. Two of them are the co-chairs of the Homeless Emergency Service Providers Association, a coalition of 30 local service providers; they would be among the first to know.
“I haven’t heard from HSH,” said Joe Wilson, executive director of Hospitality House, a Tenderloin shelter with about 25 residents.
“We know HSH is working on it,” said Mary Kate Bacalao, director of external affairs and policy at Compass Family Services, but she has only heard through unofficial channels. She doesn’t know if service providers will be invited to participate, or when. “We know our clients and communities. If someone were to open thousands of rooms and say, ‘Let’s put people in there,’ we could do that now.”
Wilson agreed that he and his peers should have a say in the process, but not the only say: “I shouldn’t get to decide who jumps to the front of the line. It has to be a mutual process, and the ultimate decider should be the public health officer.”
HSH officials did not return requests for an interview.
When the mayor’s office directed everyone to shelter in place on March 16, there was little guidance for people who had nowhere to go. It also did not prioritize getting people out of group settings, like dormitory-style shelters, where the risk of virus spreading is high. This week, at least, the city agreed that shelters should no longer accept more people. (“Populations are stable,” said Bacalao. “That’s a good thing.”)
Now the task at hand is to get people out of the shelters, off the streets, and into hotels.
‘Populations to prioritize’
However it works, there will likely be a bottleneck. Thousands of rooms aren’t likely to become available all at once. And, depending on the counting method, San Francisco could have as many as 10,000 homeless people in shelters; in housing like SROs that are high risk because of communal kitchens and other spaces; and living on the streets.
Thousands of them already meet the two “high risk” criteria that officials have marked: People over 60 and with underlying medical conditions.
“It’ll be a mad dash to fill the rooms as quickly as possible, and there will be a lot of folks in need,” said Jen Snyder, an aide to District 5 Supervisor Dean Preston, one of the five who penned the resolution this week. Like others who spoke to The Frisc for this article, she expressed impatience but empathy for those trying to craft the guidelines. “It’s going to be a complicated thing to do.”
(In a press release late Thursday, her boss was markedly less empathetic, accusing the Breed administration of delays, excuses, and a lack of urgency in getting people into hotel rooms.)http://www.thefrisc.com/coronavirus
The five supervisors — Haney, Aaron Peskin, Preston, Hillary Ronen, and Shamann Walton — are also calling for hotel rooms not just for the highest-risk (over 60, with underlying medical conditions) but for all unsheltered people as long as they can care for themselves. They acknowledged, however, that reality would likely dictate a tiered system. “We understand that there are populations to prioritize,” said Walton on Monday.
There are more complications. Rooms must be set aside for health workers and first responders who need to quarantine or stay overnight in town. And with five staffers testing positive for coronavirus at Laguna Honda Hospital, the 750 patients, now under lockdown, might need to find new accommodations to avoid a disaster.
Not an ideal world
The city has a data system that, in an ideal world, might be useful for deciding quickly who should get first priority for hotel rooms. It’s called coordinated entry, and it records the health status and needs of unsheltered people when they first show up for shelter, healthcare, or another service. The idea is to move them quickly to the right services and track their progress.
But San Francisco, even without a killer pandemic bearing down, is not an ideal world.
Former HSH chief Jeff Kositsky told an oversight committee last fall that the city was ten years behind other cities putting coordinated entry in place. As The Frisc reported last November, it’s running fairly well for families and youth, but for single adults, the large majority of the population, it’s not up to speed. “It wasn’t developed to snap to attention in a crisis,” said Compass’s Bacalao. “In an emergency situation it’s more about collaboration and looking together” at the high-risk “congregate” spaces.
While providers wait to hear the plan, Sup. Preston is trying what he describes as a “pilot project.” He helped secure 20 hotel rooms for families and women who were in shelters run by the Providence Foundation. Preston himself pitched in $10,000 to rent rooms at $80 a night at the Oasis Hotel. His staff has launched a GoFundMe campaign to raise more; it topped $48,000 Thursday afternoon. Snyder said the goal is to raise enough cash to rent up to 50 rooms, each for two weeks, then hope the city can start footing the bill.
Preston and private crowdfunders paying for a few dozen rooms is a fine thing. But to scale up to thousands of rooms rented for a long period — the city’s proposal to hotel owners says a contract would run at least four months — massive public spending will be needed.
State and federal money is coming, including at least $11 million for homeless assistance grants, as The Chronicle reported Thursday. But the virus is spreading faster. Every hour without a clear process gives the coronavirus more time to spread. “At a certain point we have enough information to move,” said Hospitality House’s Wilson. “So let’s move.”
Alex Lash is editor in chief of The Frisc.
