San Francisco can’t get enough people off its streets if the city department in charge doesn’t have enough people on its payroll. That’s one major complaint from advocates for the homeless, who are increasingly fed up with the slow pace of housing people despite a record $1.2 billion budget and new leadership.
Del Seymour, chair of a committee that provides the only regular oversight of the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH), says the agency is not firing on all cylinders at a time when it really needs to be. “You can’t have any agency operating at 75 percent capacity,” Seymour told The Frisc earlier this month. ”It just puts a tremendous strain on existing staff, and you’re always behind.”
Earlier this month, HSH officials acknowledged 26 percent of 177 positions were unfilled. That’s the same high percentage noted in a critical August 2020 audit conducted by the city’s Budget and Legislative Analyst, working on behalf of the Board of Supervisors. “With ongoing staffing shortages, the department cannot perform to its maximum capacity,” the report noted.
But the solution isn’t as simple as bulking up staff, because HSH relies heavily on nonprofit contractors to do much of its work. Just 5.3 percent of its current budget goes toward in-house salaries and benefits, compared with the citywide level of 45 percent, according to the Office of the Controller.
This dependence on outside help blurs the line of accountability on core responsibilities, and has led to recent finger-pointing at a crucial moment for the agency — and for San Francisco as it climbs out of the depths of the pandemic and back to its “housing first” strategy to fight homelessness.
Grilled recently by Seymour and other committee members about the housing delays, HSH officials said, in effect, that they weren’t at fault. Nonprofit service providers, not agency employees, perform the duties to sort out who gets housing and how quickly.
At the same time, HSH deputy director Noelle Simmons said that her department was “making good progress on filling positions.” But there are reasons to keep a close eye on that count, and not just that workers across the country are more willing than ever to quit their jobs.
Retaining staff has been a problem for the department in the past. And the sprawling network of contractors, who do much of the crucial work with San Francisco’s homeless, are being hit by staff shortages too.
Turnover at the top
Well before HSH was created in 2016, the city’s top priority, buoyed by a growing consensus that housing is healthcare, was to move unhoused people into permanent housing despite high costs, resistant neighbors, and other hurdles.
The pandemic put that on hold, forcing closure of group shelters and the emergency lease of suddenly empty hotels, rechristened “shelter-in-place” (SIP) hotels, for more than 2,500 people — most paid for by the federal government.
The pandemic also created staffing chaos, starting at the top. Three different people held the executive director’s job between March 2020 and April 2021. Meanwhile, nearly half of HSH staff moved to the Department of Emergency Management, where they filled many duties, including work at the SIP hotels.
That left HSH short of workers to do other important tasks, like the Homeless Outreach Teams (HOT) that connect people on the streets with services and shelter. That shortage meant lost opportunities, as Monica Steptoe, director of Jelani House, a Bayview shelter for pregnant and postpartum women, told The Frisc earlier this year: “When someone doesn’t get to that client in a reasonable amount of time to verify homelessness, then we lose them.” (Steptoe was referring to a pregnant woman living out of her car last January. Jelani House had 10 vacant rooms at the time, but had to wait nearly two months for a city worker to verify that the woman was homeless.)
When the current HSH leadership team arrived in April and May 2021, it seemed to herald stability, with a clear mandate to spend unprecedented cash. Legal wrangling over a 2018 vote for a new business tax ended in September 2020, releasing hundreds of millions of dollars per year to fight homelessness. Then, voters approved a $200 million bond in November 2020. All the while, emergency COVID funds were flowing, like the $74.1 million last year from California to turn two hotels into more than 200 permanent homes, along with federal money for the SIP hotels. It all adds up to HSH’s biggest two-year budget ever — more than $1 billion.
A shaky record
In that light, Emily Cohen, HSH deputy director for communications and legislative affairs, recently told The Frisc that the current 26 percent staff vacancy rate is a misleading figure. It was down to 9 percent in June, she said, but the Board of Supervisors recently approved 64 full-time positions, hence the new 177 total and higher unfilled rate.
Can these be filled? The 2020 BLA audit reported that the department has “consistently carried vacant positions from year to year.” The audit also noted that supervisors had approved 17 new HSH positions for 2019–20 (far more modest than the recent boost), yet eight months into that fiscal year, 11 of those posts had yet to be filled. (Total headcount was 138 just before the pandemic shut the city down.)
Keeping positions filled has also been difficult. Before the pandemic, a City Controller report requested by HSH executives found annual turnover at 20 percent, higher than other similarly sized departments, and in key areas such as executive administration, contracting, data reporting, and human resources.
Two key positions illustrate the ongoing concern. To get people off the streets and into housing, HSH relies on a data-driven system called coordinated entry. Two top jobs running the system have been vacant for much of this year; one position had been open since April 1 before being taken down this month. The other was open until recently and has been open at least once before, in 2019. (As of Nov. 10, HSH officials could not say if either had been filled.)
In fact, it’s now more imperative to have those leaders in place. After a rocky start, which The Frisc detailed in 2019, the system is due for an overhaul. HSH executive director Shireen McSpadden acknowledged its problems in October and said change is coming soon: “The intent is to provide an equitable and quick way to match people with housing resources.”
Frustration and finger-pointing
This spring, The Frisc reported how hundreds of homeless San Franciscans, including one family with a new baby, had to wait months for a permanent apartment despite having approval paperwork in hand and hundreds of vacant units sitting idle.
That situation seemingly hasn’t improved much. At the latest tally, SF had 803 vacant units of supportive housing, 499 of which were ready to be occupied.
Adding to the complications, the city promised folks in the SIP hotels they’d be first in line, but that effort has been a slog. As of Nov. 1, just 23 percent had moved from hotels to permanent housing. McSpadden said in September that the department hadn’t been meeting its goal of 35 to 40 moves per week because of paperwork — namely, the need for types of identification that many people don’t have. The delays pressured HSH to extend the SIP hotel program until September 2022, which they can afford because of extra federal funding.
“Due to a variety of factors, including the high cost of living in the Bay Area, recruiting qualified talent can present unique challenges at times.”
— Nicki Kluge of Heluna Health, a nonprofit contractor hired by SF to do street outreach
The delays have also contributed to frustration and the recent round of blaming. At the November oversight meeting, Coalition for Homelessness human rights organizer Kelley Cutler asked Cohen about the housing bottleneck: “Are you adding more ways for people to get assessed for housing, more staff to get assessments, and is this to generate more referrals in the vacant units?”
Cohen explained to Cutler that nonprofit contractors, not HSH staff, assess and steer people into permanent housing. One of these contractors, Episcopal Community Services, isn’t doing it for people on the street because they’ve entirely shifted to rehousing the SIP hotel guests.
(Episcopal and two other nonprofits, United Council of Human Services and the St. Vincent DePaul Society, do much of the assessment work in the coordinated entry system. None responded to The Frisc’s multiple requests for comments.)
Cohen’s comments left the impression that the contractors’ staffing decisions are out of HSH’s hands. When The Frisc asked her to explain, she said: “Housing navigation isn’t in-house. It’s a contracted service. City employees are not handling the service.”
A contract ‘historically underspent’
But another nonprofit, whose contract was recently renewed, said that the city retains a great deal of control over staffing decisions. Heluna Health provides on-the-ground workers to counsel people on the streets, get them food, healthcare, or perhaps shelter or housing as part of coordinated entry. It’s been doing the street outreach since 2014 and just received a 19-month contract extension, even with this comment from the budget analyst at the time: “The contract has historically been underspent due to staff turnover and position vacancies.”
The extension calls for 11 new positions. “Salaries for the position are set by the city, so we’re required to pay what the city approves,” said Nicki Kluge, Heluna’s director of marketing and communications.
It’s another example of how creating positions isn’t the same as filling them. “Due to a variety of factors, including the high cost of living in the Bay Area, as well as the demanding and specialized nature of this type of outreach work, recruiting qualified talent can present unique challenges at times,” added Kluge.
Mary Kate Bacalao, director of external affairs and policy with Compass Family Services, agreed: “The nonprofit frontline positions aren’t paying enough for people to afford to live here, and there’s high turnover.” (The city’s new mental health chief also recently acknowledged the wage gap between city government and contractor jobs, and nonprofits have stepped up the pressure on the city.)
Even if the new budget raises wages across the board, workers will face the same problem bedeviling the people they’re trying to serve: a profound lack of housing.
The pandemic has shown that when money is available, the city can move quickly in short bursts. Four hotels recently became available for purchase and conversion to homes. The city had to act fast to secure matching funds from the state, and it did. Three of the four purchases were approved last month by the Board of Supervisors, but the fourth drew protests from Japantown neighbors, and the neighborhood supervisor, Dean Preston, withdrew support.
It was a clear example of what lies ahead for San Francisco. The city needs to build or create much more housing for everyone, and it will be one of the biggest political fights of 2022 and beyond.
Staff writer Kristi Coale writes about homelessness and more for The Frisc.