With nearly every attempt at new housing and shelter for homeless or low-income residents in San Francisco, there is neighborhood resistance. The latest example is in South of Market, where the city is spending $30 million to buy and convert a 42-unit apartment building into homes for homeless people aged 18 to 24.
In a few cases, vocal neighbors have prevailed. The SoMa opponents — not so much. The Board of Supervisors voted unanimously last week to approve the purchase at 1174 Folsom Street.
San Francisco affords housing opponents many chances to appeal new developments, but this one is a conversion of apartments built two years ago. The most influence these neighbors can probably have is to help craft a “good neighbor policy” with the city, barring intervention from Matt Dorsey, the supervisor whose District 6 includes the project.
But Dorsey has already voted his blessing twice. “I’m cautiously optimistic,” he said during a July 14 hearing, adding that he trusts the city’s Homelessness and Supportive Housing Department (HSH) to “get this project right.”
The project comes at a crucial time for the city and its struggle with homelessness. Despite an 8 percent population loss during the pandemic, SF home prices have only marginally decreased. Under pressure from state regulators, SF has pledged to create 82,000 new homes this decade, more than half below market rate.
It costs just as much to build a unit of affordable housing — more than $1 million — as it does market-rate housing. Conversion of existing properties is more cost-effective, which is why the city pounced on the Folsom building.
“This property really reflects the values of what HSH is trying to do in supportive housing,” HSH deputy director for communications and legislative affairs Emily Cohen said at the July 14 hearing.
Supportive housing typically includes on-site services such as mental health care, substance abuse counseling, and job training. Since mid-2020, SF has built or created more than 2,900 units of permanent supportive housing (PSH), according to city data.
Housing first
To reduce homelessness, there is no more important “value,” as Cohen puts it, than housing. “Housing first” is a mantra for advocates, meaning problems that have led to or deepened the cycle of homelessness are more easily addressed once a person has a roof over their head. De’jon Joy, organizing director with the Coalition on Homelessness, pushed back against criticism that the building will increase drug use in the neighborhood.
“Yeah, there are some kids that will use and adults that will use,” Joy told The Frisc after the July 14 meeting. “So let’s address the first issue, which is housing.”
Nikki Ahmadi, a neighbor who started a petition against the site, has pushed to make it a “sober living space” where residents are drug tested. Sup. Dorsey, who is in recovery and supports sober living sites, has asked SF City Attorney David Chiu to get legal clarification about that possibility. State funding for the site requires hewing to “housing first” guidelines.
“Despite this situation, we do not feel supported” by Dorsey or his office, says Ahmadi, and adds that her group has not heard back from HSH about next steps.
HSH is committed to “working with the community and reflecting their input” through a working group that creates a “good neighbor policy” that holds HSH accountable, says HSH spokesperson Denny Machuca-Grebe.
The petition also asks why homelessness services must be concentrated in just a few neighborhoods, including theirs. Nikhil Gowda, who lives nearby, told The Frisc that he supports help for homeless young adults, just not at this “specific location.”
Ahmadi also criticizes the nearly $30 million cost and displacement of the building’s market-rate residents. (The city is paying $1.8 million, about $52,000 per tenant, in relocation fees.) About half the money would come from the state grant. Once open, the city expects to spend $1.36 million a year on the site.
The cost of homelessness, monetarily and civically, is significantly more impactful than any one-time purchase of a project.
Jake Price, Housing Action Coalition
The overall cost doesn’t raise red flags with one housing advocacy group that supports the project. “This stuff is expensive,” Housing Action Coalition’s SF organizer Jake Price told The Frisc. “Any opportunity to reduce the cost is welcome, but the cost of homelessness, monetarily and civically, is significantly more impactful than any one-time purchase of a project.”
Both opponents and supporters agree the city must do more to spread housing and services across the city. This is a key tenet of the city’s Housing Element, the blueprint for 82,000 new homes. Well-off neighborhoods that for decades have resisted new housing must build their fair share in the next decade. It will not be easy. Just before the pandemic, one attempt to mandate homeless shelters in every district went nowhere.
“We understand it’s not fair to concentrate in one neighborhood, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t go forward with this project,” said Price, adding that a key step to more equitable distribution around the city is a bill to cut red tape for housing for all income levels. It still needs approval from the Board of Supervisors.
Larkin Street executive director Sherilyn Adams, whose organization is a top provider of homeless youth services in SF, said the Folsom Street homes and another building near Market and Van Ness are much-needed housing “outside of the Tenderloin,” where her clients have said they don’t want to live.
Many protest, few succeed
During the pandemic, Japantown residents and merchants protests quashed plans to house the homeless in a Japantown hotel shuttered by the pandemic. The ugliest protest against homeless services came in 2019, when residents along the Embarcadero shouted down Mayor London Breed and other officials presenting plans for a special Navigation Center shelter. Despite the rancor, the center opened in late 2019.
A 2020 investigation by The Frisc showed no pattern of rising crime around new Navigation Centers, despite the specter frequently raised by neighbors. In 2022, the Embarcadero center received an extension with neighborhood support.
Just before COVID struck, the city opened its first TAY Navigation Center on Lower Nob Hill a few months after a tense neighborhood meeting, with one twist: When the usual fear of crime and drugs was raised, with break-ins at a nearby shop cited as an example, the shop owner stood up and voiced her support for the center.
The Frisc recently checked with a few neighbors of the center. Farah Khalil, who owns the U N Market across the street, calls his experience “50–50,” citing some theft and altercations that he says involve the center’s residents. (The Frisc could not verify his claims.) Khalil also acknowledges the center has brought him business and underscored that he has positive relationships with the tenants and staff.
At Sammie Cafe, also across the street, employee Lani Perez said the young residents “have never really caused any disruptions or anything.”
As long as SF provides a channel for input and appeal, there will be resistance. In the Inner Sunset, a 100 percent affordable housing project with 90 homes has triggered a fear mongering campaign that labeled the project a “high rise slum”; a failed lawsuit; and a last-ditch effort to raise environmental alarms.
A vote for oversight
There is broad agreement that SF must spend its homelessness dollars more efficiently. After a Frisc investigation last year into no-bid contracts that boosted the fortunes of the controversial Urban Alchemy and nonprofits, and a Chronicle investigation that revealed terrible conditions at several housing sites, supervisors unanimously placed a bill to create formal oversight for HSH, which previously had none, on the November ballot. Over Mayor Breed’s objections, SF voters approved it with a two-thirds majority. HSH has a two-year budget of $1.4 billion.
SF’s citywide count in early 2022 recorded a 3 percent drop in its homeless population, to 7,754. In that survey, the youth population also showed a small decrease, 6 percent, to 1,073. The one-night tally is widely acknowledged to be an undercount, even by HSH.
A deeper dive into the numbers shows that not all subpopulations have fared the same; Latino homelessness was up 55 percent, for example. The homeless are not a monolithic population, and the city tries to craft policies accordingly — like separate places for young people and families with children.
While people 24 and under are only 14 percent of the total homeless population, they are more likely than older adults to be living on the streets, as opposed to in vehicles or shelter, and to be victims of violence. In the 2022 survey, 38 percent self-identified as LGBTQ+.
From July 1, 2022 to May 31 of this year, HSH data show the percentage of homeless youth paired up with housing (19 percent) has slightly outpaced their proportion of the total population.
The city’s new five-year plan calls for more than 3,000 new units of permanent housing for all ages, more than 1,000 new shelter beds, and a 50 percent reduction of unsheltered homelessness — that is, people living on the streets — all paid for with a big budget bump.
With the smaller population and a chance to steer young people away early from the harm and deterioration of living on the streets, advocates hope the city’s efforts will make homelessness, as Larkin Street’s Adams puts it, “a rare, brief, and one-time experience” for youth.