Share All sharing options for: SF had a renaissance in homeless aid this decade—and it barely mattered

A look at the best (and worst) of the 2010s.

In the past decade, one San Francisco mayor vowed to end homelessness forever, and another one decided that the problem will never be fixed.

That those two conclusions occurred just two years apart reveals the only consistent thing about homelessness in the city these past ten years: At no point was a solution ever on the horizon, though SF tried seemingly everything to get there.

In 2011, the city’s biannual point-in-time homeless census counted more than 6,000 residents living on San Francisco’s streets. That was down from, say, the more than 8,000 counted in 2002, but still mostly static compared to years since, a stubborn number that, year after year, refused to significantly drop.

By the latest count in 2019, the official figure swelled to more than 8,000—and by the city’s more broad standard there were more than 9,700 people without homes in SF. But wait, it gets worse: The San Francisco Department of Health’s database even suggests that the problem is much higher, with an estimated 17,600 homeless residents citywide.

This despite hundreds of millions of dollars poured into homeless relief services every year. It would be easy to declare City Hall’s anti-homeless campaigns a complete disaster and start debating whose heads should roll.

But in a way the most frustrating thing is that, for all of these terrible indicators, much of what the city tried really did help after all.

“I think there’s a lot more to it” than the numbers alone reveal, said Jennifer Friedenbach, director of the Coalition on Homelessness, tells Curbed SF. “We have over 8,000 people in supportive housing, most of that was developed over the last decade, which is nothing to blink at.”

Though often critical of how the city frames homeless issues—”a decade ago we were coming out of a whole series of using the homeless as political wedges,” says Friedenbach—she admits that some progress has been made.

One reason any efficacy is hard to see is that relatively little of the money the city spends on homeless relief actually goes toward shelters or directly to people on the streets.

A huge majority of homeless funding is spent on housing for people who are not homeles but who surely would be if not for city resources, such as much of the city’s SRO population.

In the San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing budget for 2017 and 2018, housing and housing subsidies took up nearly two-thirds of spending. All of that spending added up to 7,403 units of housing, plus the equivalent of 961 more with subsidies factored in.

Meanwhile, services for people sleeping on the streets made up only seven percent of the budget. It seems almost obscene, and yet without the budget going toward housing, SF’s homeless population could double.

The Department of Homelessness didn’t even exist until 2016. Prior to that, no single San Francisco agency had the job of overseeing homeless programs—which, in hindsight, is appalling.

Late Mayor Ed Lee appointed Jeff Kositsky to the director’s job that year, vowed to get 8,000 people off the streets by 2020, and to build “a system that ends a person’s homelessness before it becomes chronic.”

It was a heady goal, but Kositsky—who was not available to comment this week—has yet to oversee a sweeping decline in the number of homeless residents on city streets. In fact those figures have only gone up.

In 2018, two years after the debut of the new department and its new director, United Nations Special Rapporteur Leilani Farha called the conditions on San Francisco streets a human rights violation.

“There’s a cruelty here that I don’t think I’ve seen” anywhere else in the world, she declared.

While City Hall doesn’t answer to the United Nations, Farha’s words were hard to hear. A few months after her report, Supervisor Aaron Peskin suggested that Kositsky step down. He declined.

Between 2011 and 2012, SF spent $157 million on homeless services. By the 2015-2016 fiscal year, it was up to $242 million. In the most recent 2019-2020 budget proposals, the figure hit more than $364 million. But the consensus remains that more is needed.

SF rolled out its new navigation center model of tailored homeless shelters that usher residents toward more permanent housing elsewhere (usually out of town, as it turns out) with the opening of the first center in 2015.

Unlike homeless shelters, which can be confining and in which many people don’t feel safe, at navigation centers you can bring in your spouse, your pets, and your possessions. You can also eat whenever you like and come and go at night. They also offer resources for drug and alcohol addiction.

Although generally praised, the navigation center program only has a few hundred beds available against thousands of in-need residents. Though Mayor London Breed promised to open 1,000 new beds—at present count she’s at 566—the waiting list for existing centers is up to 1,200 names.

In 2018, the city put up Proposition C, a tax on SF’s largest and wealthiest companies to help fund further homeless services. Though it passed at the ballot box, City Hall can’t touch the money collected until court disputes over the cash are settled.

Speaking before the election, Supervisor Catherine Stefani expressed skepticism, saying “San Francisco already is spending more than $300 million a year on homelessness and the problem seems to be getting worse.”

It’s a common sentiment: Where does all of the money go? Why aren’t things getting noticeably better?

Gavin Newsom, former SF mayor turned California governor, thinks he has the answer—and it’s not pretty.

Newsom came into office in 2004 in SF vowing to eliminate homelessness. But one decade later, he concluded it would never happen.

Private and public programs can end homelessness for individuals. But the problem, Newsom said at the time, is eternal, “a manifestation of complete, abject failure as a society.”

The governor added, “We’ll never solve this at City Hall.”

It’s hard to say whether he’s right. After all, last week he did announce plans to release $650 million in emergency aid to California cities and counties in an effort to combat the state’s homelessness crisis.

But now that the decade is over, there’s no doubt it didn’t prove him wrong.