San Francisco’s homelessness chief has hired one of the field’s top guns to help the city streamline its homeless programs and better focus on getting street people into housing.

Mandy Chapman Semple was the architect of the plan that has all but ended chronic homelessness in Houston over the past three years. She did it by refining the way that city tracks its indigents as they progress through drug, mental health, housing and other services to eliminate duplication and by persuading sources of public and private funding to coordinate better.

As a result, Houston’s chronically homeless population plummeted 75 percent from 1,914 in 2012 to 467 in June.

She will be advising San Francisco’s new Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing over the next five months under an $84,000 contract with the Corporation for Supportive Housing, one of the country’s oldest nonprofits that works on homelessness issues. Semple is the New York nonprofit’s lead consultant on the project.

“What we will ask is: How can we reorganize the pieces and possibly infuse additional resources to ramp up how we move people rapidly from homelessness to permanent housing?” Chapman Semple said. “The formula really is about matching the right resources to the right subpopulations on the street.”

That may mean using the city’s 6,000 supportive housing units more efficiently, such as helping people who have become stable enough to live more independently move into less-costly affordable housing, she said. New York and Los Angeles, in particular, have gone in that direction.

“You need political will to make these refinements, and the interesting thing here is that in San Francisco, by and large, the public really has an appetite for a solution,” Chapman Semple said.

“The more technical piece of all this is that everyone has to be willing to make adjustments for how they want to achieve the results,” she said. “Figure out where there are compromises and where there are overlaps. I don’t think it is going to be easy, but given the amount of resources in this community it seems like with a few adjustments you can have more impact.”

Jeff Kositsky, director of the city’s homelessness department, is eager for the help.

“Mandy, and the Corporation for Supportive Housing, are known leaders in the field,” he said. “And even though we have wonderful programs here already, it’s useful to get more perspective. I’m looking forward to this.”

— Kevin Fagan

Email: cityinsider@sfchronicle.com, kfagan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @sfcityinsider, @KevinChron