It’s no surprise that San Francisco officials want to cancel this year’s count of homeless people living on city streets, in their cars, and other makeshift outdoor spaces.
The census usually happens over a single night every other January, and cities must do it to receive federal homeless services funding. Known as the point-in-time count, it relies on hundreds of volunteers who peek into tents, knock on RV and vehicle doors, and check every doorway, along with weeks of follow-up to gather information including race, sexual orientation, and mental health.
But now it’s too risky, SF officials say, with the city, region, and state hitting all-time highs for COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations each week since mid-December. San Francisco reported a record 474 new cases on Monday and 15 deaths last weekend.
Last month, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development signaled safety was higher priority than the count. Several cities including San Francisco have received waivers.
UPDATE: Soon after this story was published, a spokeswoman for the SF Homelessness and Supportive Housing Department confirmed that this year’s point-in-time count was canceled, and told The Frisc that the department will conduct a count in 2022 instead, then again in 2023.
Although flawed, the count is the main barometer to gauge progress bringing people off the streets. Sup. Rafael Mandelman, who represents the Castro, Noe Valley, and other central neighborhoods, says the data are important, particularly right now. “Homelessness in San Francisco has changed a lot in the last year, and going without that data makes it harder to make good decisions,” Mandelman tells The Frisc.
Del Seymour, co-chair of the Local Homelessness Coordinating Board, says the city can make do by taking the 2019 count of about 8,000 San Francisco homeless and estimating a 10 percent increase. “It won’t affect services whatsoever,” says Seymour, whose board provides oversight of the city’s homelessness policy and practices.
But services have been turned upside down by the pandemic. Could this be the time to rethink the biannual ritual?
Struggles over spending
Those who work with or rely on the point-in-time survey say it undercounts the homeless and takes months to produce. It also gives no insight into the fate of those counted — which, in a city that spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year to fight homelessness, doesn’t help anyone figure out what’s working and what isn’t.
The city has long struggled with homelessness — and how much to pay to fight it. Soon after her first mayoral election, London Breed said the city shouldn’t spend money on programs that aren’t working. Citing potential mismanagement, she campaigned against 2018’s Proposition C, a new business tax to funnel more than $300 million a year into homelessness services. Backed by homelessness advocates and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, though, Prop C handily won over voters.
Even during the pandemic, voters continue to approve measures that have more than doubled San Francisco’s budget for housing, shelters, and services. That’s quite a shift from 10 years ago, when the “Sit-Lie” ordinance epitomized a more punitive electorate.
But at some point the public will want to see results. The point-in-time survey suspension further underscores the question of how SF measures the effectiveness of its spending.
COVID has forced the city to account for the occupancy of emergency hotel rooms, as well as the RVs and “safe sleeping” tent sites it has set up. But this is just a half step. Where do these people end up after they exit these alternate shelters?
Focus on the chronic
One partial answer could come from local nonprofit Tipping Point Community. The group’s goal is to cut the city’s chronic homelessness in half by January 2023, a pledge it made in 2017, backed by $100 million in funding.
Their project could be seen as a test case: a system to track how many of the chronic homeless — which it defines as people without a home for at least a year, and with a mental or physical disability — are getting permanent housing, or once housed, services to keep them off the streets. Unlike the point-in-time count, Tipping Point releases updates several times a year.
“Tipping Point is asking, ‘What are you going to be doing in the next year?’ It’s an impact mentality as opposed to a bean-counting mentality.”
— Mary Kate Bacalao, Compass Family Services
Why focus on the chronic homeless? They constitute between a quarter and a third of the homeless population, based on a decade of point-in-time data. Leaving them on the streets is bad health policy, bad social policy—and because they are heavy users of emergency medical services, bad fiscal policy, according to Chris Block, executive director of Tipping Point’s Chronic Homelessness Initiative. (A 2016 Chronicle report estimated an annual cost of $80,000 to hospitalize or incarcerate one chronically homeless person.)
Keeping folks from falling back into homelessness has long been a major hurdle in the city. “We’re only taking people to 50 percent of where they need to be and then they rotate back to the street,” says Seymour.
“That’s bad for the homeless and bad for the city,” notes Block.
A complicated count
Tipping Point is both a funder and a manager of homeless programs. Its money has helped rent apartments or purchase land for housing. (It also insists on moving fast; Tipping Point’s 833 Bryant Street project, which uses prefabricated materials that reduce construction jobs, has ruffled union feathers.)
To homelessness service providers like Mary Kate Bacalao, Tipping Point is a welcome change because of its focus on accountability. “Tipping Point is asking, ‘What are you going to be doing in the next year?’ It’s an impact mentality as opposed to a bean-counting mentality,” says Bacalao, director of external affairs and policy for Compass Family Services.
For all of its promise, Tipping Point’s methods are complicated and raise questions.
To measure progress, it’s counting two different things by two different standards. First, it counts chronically homeless people who move into housing, whether it’s Tipping Point-affiliated housing or not.
Second, it counts how many housed people stay off the streets through Tipping Point programs, like rent subsidies and financial counseling. (The nonprofit calls these “prevention” programs.) This count is limited, though, to only its own programs. (“We didn’t feel we could sufficiently access data from other programs to track results reliably,” says senior planner Andrea Faiss.) What’s more, the count is subjective; it can be a judgment call whether the help is keeping someone from falling into homelessness.
Those counts are then compared with the goals Tipping Point has set by crunching past point-in-time data and predicting the future. Its latest prediction is that SF will add 1,195 people annually to its chronic homeless count in 2020, 2021, and 2022.
The nonprofit also predicts that SF will provide housing or prevent relapse of homelessness for 6,151 people over the same three years, resulting in a net count of 377 chronic homeless in 2023.
That would be a stunning reduction from the last hard count, more than 2,800 in the 2019 point-in-time survey. Mandelman says Tipping Point’s approach is helpful, but he cautions that its data is based on “pre-COVID times.”
To underscore the daunting challenge, Tipping Point reports that actual housing and prevention numbers for most of 2020 (882 people) didn’t even reach 50 percent of their goal. But Block says there’s a silver lining: “No one used to know this stuff because no one was tracking it.”
A 2021 wish list
Paul Monge, the homelessness point person on Sup. Hillary Ronen’s staff, suggests that “some sort of [street] count” could come later this year, “when it becomes safe to do so.” If and when that happens, service providers interviewed by The Frisc are eager to see these changes:
- Doing a better job counting the youth population, who “are at high risk of being targeted for trafficking, abuse, or assault” and trying to stay off the streets, says Veronica Pastore of Larkin Street Youth Services.
- Conducting the count at a time when cold and rain don’t suppress the count (and lower the funding that flows from it), says Bill Soward of ShelterTech.
- Not squeezing the count into one night, which forces volunteers to make snap judgments, says Bacalao of Compass.
Tipping Point’s use of the point-in-time data to create a narrower, deeper dive shows the downside of skipping the count this year. Block says he’d love SF to adopt something like the Tipping Point system for all homeless, not just the chronic cases — something that doesn’t just count bodies, but anticipates future trends, sets goals, and measures progress. “The future of this city depends on it,” he adds.
There’s no evidence yet that Tipping Point’s work can push the city to meet ambitious goals. But at least they’re trying to change the conversation.
“Chronic homelessness is not something the city can solve on its own, but we have to try to wrap our arms around the problem,” says Mandelman. “At least Tipping Point has given us one way of thinking about measuring a solution. And by their measure, we’re not keeping up with the pace we need.”
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.
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