Ordinarily, a sleepy city agency renewing a lease for a temporary building wouldn’t be worth much mention.
But when the SF Port Commission voted virtually in October to let the Embarcadero SAFE Navigation Center operate for two more years in its waterfront spot, just south of the Bay Bridge, it was a remarkable moment in San Francisco’s contentious struggle with homelessness.
It was also a potential demonstration how better information about that struggle can guide better decisions in other parts of the city.
When the center was proposed in 2019, neighborhood acrimony included an anti-shelter crowdfunded lawsuit, which spurred a counter-campaign: a pro-shelter GoFundMe backed by tech titans Marc Benioff, Jack Dorsey, and by GoFundMe itself.
The nadir came in April 2019 at a public meeting that got ugly fast. Mayor London Breed showed up to advocate for the shelter, was shouted down by the anti-shelter crowd, and told to “go home.” (Breed is a San Francisco native.)
Like so much of our local politics, it became an international story.
While NIMBY opposition to shelter is alive and well — forcing officials to seek a “compromise” in the Inner Sunset, for example, or to abandon plans to convert a Japantown hotel into permanent housing — it doesn’t always carry the day.
Sometimes neighbors step up; sometimes local officials override the naysayers.
Navigating the hysteria
Navigation centers are specialized, invite-only shelters that offer longer-term stays and services, like health care and job counseling, to help people transition into permanent housing.
The Frisc’s investigation in early 2020 showed no correlation between these specialized shelters and crime rates, despite fears like those that roiled the Embarcadero.
Despite the lawsuits and protests, the center opened in December 2019. The city agreed to an advisory group, consisting of neighbors, merchants, and city officials, that could set goals and evaluate conditions around the navigation center on a regular basis. It was instrumental in the shelter’s extension.
“No one’s worst fears were realized,” said Alice Rogers, a neighbor and advisory group member. “Those who didn’t want it are still not pleased it’s here, but they begrudgingly didn’t oppose the renewal.”
That’s what counts as progress in SF’s ongoing effort to add homeless shelters and services to neighborhoods that previously had none. Sup. Matt Haney, whose District 6 includes the Embarcadero center, for years has advocated for more neighborhoods to host their fair share. He pressed this issue of the renewed lease last month.
Winning at least some neighbors’ support along the Embarcadero required not just engagement and cooperation, along with good data and tangible results — and acknowledgment of the caveats.
Showing results
One issue opponents raised was size. With a capacity of 200 guests, it is the largest navigation center in the city.
Four months after it opened, however, COVID hit, and group shelters had to either shut down or thin their ranks. The Embarcadero capacity went down to 91 guests.
But while shelter closures and other factors contributed to more crowded sidewalks throughout the city, the area around the Embarcadero site had no sidewalk surge. In fact, a regular survey by the Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH) Department’s outreach team of a nearly one-square-mile area around the site (the “outreach zone”) showed a drop from 179 unhoused people in March 2019 to no more than 60 through November 2021 — a 71 percent decrease.
The advisory group also pushed for regular SFPD foot patrols around the navigation center’s “safety zone,” about 10 to 15 blocks, a smaller area than the outreach zone. According to their agreement, two officers walk the beat 10 hours per day, 7 days a week. From October 2019 to November 2021, the incident count in the safety zone has ranged from three to 33.
Rogers was pleased with the results, but acknowledged the navigation center might not have been the only factor. During this period, the city moved more than 2,000 people on the streets into emergency “shelter in place” (SIP) hotels.
HSH also reports that of 400 people who have stayed at the Embarcadero Navigation Center, nearly 10 percent have moved into housing. (Some of them had an interim stay in a SIP hotel.) It’s not clear how this rate compares to other centers, but comparisons might be less than useful because the Embarcadero’s life span has more or less coincided with the pandemic. Rogers said she would like to see more evidence of people getting housing.
A more frequent count
With the Embarcadero results, could the site’s practices be used to convince other reluctant neighborhoods to accept shelters and other housing for the formerly unhoused?
Most of the city must wait for the biennial point-in-time count for an updated tally of unhoused people per district. The latest is coming next week after being canceled in 2021 by COVID. That infrequent snapshot is inadequate, as The Frisc has reported.
But the regular counts around the Embarcadero Navigation Center could be a model. In fact, people a few blocks away from the center but outside the “safety zone” patrolled by SFPD have been doing something similar for years.
At 4 o’clock every morning, paid workers walk the streets of the East Cut to check in on unhoused residents in the area. (The East Cut is the new name for an old part of the city, roughly 20 blocks south of Market that range from the Transbay Transit Center to Rincon Hill.)
Andrew Robinson, executive director of the East Cut Community Benefits District, said these walks began before a navigation center was proposed nearby. The goal was to connect people to services, and the center gave them “an opportunity to offer people beds.”
Robinson, who is on the Embarcadero SAFE advisory board, says there has been no increase in unhoused people on East Cut streets since the Embarcadero site opened.
(Workers are not allowed to intimidate people or move them along, according to Robinson. The Coalition on Homelessness, which often tracks harassment of unhoused people, has not had adverse reports from the East Cut.)
The Embarcadero data, married with this underlying desire to help both the housed and unhoused, is a hyperlocal example of progress. Trying to do the same in, say, the Tenderloin, home to about a quarter of the city’s fatal overdoses and a denser urban fabric, won’t be easy.
Two months into Mayor Breed’s emergency Tenderloin declaration, a weekly data report of arrest counts, overdose reversals, housing referrals and more has at least provided an attempt at transparency, but there’s a ton of improvement needed. Mark Nagel, a business consultant who founded RescueSF to advocate for solutions to the homelessness crisis, has started translating the Tenderloin data into an easier-to-read dashboard.
Nagel said the city has fragmented resources — witness the East Cut — that could help build a better system for understanding SF’s homelessness population.
“They can give you real-time data,” Nagel recently told The Frisc. “A weekly count would be possible.”
With more money than ever in the homelessness budget, San Francisco could make a dent. Better information will help service providers, officials, and taxpayers figure out what’s working and what isn’t.
Staff writer Kristi Coale reported this story as a USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism 2021 Data Journalism fellow.