Editor’s note: Interviews with Beatriz Vasquez were conducted in Spanish with the help of a translator.
Beatriz Vasquez fled violence and extortion in Peru with her husband and two children in 2023 to come to the United States. When they got to the Bay Area, they spent three weeks cycling through hotels before landing at a family shelter in SF. It was supposed to be a temporary stay.
That was nearly two years ago. Though the family has since been offered affordable housing, the rent would have been more than 80 percent of the family’s income.
“Clearly, in Peru, things were worse when we were facing real persecution and lack of safety,” said Vazquez. “But the uncertainty and lack of stability here is really affecting my family.”
San Francisco’s number of homeless families doubled from 205 in 2022 to 437 in 2024, according to the 2024 point-in-time count. As families like the Vasquezes struggle to navigate SF’s complex shelter and housing system, advocates say the city’s new budget, despite compromises, won’t move enough families into permanent homes, in part because of recent City Hall policy changes.
In December 2024, the city’s Homelessness and Supportive Housing Department (HSH) reinstated a 90-day shelter stay limit for families, intended to keep a flow of open beds in an already limited shelter system. HSH is allowing families to request as many 30-day extensions as they like; according to the agency, only one family has had to leave so far.
Update, 7/25/25: HSH has changed the extension policy to allow unlimited 90-day extensions.
The city has also cracked down on vehicular living with a two-hour parking limit on RVs, camp trailers, house cars, and mobile homes. Many of SF’s RV dwellers are Spanish-speaking families.
Then there’s the city budget. On June 25, the Board of Supervisors agreed to shift $34 million toward more single adult shelter from funds earmarked for homeless youth and families. Sup. Rafael Mandelman, the board president, told The Frisc that the new figure is a result of negotiations with Mayor Daniel Lurie: “There was a negotiation-slash-conversation, and by the end of it there was an agreement that the spending plan made sense.”
Lurie has not yet formally approved it. The full proposal is set for a Board of Supervisors vote on July 8, then it goes with the entire budget package to the mayor’s desk.
Update, 7/15/25: After delaying the vote by a week, the Board of Supervisors approved Lurie’s homelessness funding shift and the rest of the city budget on July 15. To allow Lurie to shift the money, the supervisors also needed to override a supermajority vote requirement, which they did by a vote of 8-3. The supervisors also voted 9-2 for the RV parking restrictions.
It’s a compromise from Lurie’s original May proposal, which attempted to reallocate nearly $90 million to shelter from a voter-approved tax passed in 2018. He cited excess unspent funds and the “particular need to direct more funding to shelter and hygiene programs” for thousands of people living on the street. “Fentanyl has changed the game, and we need to change with it,” Lurie said during a May 30 presentation.
The move tapped into a longstanding debate over San Francisco’s finite homelessness resources: whether to expand overnight shelters, which provide temporary refuge but make little long term difference in people’s lives, or build more permanent homes, a slower and more expensive task. Some families and advocacy groups say the mayor’s budget calculus, even with the compromise, goes too far in the wrong direction.
More beds, more pushback
Since taking office, Lurie has prioritized getting people off the streets. Part of his plan was to open 1,500 new shelter and treatment beds within six months. (He’s already moved the goalposts on that pledge.) To help make part of it happen, the mayor’s initial budget proposal, introduced in late May, called for a reallocation of Prop C funds, also known as Our City Our Home (OCOH).
In a June 5 Homelessness Oversight Commission meeting, Commissioner Sharky Laguana supported the proposal: “First things first, can we get people off the streets?” he said.
But the proposal faced significant pushback from the Coalition on Homelessness, other advocacy groups, and even the city attorney. That’s because voters passed Prop C in 2018, a new tax on larger businesses, to fund homeless services in a specific way. Lurie’s plan to shift money around defied those earmarks.
During an all-night budgetary jam session last week, the Board of Supervisors came up with a new version of Lurie’s plan. It would distribute 130 new vouchers for short-term apartment rentals (called “rapid rehousing”) for families and 100 for youth. The proposal also allocates $6.7 million for family and youth homelessness prevention and adds 124 shelter beds to the city’s portfolio — much fewer than the 630 new beds the mayor wanted to fund in the budget.
The supervisors’ revision offers more for homeless families and youth, though it still hinges on reallocating $34 million from Prop C funds. Just like the mayor’s earlier proposal, it requires supervisor approval as “trailing legislation” — an extra bill attached to the budget. This time, however, it only needs a simple majority vote, because last week, the supervisors agreed with Lurie to strike down the eight-vote supermajority requirement.
Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness, called Lurie’s bid to remove the supermajority vote “unprecedented and out of pocket.” She and her allies have a different idea how to help.
The cost of shelter
In early June, the Coalition on Homelessness and Faith in Action, a community organization group, countered the mayor’s first attempts to shift Prop C funds with their own proposal. It prioritizes permanent family housing over temporary shelter and comes with a $66.5 million price tag.
Dubbed “Ending Child Homelessness in San Francisco,” it claims providing families with permanent housing would average less than half the cost of family shelters — $2,734 a month per family instead of $6,660. While HSH confirms that the cost of operating shelter can be more expensive per night than permanent supportive housing, the math is nuanced.
According to HSH, housing is cheaper on a per person, per night basis, but because people stay long term in housing and (hopefully) shorter term in shelter, the two are difficult to compare accurately. In the department’s 2025 annual cost estimates for families, permanent supportive housing penciled out to just over $69,000 a year and congregate shelter just over $68,000; in non-congregate shelters where residents have a private room, it costs more than $77,000 per year.
The advocates’ solution includes 125 five-year rapid rehousing vouchers, which differ from subsidies because they are time-limited and gradually decrease as the resident becomes stable, according to HSH. The proposal also calls for 550 need-based scattered site housing subsidies, 100 subsidies for single-room occupancy units, and 100 subsidies for operators of affordable housing, plus a three-year guaranteed basic income program for 550 families.
Right now, we have people that have been in shelter for years. We’re a far cry from where we need to be.
Christin Evans, Homelessness Oversight Commission
These asks total nearly $66.5 million. The proposal outlines various funding sources. The subsidies would come from the city’s general fund. Vouchers for rapid rehousing would be funded through Prop C, and the basic income program would be paid for by private donors. Friedenbach told The Frisc that other funding sources would be identified over the next few years.
Having money is one thing. Having available homes is another. To implement the proposal, units would need to be “added on” to affordable housing buildings, Friedenbach said. In other words, in the mix of a building’s units, the number reserved for people requiring deep subsidies would have to expand.
Advocates also cite a great deal of vacant housing in SF — more than 60,000 units according to the most recent analysis from the Board of Supervisors, said Matt Alexander, a community organizer with Faith in Action. But as The Frisc has previously reported, a large majority of these units aren’t available, despite claims like Alexander’s, and they’re not easily thrown open against the owners’ will. (In 2020 SF voters passed an “empty home” tax to punish landlords who keep units vacant, but it’s mired in court.)
Though the new budget proposal from the supervisors doesn’t explicitly encompass the advocates’ idea, the addition of 130 rapid rehousing vouchers “is a huge improvement” in Friedenbach’s estimation.
She and Faith in Action still plan to pursue other elements of their proposal. Meanwhile, families like Beatriz’s continue to wade through bureaucracy to find homes in a system advocates say are working against them.
‘Difficult to navigate’
When the Vasquez family first tried to settle in San Mateo in August 2023, Vasquez and Faith in Action staff said the Samaritan House shelter turned them away because of a policy requiring homeless individuals to reside in San Mateo County for 90 days to be eligible.
A Samaritan House spokesperson told The Frisc that the shelter has no such policy and individuals are never turned away. But according to Alexander, Vasquez and Faith in Action contacted San Mateo County District 2 Supervisor Noelia Corzo, who helped rescind the policy, which is referred to in city documents from 2022.
Out looking for work, Vasquez’s husband saw a flyer for Faith in Action. He called and was told the family would be brought to a hotel room in San Mateo. Vasquez, weary from all the family had been through, didn’t believe him.
But after a few nights in San Mateo, the advocates took the Vasquez family to a shelter access “intake” point for San Francisco’s system. Alexander believed that anyone could get shelter if they had no place to go.
But after 90-minute interviews, the family was turned away for not having enough “points.” (SF uses a system to match families to shelter and gives points based on vulnerability and eligibility.)
Instead, they received Muni passes and information in English about other ways to seek help. The family was then turned away from several full shelters. Alexander, who is also on the city’s Board of Education and knows many supervisors, made calls and was able to secure a voucher for a private hotel in Fisherman’s Wharf. After five days, the Vasquez family moved to the Hamilton Families Shelter, where they’ve been since September 2023.
Many families are staying in shelters for long periods due to a lack of affordable housing, according to Christin Evans, a commissioner with the Homelessness Oversight Commission. Evans agrees with advocates that permanent housing, not shelter, should be a higher priority.
“Right now, we have people that have been in shelter for years,” Evans said. “We’re a far cry from where we need to be in terms of system flow.”
The Vasquez family was approved for affordable housing twice — once last year, and again in June. Both times, the family couldn’t afford the rent. In the most recent case, it was $2,500 a month — just below the roughly $3,000 a month that Beatriz’s husband makes.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Vasquez said. “We told them what our income was, so why were we even approved for it?”
Their experience is nothing new, Alexander said.
“We’ve heard this over and over and over again. There’s these weird bureaucratic systems that are confusing and complicated and are obviously intended to help people,” Alexander said. “But it’s very difficult to navigate.”
To address the family shelter bottleneck, HSH in December brought back its pre-COVID limit of 90 days per stay. Since then, the Vasquez family has received several notices, but 30-day extensions have allowed them to stay in place while they search for housing. Beatriz is “terrified” each time she gets a new notice, she said.
In April, Sup. Jackie Fielder introduced an ordinance to extend the maximum stay from 90 days to one year. A hearing has been postponed twice.
In another complication, Lurie on June 10 announced a new plan to make living on the streets in RVs and other large vehicles more difficult. An El Tecolote investigation reported that the city weaponized parking rules to displace people living in RVs without providing safe alternatives.
These changes are happening against the backdrop of increased pressure from federal immigration agents, making it more difficult for unhoused immigrants to seek resources out of fear of deportation.
“We’ve always worked our whole lives. We want to work. We’re not asking for something for free,” Vasquez said. “We just need a little help to open the door.”