S.F. takes new direction on homeless camps with 1-stop aid center

Sharon Albanese, who lives with her husband in an encampment on San Bruno Avenue, says she hopes the Navigation Center will offer alternatives to the streets. Sharon Albanese, who lives with her husband in an encampment on San Bruno Avenue, says she hopes the Navigation Center will offer alternatives to the streets. Photo: Brant Ward / The Chronicle Photo: Brant Ward / The Chronicle Image 1 of / 13 Caption Close S.F. takes new direction on homeless camps with 1-stop aid center 1 / 13 Back to Gallery

Justin Gember has a prison record and a hopeless sense that he’ll never trade his soggy orange tent for a place with a roof. He’s a gaunt string-bean of a man sleeping under Highway 101 near Potrero Hill with a colony of about 25 other homeless people, and every attempt by street counselors to move him inside has failed.

He’s exactly the kind of guy Bevan Dufty wants for his new effort to help the poorest of the poor get new lives.

The plan being spearheaded by the San Francisco mayor’s point man on homelessness is to create a one-stop homeless aid center in the heart of the Mission District that’s unlike any seen in America. It will be an airy complex where entire existing encampments of hard-core homeless can be moved in — tents, carts, dogs, girlfriends, boyfriends, you name it — and housed for up to 10 days while an army of aid workers finds them permanent housing.

The complex is being called a Navigation Center. And though some of its techniques have been successfully used before, particularly in Philadelphia and San Diego, no other city has tried this exact approach. It will begin in the spring with a big push in and around the rapidly gentrifying Mission District, where panhandlers and heaped shopping carts are increasingly contrasting unhappily with cash-flush techies and gourmet restaurants.

Usually, when an encampment is broken up, aid workers offer shelter beds and other assistance as the angry campers start heading for the hills. Some take the offers, but many wind up doing what happened in December when San Jose officials busted up the huge Jungle encampment — about half spread out like melted Jell-O into new camps.

Cycle of frustration

Cleanup efforts are also thwarted when campers who do land in housing feel alienated or guilty because they abandoned their street community — and they go back to it.

The new center hopes to shatter that cycle of frustration.

Overwhelmed service providers, policy leaders in other cities and street people are eager to see what happens. So are neighborhoods aching to get rid of homeless camps that have been burgeoning as tech-driven housing costs and gentrification shove them into new urban nooks and crannies.

“I don’t know how it would ever be possible to help me, and I don’t really trust the system much, but hey — if they can get me and my friends into some kind of center like they’re talking about, we might give it a try,” Gember, 33, said as he tied off the entrance to his tent on San Bruno Avenue to go forage for food.

Promising fast results

Steve Woods, 49, gestured down San Bruno with impatience. “Look, I’ve got a brother and sister-in-law in that tent right down there,” he said. “My girlfriend and I aren’t going anywhere separately. A lot of us have prison records. We support each other out here.

“We’re not easy to get inside, but let me tell you this,” Woods said. “You know what I want more than anything else? A place to live. A new start. Give me a chance for that, and we’ll talk.”

Bring it on, says Dufty along with the other city homeless-aid leaders who are assembling the center.

“We’ve listened to what people on the street say doesn’t work for them, and the whole idea of this center is to take away the reasons accepting help and moving inside doesn’t work for you,” he said as he inspected the complex’s busy construction site on Mission Street near 16th Street. “There is going to be a very low threshhold for coming in here — we’re talking no curfew, you can bring all your possessions, you can stay as a couple, bring your dog.”

Once in the center, the goal is to move people within three to 10 days to permanent rooms, rehabilitation centers, bus rides home or anything else that can lead to stable lives — and will stick.

From creating thousands of counseling-enriched supportive housing units to the periodic Project Homeless Connect daylong, one-stop help fairs, the city has long gone the extra yard to help its street people. But nothing has been that one magic bullet. The always nettling challenge has been to deal with acutely troubled people who resent the constraints of shelters, distrust government and are afraid to leave their survival routines in the street — and legally can’t be forced to take help.

If this latest attempt doesn’t work, “we’ll move on to another,” Dufty said cheerily. It’s currently penciled in as an eight- to 10-month pilot project.

Unified approach

Bending over backward to convince an indigent to take offered assistance seems counterintuitive, but studies show that moving a chronically homeless person out of the gutter actually saves cities money. According to the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness and the United Way, someone living hard-core on the street costs more than $60,000 a year in police busts, emergency ambulance rides and the like, compared with about $20,000 in a government-funded supportive housing unit with counselors on-site to provide help.

Those hard-core, long-term homeless — often suffering substance abuse or mental illness — are the ones the Navigation Center will target, not people who just lost a job and bounced temporarily onto the sidewalk.

The center will be housed in rehabilitated buildings at a closed-down school, and it’s expected to be significantly funded by private contributions. Several city agencies, including the Police Department and the Human Services Agency, will participate, along with nonprofits such as the Mission Neighborhood Resource Center and the Homeless Youth Alliance.

Key to the project’s success will be the creation this year of 500 new supportive housing units announced by Mayor Ed Lee this month. The units will not just be lumped into huge complexes, but spread throughout other developments and smaller residence hotels away from traditionally troubled areas such as the Tenderloin — and they will come with added counseling, a crucial element for helping people stay inside.

The new units are also to be partly funded by private donations, and the nonprofit HomeBase is conducting an exhaustive study to locate available spots for the city to lease.

“We’re lucky to have this site available for the center, because we want an area where there’s enough space and a level of care where we can really help people move forward,” Lee said. “If we can get a workable model from this, we’ll see if we can pitch for more funding and a new location to take it further.”

Street counselors have long said that if you can deal with whole communities instead of individuals, the whole process of getting to a stable life moves more quickly — and Dufty found this out firsthand in 2013 when the then-biggest encampment in the city, a sprawling mound of tents and trash at the Interstate 280 on-ramp alongside the Caltrain station, was broken up. All 30 campers were put up in a church auditorium for almost a week instead of just being offered housing vouchers or shelter beds, and within days all but five had been moved into permanent spots.

“It actually worked, and we want to build on that,” Dufty said.

A similar effort involving Pathways to Housing in Philadelphia has moved 450 severely mentally ill homeless people inside over six years, and the one-stop Connections Housing center in San Diego reduced homelessness downtown by more than half after it opened in 2013. But they didn’t deal with entire camps at once — that’s a San Francisco innovation.

“It’s actually a brilliant idea to bring in a displaced community of people,” Chris Simiriglia, Pathways’ executive director, said of San Francisco’s plan. “It hasn’t been tried before exactly like this.”

1 encampment at a time

Dufty estimates as many as 400 people sleep in tents and bags in and around the Mission District, which is the most critical camping region of the city. The goal is to bring them in one encampment at a time, with groups no bigger than 25 or 30 at once so aid workers can give good attention to each person. Boozing and doping will not be allowed on-site, but counselors will work on a “harm reduction” model that lets addicts draw down slowly on their habits in ways that are still being worked out.

Trent Rhorer, executive director of the city’s Human Services Agency, said speed will be of the essence.

“We don’t want this to just become a shelter for people for weeks or months,” he said. “This is not going to be an environment for 150 or 100 people at a time. It’s for smaller groups where we can really handle it.”

After helping oversee San Francisco’s primary homeless initiatives for more than a decade, Rhorer called the planned center “an entirely new thing.”

“One thing we’re trying to do is respond to the frustration we’ve been hearing from merchants, residents and employees from certain parts of the city about encampments just moving block to block and never going away,” Rhorer said.

Coordination hurdles

Homeless policy leaders across the region are eager to see how this will work, particularly in Santa Clara County, where chaos attended the breakup of the 300-strong Jungle homeless camp. Though officials say more than half of the Jungle denizens have now moved inside, the problem is getting worse — there are now 100 more encampments in Santa Clara than before the Jungle’s dismantlement.

Ray Bramson, homeless services manager for San Jose, likes the concept of one-stop help complexes such as the Navigation Center, although he warns it can be hard maintaining funding and that getting all the agencies to coordinate can be “like herding cats.” But he has high hopes.

“San Francisco’s project sounds great, and we’ll be paying attention to see how it goes,” he said. “Having that kind of targeted approach is a recipe for success.”

Kevin Fagan is a San Francisco Chronicle

staff writer. E-mail: kfagan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @KevinChron

Online extra

To see a video of a homeless camp that organizers say could be served well by the Navigation Center, go to: http://tinyurl.com/kqoc46a,