SF’s Specialized Homeless Shelters Do Not Bring More Crime, No Matter What Angry Neighbors Say

In February, just before COVID-19 struck, San Francisco officials and advocates for the homeless notched a small victory.

The city leased a site for a 44-bed Navigation Center for at-risk youth on the corner of Post and Hyde Streets, in a dense residential neighborhood.

Here’s the surprising part: At the final meeting before the lease, many members of the surrounding community showed up in support. When one neighbor began to complain about crime, using anecdotes about break-ins at a local shop, the shopkeeper herself took the microphone and clapped back at him.

“This might be the first neighborhood that actually wants” a Navigation Center for youth, an advocate for the homeless said that night.

Navigation Centers are special 24/7 shelters that are more like halfway houses, where unhoused people can stay up to 90 days with their own possessions, even pets, and tap into all kinds of services, including referrals to more permanent housing, if they qualify.

The positive vibes at the recent neighborhood meeting were a glaring contrast to other neighborhood reactions to Navigation Centers. The most vociferous came last year, when a group of residents, citing drugs and crime they were sure would come, shouted down Mayor London Breed then raised funds and hired lawyers to fight a proposed 200-bed center along the Embarcadero. (They lost. The center opened just before Christmas.)

“There’s a lot of anxiety over how people imagine their neighborhood looking,” says Kimberly Richman, a University of San Francisco professor and criminologist who has studied the city’s crime rates for 20 years. “But fear of crime never follows rationale.”

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In San Francisco, violent crime is at an historic ebb, while property crime rates are among the highest in the country. What about the hyperlocal level? The city says Navigation Centers have no negative impact on neighborhoods “and in some cases” improve them, based on neighbor surveys that were part of a 2018 study from a UC Berkeley graduate student.

But that report, as well as one from a news outlet last year, only analyzed about half the Navigation Center sites.

It’s important to look more deeply.

COVID-19 has added even more urgency to the debate by scrambling the shelter situation.

Fear of infection has limited access to shelters, which means tent encampments have mushroomed on sidewalks across the city, evoking other recent eras in city history and adding stress to several neighborhoods. The city has opened a sanctioned camping site in Civic Center, and is supposed to open one this week in the Haight-Ashbury. An unsanctioned site run by a nonprofit has been operating for several weeks in the Bayview.

Traditional shelters were already considered inadequate before coronavirus; they may never offer the same capacity again. Even single-room-occupancy hotels (SROs) with communal bathrooms and kitchens, home to about 19,000 San Franciscans, may need rethinking.

Now, according to a report Wednesday, the city could be shuttering Navigation Centers temporarily and moving residents into hotels. It’s unclear what comes next; perhaps larger venues will become the next iteration of Navigation Center, or perhaps the smaller sites will reopen with more social distancing in coming months. But the concept — a step up from the street toward better support and permanent housing — will remain an important part of addressing homelessness.

Before coronavirus, Supervisor Matt Haney was working on legislation to force all 11 city districts to host at least one Navigation Center. It stalled out in late February, but at some point, the pandemic will recede and thousands of people will still be homeless or housing-insecure in San Francisco. And it still will still make sense to spread housing and services into neighborhoods that have traditionally fought new development, not just for low-income citizens.

That’s why The Frisc has undertaken its own analysis, the first comprehensive look at Navigation Centers across the city, not just a handful of them, across a longer timeframe.

What remains in place are opponents who don’t want Navigation Centers throughout the city. Local Republicans filed papers in February for a ballot measure to restrict centers to districts with the highest homeless populations.

What also remains is a critical question right now, and in the future: What happens to nearby crime rates when a Navigation Center opens its doors?

Here’s what we found.

‘Random Nature‘

The Frisc tabulated crime reports available on the city’s website, generated by both police and citizens, from areas immediately surrounding Navigation Centers that opened between 2015 and 2018 and have operated for at least 12 months.

There are eight such centers in all. Six are still in operation; two, by design, have shut down. (The Embarcadero center does not yet have enough data to qualify for our study.)

For five of the eight centers we analyzed, incident rates either decreased or stayed relatively flat after the Navigation Centers opened, compared to the 12 months prior to their opening. Rates increased around three of them.

“The random nature of the increases and decreases after [opening] indicates Navigation Centers cannot be shown to increase crime,” according to Mike Males, a senior research fellow at the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice in San Francisco. (Males also advised The Frisc on aspects of the study design.)

Nor can we credit Navigation Centers for making neighborhoods safer.

“The general trajectory of the crime levels has to do with other patterns,” said USF’s Richman, who also reviewed the data.

Because we were analyzing small areas — a radius of 500 feet, roughly a long city block in all directions, around each Navigation Center — we examined “control” areas as well, to see how incident rates changed slightly farther away.

So we included areas nearby with similar features, such as transit lines or freeway overpasses, but outside the 500-foot radius around each center.

For example, the Division Circle Navigation Center at 224 South Van Ness Avenue is surrounded by a freeway on-ramp and is next to Division Street, so we chose a control area beyond the Navigation Center’s 500-foot radius that’s also next to Division Street and near an on-ramp.

When we added a control area to seven of the eight sites, the data remained about the same. One control area had a notable rise in incidents, the others stayed relatively flat or decreased.

(Note: Because the Hummingbird Place Navigation Center, which specializes in mental health and drug abuse treatment, is uniquely located within the campus of San Francisco General Hospital, we decided not to use a control area for comparison. However, we included the center in our crime data because clients may come and go from the facility.)

The takeaway is clear: Whether immediately close by, or slightly farther afield, there is no pattern of rising crime in the months that follow the opening of a center.

Increases around the centers at 224 South Van Ness and 1515 South Van Ness (near Cesar Chavez Street) might be explained by other factors, such as proximity to transit lines, said USF’s Richman. She saw the same patterns she’s seen across the city and across the country through national crime statistics. “When I look at maps, crime follows major transit lines,” Richman said.

A Tale of Two Centers

City officials intended each Navigation Center to be temporary, operating for just a few years. This is one reason experts like Richman say the centers have little effect on criminal activity already existing in a neighborhood.

She sends her students out to neighborhoods across the city to look for things like unkempt conditions, a lot of liquor stores but not many grocery stores or schools, and the like. “Where you see those conditions very palpably, there are not a lot of neighborhood associations,” she said.

Two navigation centers exemplify the different ends of that spectrum: 680 Bryant Street in SoMa, and 600 25th Street on the Central Waterfront.

With 84 beds, 680 Bryant sits on a triangular sliver of land between Bryant, 5th Street, and a freeway onramp. The back fence borders the dirt lot in the raised freeway’s shadow. Right across the street is the city’s largest overnight shelter, MSC-South, which served more than 340 people a day until 100 people were diagnosed with COVID-19 in April and everyone was moved out.

It is not a residential neighborhood. Historically, this landfilled section of San Francisco was home to transient populations looking for work in the maritime industry. Now, it’s home to florists served by the SF Flower Market, auto repair shops, tech startups, arts and antique dealers, and more.

Eddy, manager of an auto-body shop on Bryant, was well aware of MSC-South, which dominates the intersection. (He declined to give his last name.) He didn’t realize the Navigation Center was a live-in facility, even though his shop shares a fence with it. Eddy thought it was only used for storage. He said he hasn’t noticed a difference on the street: “It certainly isn’t cleaner.”

In the 12 months after the center opened, from December 2018 to November 2019, incidents dropped by 21% in the 500-foot radius around the center, from 231 to 183. In the control area we chose, a few blocks to the northeast, incidents increased by a slight 3%, from 183 to 189.

You can tell people that studies — including the city’s biennial point-in-time count — show most homeless were housed in SF before losing their housing. You can also tell people crime doesn’t typically go up when a Navigation Center opens. But when crime happens to them, or they have to step over poop and needles on the sidewalk, numbers often don’t matter.

James Chen, who runs an audio-video equipment shop on the corner of 5th and Bryant, also didn’t realize the Navigation Center was a longer-term homeless facility, even though his shop is across the intersection. He feels the impact of homelessness every day, especially with tents now lining the sidewalks on both sides of 5th Street. “I can’t walk to the post office safely,” Chen said recently, as he laid out hand sanitizer and masks for clients to use if they wanted to visit his shop.

An antique business in his building had its truck window smashed. They don’t plan to fix it because it’ll just get broken again, Chen said, and he expressed some choice words about “tough love” and moving all the homeless to one place, like Candlestick Point.

Another problem is the lack of a merchant’s association, says Marilyn Yu, owner of the co-working space SHARED at 739 Bryant, which she has run for seven years. “I haven’t seen any negative impacts from the center [since it’s opened],” she says, but notes that her business backs up on the Flower Market, which is open well before sunrise and keeps its property free of homeless campers.

Nominally, these merchants would be represented by the South of Market Business Association (SOMBA). SOMBA board president Harold Hoogasian wrote in an email that the group has had a spotty record in its outreach around 680 Bryant, having only recently taken on this part of SoMa after another organization dissolved.

On the waterfront

The Central Waterfront Navigation Center, with 64 beds where 25th Street dead-ends near the Bay, is a different story. It opened in 2017, and the Port of San Francisco, which owns the center’s land, last month approved an extension of the center’s lease for 5 years.

The surrounding Dogpatch neighborhood has some of the oldest houses in San Francisco, as the area escaped the heavier damage of the 1906 earthquake. Old waterfront industry is being transformed into mixed-use spaces like Pier 70 and the Potrero Power Station. The polluted bayfront stretch — Warm Water Cove Park was once known as Tire Beach — is now being reimagined as a greenspace resurgence.

The Navigation Center sits near it all. And Dogpatch’s neighborhood association was a key to the extension, voicing support more than a year ago.

Association president Katherine Doumani, a 20-year Dogpatch resident, is no bleeding heart. She is fed up with what she calls the city’s “rotating door” justice system. But she doesn’t buy into the narrative that services like Navigation Centers boost crime; in fact, she criticizes the city for not building services fast enough. “We have plenty of crime here, but it doesn’t appear to be correlated with folks that are unhoused,” she says.

If more centers open in coming months according to the city’s plan, there should be even more data to study in the future. But it seems clear now that crime levels immediately surrounding SF’s Navigation Centers — key components of the city’s homelessness strategy — have no correlation to the centers opening. We can neither blame them for rising crime nor credit them for making neighborhoods safer.

We can only credit them for giving hundreds of homeless people a situation that feels more like a home, or at least a step-up to housing and the services they need.

Whether they can keep on as currently configured in a new era of social distancing remains to be seen. But when San Franciscans show up to debate the next homeless facility, it will be important to have independent data, not just personal biases and anecdotes, at hand.

Jeremy LaCroix produced the graphics for this report. Alex Lash contributed reporting.