Cash Crunch and COVID Scramble SF’s Homelessness Plans, Officials Say, Despite a Bigger Budget
By: Kristi Coale
Tags: Homeless, Coronavirus, San Francisco, Housing, Budget

An annual winter program providing extra shelter for unhoused San Franciscans is now being drastically reduced, and city officials say they can’t open more sanctioned tent sites. Both are somber signals that SF’s ambitions to fight homelessness are bumping into a harsher short-term reality of limited funds and space, all while a pandemic resurgence threatens to lock down the city again and overwhelm its health care system.

The scaled-down winter program, run by a coalition of faith-based services, will host 67 men at St. Mary’s Cathedral through January 31. Mayor London Breed used the announcement this week to promote her long-term Homeless Recovery Program, which is centered on a major expansion of permanent housing.

Voters boosted the plan last month by approving the business tax reform of Proposition E, as well as Proposition A, a bond that set aside $200 million for mental health services and homeless facilities. The budget will also benefit from 2018’s Prop C business tax, which until recently was tied up in court.

But this promise, and more cash to make it possible, can’t obscure a grimmer present, which officials made clear before Thanksgiving. Over the objections of many Haight-Ashbury residents, they extended the neighborhood’s sanctioned tent site for four months because, they said, San Francisco cannot afford to create more short-term shelter options.

“We are focusing on saving lives here and getting the most vulnerable off the streets with the funding we have,” said Mary Ellen Carroll, executive director of the Department of Emergency Management, during an online community meeting last week.

That means the city is heading into the teeth of a renewed pandemic surge with a skeletal congregate shelter system, a scaled-back winter shelter, and only five tent sites to take people off the sidewalks.

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What’s more, the mayor’s team wants to wind down its hotels-for-homeless leasing program, which topped out at more than 2,400 residents, and move people into permanent housing. City supervisors have pushed back aggressively, charging that there isn’t enough housing to keep them from going back to the streets.

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing announced via Twitter that $10 million in state funding would give the city “at least a 30-day extension” so that no one would have to leave a hotel in 2020.

At last night’s board meeting, supervisors delayed until next week a discussion about legislation to halt the hotel exodus.

If folks do start moving out of hotels, where will they go? The city’s top homelessness official, Abigail Stewart-Kahn, has changed her tune over the past few months. She told the SF Chronicle in September that some of the residents could be moved back to traditional shelters or tent sites, but she backtracked in an early November letter to several supervisors: “It is important to note that returning COVID-vulnerable hotel guests to congregate shelter or [tent sites] is not part of the plan.”

[UPDATE: On December 9, Stewart-Kahn said in a public meeting that the hotel program will be extended. Instead of a December 21 deadline, no one will start moving out until March, with subsequent exits staggered through October.]

A COVID winter

To alleviate winter stress in previous years, several churches would open their doors in a rotation, offering shelter to up to 100 homeless men at a time between late November and late March, with no reservation needed for a one-week stay. Officials say the system increased the city’s total capacity 5 percent to 8 percent.

St. Mary’s Cathedral will shelter 67 homeless men this winter. (Franco Folini/Creative Commons)

This year’s winter shelter will last only two months, with no walk-ins allowed. “COVID-19 health precautions require a very different model for the 2020–21 season,” said Michael Pappas, executive director of the San Francisco Interfaith Council, in a statement.

One alternative that’s not on the table is more tent sites. Officials said last week there isn’t money to create new sites beyond the current five, despite the recent good news for the homelessness budget.

‘It’s not like there was some secret plan six months ago to keep this going.’ — Sup. Dean Preston, addressing District 5 residents last week upset about the city’s extension of the Haight-Ashbury “safe sleeping” tent site.

The mayor’s team has also cited budget woes as a reason to end the hotel program. However, the city controller reported two weeks ago that, with promised state and federal reimbursement, San Francisco should be on the hook for only $10.5 million, or 5 percent, of the hotel costs this year.

Without cash for more tent villages, the Haight-Ashbury site, with space for roughly 50 tents, will remain in place, despite official promises in June to dismantle it at the end of November. “I acknowledge this [extending the site to March 2021] wasn’t the original plan,” District 5 supervisor Dean Preston said at the online meeting last week. He called the original timeline overly optimistic: “It’s not like there was some secret plan six months ago to keep this going.”

As The Frisc reported in June, some residents hoped the site would reduce tents on neighborhood sidewalks.

Two big encampments, around the Department of Motor Vehicles and at the intersection of Haight and Masonic, were cleared during the summer, but smaller groups persisted and grew until the week before Thanksgiving.

That’s when the SFPD, Homeless Outreach Teams, and the Department of Public Works came in to move the people off the sidewalks on the 1700 block of Waller Street. “I’m back to square one again,” said Christopher Dent, who lived on Waller for a few months.

Dent watched two weeks ago as city workers cleared out the items he and others couldn’t carry with them. “They come tell me to move and then take my stuff,” he told The Frisc.

City workers remove an encampment from a Waller Street sidewalk in November, just over the fence from the Haight-Ashbury’s “safe sleeping” site. (Photo: Kristi Coale)

For the housed residents on this part of Waller, the clearing and power washing were welcomed after months of dealing with the ebb and flow of tarps, bikes, chairs, rugs, and other items the people in the encampment gathered to build their own homes. There were negotiations over passage along sidewalks, along with late nights of loud generators, yelling, and fights that tested the patience of neighbors like Blake Williamson, who lives on Waller down the street from the sanctioned site. He supported it at first but is now fed up with the sidewalk scene. “We were told this site and surrounding area would get extra care with the Park police station nearby and 24/7 security,” Williamson told The Frisc, adding that he feels his calls for help are often rebuffed.

In last week’s community meeting, Captain Chris Pedrini of the SFPD’s Park Station acknowledged the frustration. “We engage as much as we can, communicate as much as we can, and negotiate to get [people on the streets] into resources. But we don’t really have a lot of teeth in what we do,” he said.

Clearly, the safe sleeping site wasn’t big enough. The fight over it is a raw example of the difficulty of fixing homelessness, which was about as intractable as a crisis can get — even before the pandemic arrived and overwhelmed city services.

Since the money has already been spent to bring electricity and water to the parking lot to make it a “safe sleeping” site, the best option for the city is to keep things where they are, DEM’s Carroll said last week. “The arrival of a vaccine will help us get back to a modicum of safety in congregate settings,” she added. “It will take some months to get there, but we have to get through this winter.”

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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