What a year it’s been. Abigail Stewart-Kahn — who became interim director of the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, or HSH, just as the city went into a COVID-induced lockdown — is now leaving the agency. But 12 months ago, she heard an urgent call from homeless advocates and others: How can those without shelter follow a shelter-in-place order?
Stewart-Kahn, previously the department’s director of strategic partnerships for three years, began her new position doing triage.
Under shelter-in-place, homeless advocates began handing out dozens of tents to give people on the street a more socially distanced place to sleep. Sidewalk conditions in the Tenderloin and other neighborhoods deteriorated, triggering a lawsuit. Stewart-Kahn and her team scrambled to create “safe sleeping” sites, such as the one in a parking lot at the end of Haight Street, to move folks off sidewalks.
Group shelters stayed open at first, but with the spread of COVID, it was inevitable that they would have to be shut down. Hotels left empty by the pandemic seemed the obvious answer, but the mayor’s team, citing costs and logistics, didn’t rent them as fast as the Board of Supervisors and homeless advocates demanded. The fight over hotels lasted through the year, until it became clear that federal emergency money would come through and keep people in their rooms until at least this September.
That said, UCSF researchers wrote in a recent paper that the city’s hotel program likely gave local hospitals critical breathing room to avoid the capacity crises many other cities have suffered during COVID.
Under Stewart-Kahn’s watch, the HSH budget got big boosts from voters and from the state and federal governments. It has grown 250 percent since 2016, and began the current fiscal year at $852 million — making it the largest city department with no formal oversight.
The combination of big money and patchwork oversight has made many observers and officials nervous. A scathing audit from the supervisors’ analyst, which began well before the pandemic struck, highlighted several problems at HSH, including the mismanagement of $26 million in contracts. At the root of all the problems was staffing: not having enough people in the right places.
The report included a detailed response from Stewart-Kahn. She pushed back, citing several accomplishments, but acknowledging that inexperience at the top of the department, including her own, has hamstrung its work. “Five out of seven members of this team have been in their positions for much less than one year,” she wrote.
Her successor, however, will not even be an interim director. Buried at the bottom of the mayor’s press statement was a final paragraph announcing that Sam Dodge “will move over from his current position at Public Works to lead the department until a replacement is found.”
Dodge is not new to HSH. In fact, he helped create the department and served as deputy director during its first year. He’s also worked on the city’s earlier efforts on homelessness. But Dodge’s name has not come up with respect to any of the major issues on homelessness over the last two years. As recently as December 2019, he was on sabbatical, as was noted in the lead-up to his appearance on a podcast about state issues.
The personnel move caught District 6 Sup. Matt Haney, a leading watchdog over HSH, off guard. “This is a huge setback,” he tells The Frisc. “We’re basically going from interim to someone who has much less experience than interim at the most important time.”
Dodge takes over a department with a huge budget, complicated services that depend on nonprofit service providers, and intense pressure from all sides. And HSH has a lot on its plate to accomplish. Haney ticks off a list: transitioning 2,000 people currently in the emergency hotels to permanent supportive housing; launching a spending plan for funds raised from 2018’s Proposition C; reopening the city without leaving multitudes of people living on the sidewalks; and reopening Navigation Centers and shelters safely. “That’s just over the next nine months,” he says.
‘Transitions are challenging’
There’s also the national search for a full-fledged director, which the mayor paused, citing the pandemic and the need for the department and the city to focus on the health emergency. Yet Breed managed to bring on Dr. Hillary Kunins as the city’s new director of Behavioral Health Services and Mental Health SF almost two months ago.
“This is one of the most important moments we’ve had in our city’s homelessness response in decades, and I’m concerned about how abrupt this move was,” points out Haney, who says he wished that the mayor had named a permanent department head instead.
That didn’t happen, which means leadership at HSH will be in flux. “Transitions are always challenging,” adds District 8 Sup. Rafael Mandelman.
The mission of HSH has only grown over the last year, according to Mandelman, and perhaps that makes it a tough job for anyone. “It is a close to impossible, if not an impossible job,” he says.
One thing that will help, given the chronic understaffing, is that the mayor released resources to allow for emergency staffing. This will allow the department to get bodies on tasks right away, something that it sorely needed, says Mandelman: “It takes a ridiculously long time to fill a position in this city.”
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.