Last year, by closing part of Golden Gate Park and committing to “slow” neighborhood streets, San Francisco began shifting the way people use its streets. The city hopes 2023 marks a turning point for people living on its streets.
In the next few weeks, the city will launch its latest attempts to get ahead of the homelessness crisis, with more oversight and a new five-year strategic plan. For years, however, the crisis has resisted all manner of intervention, be it more money, new ideas, or emergency directives, and this next stage of the fight will be waged with two disadvantages: a shrinking budget, as well as no fresh data that’s supposed to come from an odd-year street count.
SF homelessness policy is centered around — some would say mired in — a debate over how best to bring people off the streets. City homelessness officials have mostly stuck to “housing first” — get people into apartments first, then focus on mental health and other services. With this approach in recent years, SF saw a slight reduction in its unhoused population in 2022, according to its biennial count — which most observers acknowledge is an undercount. But other cities like Houston have done much better.
For others like Sup. Rafael Mandelman, “housing first” shouldn’t be an absolute. Mandelman has tried to mandate more temporary shelter options, such as tiny homes and tent sites, to get more people off the streets faster. (His colleagues unanimously passed Mandelman’s A Place for All bill last year, but only after amending it to include permanent housing as an option.)
Mark Nagel, co-founder of nonprofit Rescue SF, says an all-of-the-above approach is necessary: “If housing is the solution, and you don’t have enough, then you can’t make people wait for it on the sidewalk.”
All eyes on March
This tension will be front and center in the coming weeks. In March, the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH) will present its next five-year plan and lay out its priorities to reduce homelessness. Officials say it will focus in part on racial equity, with Black and Latino San Franciscans overrepresented in its unhoused population.
A Place for All will be part of the debate as well. At a March 21 hearing, supervisors will dig into a recent HSH report that an extra $1.4 billion, on top of the department’s current $1.3 billion two-year budget, is needed to provide 6,000 more homes and shelter beds within three years. The report, required by A Place for All, came out on Dec. 30, just before the New Year’s weekend. Mandelman called for the hearing over concerns that HSH is focused on permanent housing to the exclusion of other “cost-effective options,” said Mandelman’s spokesperson Jackie Thornhill.
Also next month, the supervisors and Mayor London Breed are slated to unveil appointments for the first ever oversight commission for HSH, which was approved by fed-up voters last November.
Numbers aren’t everything, but no matter how SF tries to get people off the streets, numbers are important to measure progress. And for reasons officials refuse to explain, SF has decided to forgo a big street count this year that could provide an important, albeit imperfect, update.
Skipping the count
A year ago, the city updated its estimate of the homeless population — on the streets and in temporary shelters — through the 2022 point-in-time (PIT) count, as it’s known: the tally came to 7,754, a 3.5 percent reduction from 2019.
The PIT count is meant to take place in odd-numbered years, but COVID canceled the 2021 version. Last year’s count was a makeup, and HSH officials said they would get back on schedule in 2023.
But with no announcement or explanation, the department won’t count this year, even though many major cities in California and around the country did. “Since we had a count in 2022, we will conduct our next one in 2024,” an HSH spokesperson told The Frisc.
The point-in-time count is widely considered an undercount — just a one-night snapshot. HSH’s final report last year said that 20,000 people would experience homelessness at some point in 2022, and that more people fall into homelessness than leave it.
Still, when conducted at the same time as other cities, the census’s broader view helps gauge effectiveness of various policies, said Coalition on Homelessness executive director Jennifer Friedenbach: “You can’t compare and see if investments are working if all cities [don’t do the count] in the same year.”
Oversight’s new look
HSH was created in 2016 to consolidate services from several city departments under one roof, all with the lofty goal of ending homelessness in SF. Its executive director is appointed by, and reports directly to, the mayor. It has become the city’s largest agency by budget without an oversight commission. That’s about to change.
HSH has had a bumpy existence, exacerbated by the pandemic. A scathing legislative report three years ago cataloged many early shortcomings, which the department has worked to fix.
But with progress come problems. The city has awarded no-bid contracts to nonprofits to run services and shelters with inadequate oversight, as a Frisc investigation revealed last year. And while HSH has boosted its stock of permanent housing, terrible conditions in some locales have turned much-needed homes into cold comfort. Amid calls for more oversight, SF voters overwhelmingly approved Prop C and the new commission in November.
(Since the vote, a report surfaced that $5 million allocated by the mayor to fix dilapidated residences has yet to be spent, and a nonprofit taking city money has sparked an FBI probe.)
The most anticipated part of the new commission — the appointments — are set for March. The supervisors get to select three members and have approval over the mayor’s four nominations. Members must have lived experience of homelessness, and experience working in mental health, addiction treatment, and homeless services.
Two advocates who often have different views on homelessness policy agree that the city needs better data. “We still don’t know what unmet need is,” says Jennifer Friedenbach. “The city regularly touts how many move into shelter and housing, but they’re not telling us if they’ve reduced the number of people on the street,” says Mark Nagel.
Before the commission can start, supervisors need to write legislation to streamline several administrative bodies, including the Local Homelessness Coordinating Board (LHCB) — the de facto oversight body for HSH until now. The board will carry on with a narrow mission to oversee federal funding, but its members will be appointed by the new commission and serve as advisors.
Long-time LHCB co-chair Del Seymour is no fan of the new oversight plan. He says consolidation into one commission will create more potential for trouble because each commissioner will be beholden to either the mayor or the supervisors. “This is what good government should avoid,” Seymour said at the Feb. 6 LHCB meeting.
The commission, which is to begin meeting in May, will have its own backstop. The SF controller’s office will conduct regular audits of HSH.
Homelessness vision zero
The stated goal is to end homelessness in SF. Then reality intervenes. perhaps most glaringly with the budget outlook. With SF facing a $728 million deficit and no solution to office space, now empty, that’s typically the city’s main source of revenue, HSH is looking at a 6 percent budget drop in the next two-year cycle, putting more weight on funds from the state and federal government.
The anticipated five-year plan will need to squeeze more impact out of fewer dollars, and many working in homeless services and advocacy disagree on how best to do this, which gets back to the conflict between “housing first” and “shelter fast.”
In a workshop to help craft the new five-year plan, Nagel said consensus among a group of housed residents was that people need more access to shelter — not big overnight or “congregate” shelters, which many advocates and unhoused people despise, but smaller models with more privacy — mostly single rooms, but doubles and triples as well. (711 Post Street, with room for 250 people, is one example, and it costs per person about 40 percent of what the city spent on a single tent during the pandemic, according to Nagel’s analysis of the contract.)
The Coalition on Homelessness director Friedenbach disagrees, saying anything short of a permanent home is too unstable: “People don’t have tenant’s rights, there are daily time limits, and they’re constantly being moved around.”
While Friedenbach and Nagel often have different points of view, they’re both skeptical that new plans, strategies, and oversight will have any effect as long as the city can’t get a handle on the scope of the problem. “We still don’t know what unmet need is,” says Friedenbach. (She also notes that SF no longer tracks a useful pre-COVID measure: people turned away nightly from overnight shelters.)
Nagel says the city isn’t looking at the problem in the right way. “The city regularly touts how many move into shelter and housing” in their monthly updates, he says, “but they’re not telling us if they’ve reduced the number of people on the street.”
That measure only comes with the point-in-time count, and now the city will have to wait until next year.
Kristi Coale is a staff writer for The Frisc.