It was only five years ago, but it seems like several lifetimes. Ed Lee was mayor of San Francisco, and large tent encampments lined major streets and jostled for space under freeways and overpasses like the Hairball.
The city finally cracked down, calling them hazardous and sweeping them away, and so launched the era of the “Navigation Center” — a 24/7 specialized shelter and service center that was meant to give homeless people at least slightly more normal lives. But now, thanks to the coronavirus crisis, the city has come full circle.
Group shelters aren’t accepting new clients because proper social distancing in those spaces is difficult, if not impossible. But moving people to safer, more private spaces has been a slow-motion ordeal.
More than ever in San Francisco, there aren’t enough roofs over heads. And that means tents are back on sidewalks in numbers that some neighborhoods have not seen for years, if ever. City officials haven’t sanctioned them, exactly, but they don’t seem to be sweeping them off the street either.
On Waller Street in the Haight-Ashbury, about five tents have been spaced along the sidewalk for a couple weeks. One tent resident, Linden, who declined to give his last name, said the police have asked them to move farther apart and get rid of the furniture outside their tents, but have not chased them away or chivvied them along. (There have been reports, however, of city workers removing encampments since the coronavirus crisis began.)
So what’s the policy? Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing interim director Abigail Stewart-Kahn said at Wednesday’s press conference that the city has “paused all resolutions.”
When asked to clarify her comment, mayoral spokesman Andy Lynch said that the city was “shifting from encampment resolution to encouraging six feet of distance and food distribution.”
It’s unclear how long this limbo will last. There’s now talk of creating sanctioned “safe sleeping” sites for people in tents, but Stewart-Kahn Wednesday would only say that they’re being evaluated.
[Update: On April 25, Mayor London Breed wrote that the city “is working to open” sanctioned sites but gave no timeline.]
Progress, then pandemic
Only a few months ago it seemed the city’s push for more services was gaining momentum — halting, to be sure, but there were signs. An ugly fight over the Embarcadero Navigation Center, the city’s seventh, ended with a judge ruling against the opponents’ claim that the center would cause irreparable harm. It opened in December.
In District 5, newly elected Supervisor Dean Preston was adamant about bringing in a Navigation Center. A youth center won approval at the corner of Post and Hyde Streets, the first in District 3. At a community meeting in January, neighbors like Lake Taylor, who owns a leather craft shop, and Philip Jones, who experienced homelessness as a teen, filled the aisles to voice their support. “Resources like [the youth center] are a solution,” said Jones, an advisory board member with Tipping Point Community.
But group shelters and communal living situations are exactly what the easily transmissible coronavirus prefers. Hotel rooms — more than 30,000 in the city sit idle — provide a better chance to prevent the virus’s spread. With older people and those with underlying conditions — a high percentage of the homeless population — at highest risk, the city isn’t shifting gears fast enough for homelessness advocates.
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“Only after an outbreak in a shelter have we moved to putting people in hotels,” said Mary Kate Bacalao, director of external affairs and policy of Compass Family Services. “But a major part of the population is people on the streets and families living in cars throughout the city. We need to focus on getting everyone inside.”
Frustrated with the slow pace, some city supervisors have helped service providers like Hospitality House raise private donations to move their clients into hotel rooms.
From Feinstein to Breed
Not only has Mayor London Breed’s administration been cautious about leasing hotel rooms — citing “fiscal prudence” as one reason to move deliberately — its strategy has seemed scattershot. First the city said the rooms were prioritized for people who tested positive for COVID-19, were at risk, or were showing symptoms and awaiting test results; only after residents and staff at the city’s biggest shelter tested positive a couple weeks ago did officials say the rooms would be open to people regardless of COVID status. For a few days, they were preparing part of the Moscone Center, which won’t host conventions for many months to come, as a shelter expansion. But photos leaked of the set-up, and the city pulled the plug.
[Correction: The previous paragraph has been changed to clarify the city’s initial criteria for assigning people to hotel rooms.]
The whiplash of approaches under a cloud of crisis in the past month is not unlike San Francisco’s long history of trying to deal with homelessness, just much more compressed.
Under Dianne Feinstein in the 1980s there were converted Muni buses and overnight stays in cheap private hotels. Art Agnos followed with his “Beyond Shelter” policy — and was bedeviled by Camp Agnos in the Civic Center after the 1989 earthquake.
The 1990s brought Frank Jordan’s punitive Matrix system, then Willie Brown and Gavin Newsom began to channel millions of dollars into housing while cracking down on quality-of-life issues, including Newsom’s “Sit/Lie” initiative in 2010.
By the city’s official count, the homeless population has only gone up. (Until last year the city relied on a different method, which produced a higher total than shown below.)
When Ed Lee took office in 2011, he inherited a city crippled by recession and unemployment above 9%. His first focus was jobs, and his $1.9 billion payroll tax break helped attract more than 100,000 jobs and lowered unemployment to 3.6 percent by 2015.
Lee also promised more revenue to help the homeless. Meanwhile, his administration cleared tents from mid-Market Street to make way for tech companies, and the rise in housing costs pushed more people out of the city, or onto its streets.
Facing reelection in 2015 and heat over rising inequality, Lee pivoted to homelessness. The city’s first Navigation Center opened in March 2015 on Mission Street with 75 beds, and Lee touted it as a way to get entire encampments off the street within days.
Reality soon hit that the centers wouldn’t be enough. The city’s official “point in time” count revealed the population had hit a 10-year high. In August, San Francisco was chosen to host a party for the upcoming Super Bowl 50. Lee wanted it along the picturesque Embarcadero, where many homeless people were living in tents. “They are going to have to leave,” Lee said at the time.
Lee promised more Navigation Centers and housing, but advocates framed the Super Bowl as the city sweeping people away in favor of a glitzy party.
In April 2016, the Board of Supervisors declared a state of emergency. “This is about the recognition that City Hall has been failing San Franciscans on the issue of homelessness, and that we finally need to increase it to the level of priority that it needs to be,” said then District 9 Supervisor David Campos.
The emergency declaration didn’t come with funding from the feds or the state and couldn’t change the situation on its own. But Campos and three other supervisors also drafted an ordinance that, among several things, required the city to open and operate no fewer than six Navigation Centers within two years. Lee signed it two days before opening the city’s second Navigation Center. He also created a new Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, with the director charged with streamlining the city’s tangled skein of services.
Doubling Down
Until the coronavirus swept across the globe, the city under London Breed staked its homelessness plan on more Navigation Centers, more shelter beds, more coordination by HSH — and more tent sweeps, in which people’s tents and other belongings are confiscated.
In fact, the Breed administration has used the number of dismantled encampments as a measure of success. They’d talk about sweeps on one hand and Navigation Centers on the other, leaving the impression that entire encampments were being moved indoors.
The pandemic and the city’s homelessness strategy have done what proposed legislation hasn’t been able to do: spread the homeless population around.
Fresh off her special-election victory to finish Lee’s term, London Breed emphatically doubled down, planting a metaphorical flag in a city-owned parking lot along the Embarcadero, just south of the Bay Bridge. The proposed 200-bed Navigation Center for the site would be the city’s largest, and a key part of her pledge to open 1,000 new shelter beds by the end of 2020.
Breed needed the Embarcadero site to succeed because she had just opposed Proposition C, a half-cent tax on the city’s richest businesses that would raise an estimated $300 million annually for supportive housing and homelessness prevention. Without her support, the measure still passed but did not hit the two-thirds approval threshold, which left it open to lawsuits. It’s now tied up in court.
Last May, it seemed Breed’s Embarcadero push might run aground on the rocks of NIMBY blowback. At a public meeting, the Navigation Center’s would-be neighbors shouted Breed down with visions of crime, drug use, and filth that would surely follow. She never finished speaking.
Despite a lawsuit paid for with crowdfunding, the center opened last December. It became the seventh navigation center in operation, and the third one in Supervisor Matt Haney’s District 6.
Haney, like Campos before him, believes more neighborhoods need to shoulder the burden for housing and services. But his legislation to open at least one Navigation Center in all 11 districts stalled earlier this year.
The pandemic and the city’s response have done, in effect, what Haney hasn’t been able to do: spread the homeless population around.
Tent surge
Fueled in part by tent giveaways, encampments are spreading to neighborhoods, like the outer Richmond, that had mainly avoided them in the past. Federal health guidelines to prevent the spread of COVID-19 discourage sweeping tents away, so they’re here for now.
Supervisor Dean Preston is not surprised at the surge in his district, which includes the Haight-Ashbury. Shelters are not accepting new residents, and with COVID-19 outbreaks among those already in the shelters, no one wants to go there, anyway. “Tents are a last resort,” Preston said.
Services could follow: Preston and fellow supervisor Rafael Mandelman are working on legislation to provide pop-up bathrooms, sinks, and hygiene products for people on the street.
Can they go a step further and find organized spaces for the tents? While other cities have set up formal camp sites, San Francisco isn’t ready to commit, HSH’s Stewart-Kahn said Wednesday. “The Healthy Streets operation center is evaluating the possibility of safe sleeping and whether the global pandemic of coronavirus warrants the movement in that direction by the city.”
Preston held an online meeting for constituents last week, and he says the majority were supportive of “sanctioned sites,” including parking lots at Kezar Stadium and the Department of Motor Vehicles. (Each has obstacles: Kezar, which offers proximity to Kezar Pavilion showers, is Park and Recreation property, and the city charter prohibits camping in city parks. The DMV is state property, presenting another type of red tape.)
A third site is the former McDonalds on Haight and Stanyan Streets, now an empty lot and slated for affordable housing. It has drawn opposition from the Cole Valley Improvement Association. “We don’t believe selecting this location warrants potentially delaying the production of the 100% affordable housing development,” the CVIA wrote on its blog on April 10.
The group instead recommends the basketball courts in the nearby Panhandle, which, as noted in the blog post, would put those living in tents a few blocks farther from the Haight’s “essential neighborhood services with heavy foot traffic, such as a grocery store” and would reduce “potential negative ‘quality of life’ side effects.”
The CVIA cites support from other neighborhood groups, but it seems like a coalition on paper only. One of the groups last published a newsletter two years ago, and another hasn’t posted anything on the web since 2012. (Neither group, nor the CVIA, returned our emails.)
In his conversation with The Frisc, Preston didn’t call anyone out by name, but he did say the same folks who have previously opposed a Navigation Center or other homeless services at the old McDonalds site were now at it again.
In other words, neighbors who say they want to help are finding reasons not to — or at least looking to delay it, at a moment when every day counts.
Kristi Coale (@unazurda) is a San Francisco-based freelance writer and radio producer for various outlets, including KALW’s Crosscurrents and the National Radio Project’s Making Contact.