Two floors above an enclosed courtyard, three young girls press their hands against a set of large glass windows. The youngest, Titi, is jumping up and down, waving down at their mother, Danica Gutierrez. She smiles up at them, finally breathing easy.
It’s March, and Gutierrez, 30, and her daughters — ages eight, nine, and 11 — just moved into a three-bedroom apartment at 600 7th Street, a brand-new building in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood. Like the Gutierrez family, many of the residents are formerly homeless.
For Gutierrez and her daughters, the move was long overdue. In November 2023, Titi was hospitalized for four days with an asthma attack, a result of exposure to cigarette smoke that seeped into their previous apartment in a building a few blocks away.
Gutierrez spent two years trying to escape that building, called The Margot, on 9th and Mission streets. It wasn’t just smoking neighbors, but also a roach infestation, residents screaming at night, and threats of violence. She filed three transfer requests with city officials in charge of SF’s housing for formerly homeless residents.
They finally granted the transfer in August 2024 after a doctor and social worker documented Titi’s asthma. Gutierrez and the girls still had to wait six months to move.
So far, they are happy in their new home. Unlike The Margot, the new place keeps families and individuals in separate wings.
Their story is an example of the complexity of San Francisco’s homelessness crisis. The unhoused population is far from monolithic, with a wide range of ages, health conditions, family situations, and living needs.
City officials acknowledge that some residents make life difficult for neighbors in the more than 9,000 units of permanent supportive housing (PSH) run by the city and its nonprofit contractors.
The problem is underscored when families with children are living next to or down the hall from adults who struggle with mental health or substance use. Long-term housing for the formerly homeless is in short supply, let alone places where families can have separation from the single adult population.
This shortage is having an effect on families in SF’s temporary shelters too. Ideally they could “graduate” into permanent housing to make room for new families. But with little extra space, there’s a wait list for temporary shelter with hundreds of families, spurring a fight at City Hall over the limits on shelter stays.
Gutierrez is thankful she’s gone through that process and finally landed in a place she can call home. “Over time, I will recover from The Margot, but when I see these people that are still there that don’t deserve to be there…” Gutierrez says, her voice trailing off. “When is my mental health going to get better when I keep thinking about everybody else?”
Forced to flee
Gutierrez moved from Mexico to San Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood when she was two years old. She and her three brothers were on their own at a young age while their parents worked.
“We did what we could, but in the Bayview, there was a lot of poverty. There were not a lot of opportunities for kids like me,” Gutierrez says. “One of the things I was told as a very young girl was, ‘When you grow up, you’re not going to college, because we’re poor.’”
Gutierrez recounts that she attended multiple schools, ending at Downtown High School, 17 and pregnant. She says she also worked at an industrial laundromat with sweltering temperatures and no breaks, and felt there was no future for her.
In high school, Gutierrez met her now ex-husband. They lived with her family in the home where she grew up, and over the next four years, had two more daughters. But in 2021, the relationship became “unstable,” as Gutierrez puts it, and safety concerns led her to flee with her children to a shelter. The rest of the family also had to move. It was the only home they’d ever known in the Bay.
She and the girls ended up at the Buena Vista Horace Mann Community School’s stay-over program for SF public school students and their families. In family court, Gutierrez got a restraining order against her husband and gained custody of her children. She then moved to Hamilton Families shelter, where she stayed for 18 months waiting for a spot in supportive housing to open up.
Where families can go
Like all San Francisco’s supportive housing, which is funded by the city and run by nonprofit contractors, The Margot follows the state Housing First policy that became law in 2016.
Housing First holds that people on the streets first need a roof over their heads before addressing issues such as mental health and substance abuse. Residents can’t be denied a home for lack of sobriety, a criminal record, or other barriers. It’s an evidence-based method of getting people off the streets and into housing, which includes services like subsidized rent, mental health treatment, job training, and help with food and hygiene products.
But amid high rates of homelessness, as well as record overdose deaths driven by fentanyl, Mayor Daniel Lurie and some lawmakers want more room to promote sobriety, including supportive housing for people who don’t want to be around drug and alcohol use.
Lurie recently announced that city-funded nonprofits providing drug users with clean needles and foil must first offer counseling and connections to treatment. The nonprofits are also prohibited from handing out supplies in public spaces. District 6 Sup. Matt Dorsey, an advocate for sobriety and a recovering addict himself, wants to amend city code to shift official policy “toward the cessation of drug use and attainment of long-term recovery.”
Many organizations, including Compass Family Services and UCSF’s Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, emphasize harm reduction — allowing substance use with safety measures, such as overdose reversal Narcan kits — as the best model for housing a formerly homeless population.
Gutierrez believes families should not have to live where residents often use hard drugs. (She says she used to drink but never did hard drugs.) But there aren’t enough spots for families in “sober” environments, says Hope Kamer, director of strategic initiatives at the nonprofit Compass, which provides family services at The Margot and other PSH apartments.
The stock is “incredibly limited,” says Kamer, yet it’s “the difference between returning to homelessness and having somewhere to live.”
The city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH) has 896 supportive housing units for families with children in 27 buildings across the city. Nineteen of those buildings are reserved for families.
I’m just supposed to get adapted to the smell of death in the hallway? How am I supposed to get that out of my children’s heads?
Danica gutierrez
The department also has 646 family units in scattered site housing (private-market apartments with subsidized rent and access to mobile services) and 715 subsidies for rapid rehousing (also private-market and subsidized but with time limits).
When asked why Gutierrez’s transfer requests from The Margot were denied, Kamer says it’s likely there was nowhere else to send them. (Gutierrez wouldn’t have accepted space in a family shelter, but even so, the shelter waitlist is more than 300 families long and the subject of anger and controversy.)
Emily Cohen, deputy director for communications and legislative affairs at HSH, confirmed Kamer’s explanation and added that it can be challenging to find housing for larger families. For a transfer request to be accepted, the applicant needs a disability accommodation, a documented security issue (such as violence or a threat from another resident), or a change in eligibility.
Last month, Lurie launched an 18-month pilot program to provide better support and keep at-risk families from becoming homeless. The effort will receive $11 million from Lurie’s former nonprofit, Tipping Point Community. It will provide assistance to around 1,500 households for back rent and other living expenses and create a database of SF’s homelessness prevention programs.
Roaches and corpses
On Sept. 7, 2022, Gutierrez and her girls were living at the Hamilton Families shelter. They received news that a three-bedroom apartment was available at The Margot, a fairly new building that opened in 2015 as micro-units for students. (SF bought it in 2021, converted it to PSH, and renamed it in honor of a former supportive housing official.)
Gutierrez says she had 72 hours to accept the apartment. She felt rushed but said yes – and almost immediately felt unsafe. She told The Frisc about several incidents and said she reported them to Delivering Innovation in Supportive Housing (DISH), The Margot’s nonprofit operator. The Frisc was able to review some of the reports she filed.
There was one neighbor on their floor whose behavior had Gutierrez on edge. A few months after a disturbing incident, Gutierrez says she passed the neighbor’s open front door and peered in.
The person was face down, dead in their room. “Although they were a danger to themselves and others, they were also a person who needed the compassion and the social services of the building that failed them,” Gutierrez says.
Gutierrez says in her two years there, two other residents on her floor died, at least one from an accidental overdose. She also saw several memorials for residents in the lobby with teddy bears and other memorabilia. It’s well documented that many SF overdose victims have fixed addresses, and deaths often occur in SF’s PSH buildings.
“I’m just supposed to get adapted to the smell of death in the hallway?” Gutierrez told The Frisc in the fall. “How am I supposed to get that out of my children’s heads?”
Just before that interview at The Margot, cockroaches infested her floor after someone left old food in the hall, resulting in “hundreds” of them in her apartment.
During The Frisc’s visit, devices emitting a high-pitched sound to deter roaches were plugged into every outlet of her apartment. Dead bugs were still visible in the corners of her door frame.
Building services had offered a chemical treatment, she said, but she declined, fearful the spray would exacerbate Titi’s asthma.
The final reports Gutierrez filed involved a neighbor whose screaming kept them up at night: “I can’t get any sleep. My kids are scared. They want to sleep right next to me because of all of this screaming,” she said during another interview before her move.
The modern Margot
DISH says The Margot embodies “supportive housing done right.” It has modern fixtures, a child-care program, a food pantry, and a rooftop common area with great views of the city.
Lauren Hall, co-founding director of DISH, said many residents like a mixed environment with families and single adults: “There’s a lot of cases where it’s working.” But Hall doesn’t dismiss Gutierrez’s experience and recognizes the situation is complicated.
Hall says she can’t speak directly about Gutierrez, but she understands how residents like Gutierrez can feel frustrated.
According to Hall, when a complaint is filed, DISH can only intervene if the complainant documents the disturbance. DISH tries to talk to the resident causing the disturbance, but it doesn’t tell the filer what happens. DISH also doesn’t tell the target of the complaint who filed it. (Hall says this is for privacy reasons and because of DISH’s staff capacity.)
“We try very hard with people creating nuisances to offer them support and not have our only response be, ‘I’m going to threaten you with losing your housing,’” says Hall. “But if the person is able or not interested [in changing behavior], it really can create a challenging environment.”
The police only intervene if there’s evidence of physical harm. Even with “fairly significant violence,” says Hall, it can take months to remove someone from PSH, should it escalate to that. “We have to make the case that this is a pervasive and imminent threat to the safety and security of the rest of the site, and that is very hard to do. It’s not what we’re set up to do.”
‘A safe place to rest my head’
Some residents love living at The Margot.
Dimitri, who did not share his last name, is a 63-year man in recovery from methamphetamines. He was homeless for years before moving into The Minna Lee on 6th Street, another building run by DISH. He was there five years and says he found stability and community, but the street’s pervasive open-air drug markets and users were a challenge.
“I didn’t want to be involved in anything, I just wanted a safe place to rest my head,” Dimitri says. “But it got to a point where I outgrew The Minna Lee.”
He moved into The Margot in May 2024, thrilled to have his own bathroom, shower, and a great view of the city. The environment is “a world of difference.” And he enjoys having families in the building, which contributes to what he feels is a healthier atmosphere.
A few blocks away at 600 Seventh, Gutierrez’s new space is a healthier atmosphere for her too. During a recent visit, the smell of simmering chicken filled the spacious apartment. New furniture was still under wraps, waiting to be arranged.
“It’s paradise, but at what cost?” says Gutierrez. She’s still shaken from the two years it took to get here. As she thinks about other people in a similar situation, she wonders: “What about the rest of the families?”