Before the global pandemic, before San Francisco closed its shelters and began moving unhoused people into hotels and recreational vehicles and tent sites to blunt the spread of COVID-19, the city’s top priority was to get the chronically homeless — the most desperate cases — into permanent housing.
Now, even though COVID won’t likely fade soon, officials are preparing a return to their pre-pandemic strategy, especially by winding down the hotel program that has left people on all sides frustrated.
Joe Wilson, executive director of Tenderloin shelter and service center Hospitality House, says that working to “flatten the curve” has, at best, only brought the city back to its pre-pandemic situation, which was already dire. “It’s hard to feel good about that,” says Wilson.
When San Francisco officials ordered residents to shelter in place on March 16, the cry immediately went up: What about the homeless population? Inevitably, positive COVID cases in SF’s crowded homeless shelters forced officials to shut down the 3,500-bed system, from small ones like Hospitality House (30 beds) to the city’s largest, MSC South (340 beds).
A campaign to lease empty hotel rooms emerged, but city officials cited staffing complications and “fiscal prudence” as reasons for a relatively slow pace.
When city supervisors passed emergency legislation on April 14 to force Mayor London Breed to lease more than 8,000 rooms, she refused to comply.
Other attempts at shelter alternatives have been a mixed bag. The city leased a site for 120 RVs in the Bayview. Trying to find indoor space, the Palace of Fine Arts was nixed by angry Marina district neighbors, and the Moscone Center was torpedoed by photos of the center floor, taped into segments to encourage social distancing.
With nowhere to go, people began pitching tents on sidewalks in numbers reminiscent of previous eras in city history.
Conditions deteriorated in many neighborhoods. UC Hastings Law School and others in the Tenderloin filed a lawsuit to force the city to address the increasingly desperate situation. To settle the suit, the city swept tents off streets, opened sanctioned tent sites, and moved people into hotels.
Now, after five months of fits and starts, lawsuits, political clashes, and pleas for nonprofits to help run hotels, the city has made it official: Hotels aren’t part of the long-term solution.
In fact, as part of a new plan, the city is winding down the hotel program, a spokesman for the Department of Emergency Management (DEM) said. It will no longer lease rooms beyond current stock and plans to end the program in June 2021.
Even as an August 6 report from the city’s budget and legislative analyst slammed the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH) for problems with staffing, fiscal management, and data systems, the Breed administration is doubling down on its pre-pandemic strategy.
“Rock solid” evidence
Instead of focusing on temporary spaces, officials say they’ll move aggressively to get chronically homeless people off the street and into permanent supportive housing with in-house services for mental health, substance abuse, and more.
“The evidence is rock solid that this is the most effective way to help the most chronic cases,” says Margot Kushel, director of the University of California San Francisco’s Center for Vulnerable Populations.
The idea is to provide people housing first, then help with drug addiction and mental illness, Kushel says. “If they’re worried where they’re going to put their head down each night, they’re not going to be open to treatment.”
Randy Shaw, who runs the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, one of the city’s top managers of permanent supportive housing, welcomes the news: “We are going back to what we did because it’s more effective and economically superior to getting hotels.”
It’s far from a done deal. Between now and October 1, there will be intense negotiations with the Board of Supervisors on a final version of the next budget. A draft emerged from the board’s budget committee late last night and is a work in progress. The full board will take up discussions starting September 15, according to the committee clerk.
The board, with a progressive majority often at odds with the mayor, could keep pressing for more hotel rooms. Just this weekend, District 5 Supervisor Dean Preston (up for reelection this November) said as much in a tweet, in response to a question about a potential tent site (also known as a “safe sleeping village” or SSV) near City Hall: “[The] Mayor needs to scale up hotels & SSVs to meet the need.”https://twitter.com/DeanPreston/status/1297751352714465280
Preston and other supervisors did not respond by press time to requests for comment about the mayor’s plan.
Leasing rooms, pitching tents
San Francisco’s homeless population is about 8,000, 5,000 of whom are not sheltered, according to the most recent “point in time” count — a 24-hour survey in early 2019. The figure is almost certainly higher now, and the economic disaster of the pandemic is likely to add to it as well.
As of August 27, the city has leased 2,385 hotel rooms for the homeless, with 1,853 people in them (a 78% occupancy rate). An additional 228 are reserved for workers who need to quarantine. Through June 30, the cost was $22.9 million, about 75% of which will be reimbursed by FEMA. A DEM spokesman said via email that the city has requested federal and state funds to pay for the rest.
The mayor also wants sanctioned tent sites with 24/7 security, hygiene, food, and health services to remain part of the longer-term plan to move people off the streets, although some sites will be temporary. (Five current sites — three in the Tenderloin, one in the Haight-Ashbury, and one in the Bayview — have space for 210 tents.)
Can they take up slack as the hotel program winds down? Just before the Haight-Ashbury site opened in early June, The Frisc counted at least 35 tents around the neighborhood. Officials said they would “resolve” the encampments. Some spots were cleared out, but there were roughly the same number of tents in the neighborhood for months. Just this week, however, city workers removed about two dozen tents from the sidewalks around the Department of Motor Vehicles.
The Tenderloin has seen a big change because of the Hastings settlement, which required the city to reduce tents by 70 percent by July 20 and move people into hotel rooms. The city said just before the deadline that it had surpassed the goal, but it has not updated the count since July 16.)
“A lot of housing”
Before COVID, the city focused on getting the chronically homeless off the streets — people who have a disabling condition and have been continuously homeless for a year or more, or who have experienced four or more episodes of homelessness within the past three years. The 2019 point-in-time count identified about 3,000 chronically homeless people in San Francisco.
The new plan is an affirmation of that strategy, but with more resources and effort.
“We need housing. A lot of housing,” said Breed when unveiling her budget.
The new goal: get 4,500 adults into permanent supportive housing over the next two years. (The city currently has 10,000 people living in about 8,000 units of permanent supportive housing, according to the mayor’s office.)
Getting the right housing and services means people will be more likely to leave the streets for good, says Chris Block, chronic homelessness initiative director for Tipping Point Community, a local nonprofit that has emerged as a key player in the push for more permanent housing.
Tipping Point aims to help finance 1,500 homes, the first 200 with local nonprofit housing provider Brilliant Corners as its partner. “If we can pull this off, it will make a significant difference in reducing the number of street homeless,” says Block.
Some units will need to be built, some will be bought or leased through a “master lease,” for which a provider like Brilliant Corners signs a long-term lease with the property owner, then rents units to tenants and handles property management issues.
The 1,500 units would triple the current city pipeline of 755 permanent supportive housing units in the works, some of which are also partially financed by Tipping Point.
With less fanfare, the Breed administration also wants to turn back to group shelters, as it has quietly done at the Moscone Center. Officials say they can safely reopen the shelter network up to 1,000 beds. (The latest data shows that 405 people are in congregate shelters out of 476 available spaces.)
Hospitality House’s Wilson finds this move troubling. “We need to continue to think through the logic of returning to congregate settings because they’re unhealthy for everyone and should only be used as housing of last resort,” he says.
Votes for cash required
The pandemic has blown a $1.5 billion hole in the two-year city budget. So much of what’s driving this switch is, of course, money. Hotels are costly to run, as The Frisc has reported. FEMA is paying the bulk of the bill for now. But the city can’t rely on FEMA forever.
Permanent supportive housing is expensive too, but a window of funding opportunity is open right now. How wide depends on voters in November. Before the pandemic, there was fiscal and political backing, to some extent. Voters approved hundreds of millions of dollars in late 2018, via the Proposition C business tax, but they’re now locked up in litigation because the measure didn’t quite reach the two-thirds approval threshold.
Those funds and more can be unlocked with ballot approvals in November: business-tax reform (Proposition F) that would, among other things, restore the old Prop C funds tied up in court; and a huge bond (Proposition A) that would funnel more than $200 million into housing and services, including $17 million for four crisis teams who respond to mental health 911 calls instead of the police. (The idea is part of the MentalHealthSF compromise bill that the mayor and supervisors passed late last year.)
In short, the new plan is the old plan on steroids: pre-COVID policy and ideas layered with a big dollop of hope that voters in the midst of the pandemic-driven financial and civic disaster won’t just be OK with it, but will double down on it.
Accountability, again
Problem is, voters keep getting mixed signals about the city’s ability to spend funds wisely. One main argument against 2018’s Proposition C — leveled by Breed herself, as well as SF’s state senators David Chiu and Scott Weiner and some business leaders — was that San Francisco was already spending millions of dollars on homelessness, and the big new tax hadn’t been vetted enough.
They argued for accountability, and they lost. (Prop C carried the day but with the high-powered opposition failed to reach two-thirds approval that would have staved off a lawsuit.)
The problem hasn’t gone away. Supervisor Matt Haney has tried unsuccessfully to add independent oversight to HSH. (Breed opposed Haney’s effort last year.)
Two weeks ago, the legislative analyst’s audit of HSH detailed chronic understaffing, unused funds, insufficient oversight of contractors, and an inefficient data system, known as coordinated entry.
“It is unclear how the Department identifies program or provider deficiencies, and whether a corrective action process exists for under-performing contractors.”
—From the legislative analyst’s audit of the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing
The Frisc reported last fall that the coordinated entry system, introduced by Breed’s predecessor Ed Lee, had gotten off to a rocky start.
In a written response to the audit, HSH interim chief Abigail Stewart-Kahn said several department directors, including herself, have only been on the job for a few months and need more time. “HSH seeks to finish the important work of creating the infrastructure and hiring the staff needed to support its ambitious goals,” she wrote. “The report confirms the importance of these efforts and provides helpful suggestions for the continuation of this work.”
Perhaps COVID has already started to make the city more accountable. Data collection is now a city-wide priority, with more focus on homelessness too. The Tenderloin lawsuit settlement also forced the city to track tents on sidewalks and the placement of people into hotels and tent sites.
Can it happen for housing? In addition to its finance work, Tipping Point is working with the Urban Institute on a data system (separate from the city’s coordinated entry system) to track and predict population changes among the chronically homeless. The goal, says Block, is to issue quarterly updates on available housing units and the number of people who are chronically homeless. It would provide transparency for the public and data for policy makers who might want to adjust more quickly when things aren’t working.
With the outreach teams on the street, more money for supportive housing, and better data to tie it all together, Block says the city will have a better chance to find and help the chronically homeless than in years past.
“It’s fine to say we housed 90 people and it’s a cause for celebration,” Block says. “But that needs to be seen in the context of the commitments we’ve made and the numbers we need to achieve to do what everyone wants, which is to make a significant difference for homeless people and the streets of San Francisco.”
Making a difference has been an elusive goal, to put it mildly, even in flush times. Now, voters will have to assess their own comfort level to approve resources to a crisis that has so far thwarted all solutions.
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.