Better tracking, response sought for new homeless agency

A new report bolsters the desire already expressed by nearly every homeless services leader in San Francisco: that the city should emphasize housing over shelters and create a tracking system for homeless people as they make their way through services.

The report by the city’s budget and legislative analyst, being released Monday, comes as the city’s new Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing is taking shape, with a $221 million budget, almost 200 workers and a new director, Jeff Kositsky, former executive director of Hamilton Family Services.

Kositksy has the task of trying to care for the city’s homeless population, which has continued to grow despite the city spending between $220 million and $241 million a year on the problem and taking roughly 22,000 people off the streets since 2004.

“With the restructuring of homeless programs under a single department, the city has an opportunity now to re-evaluate the effectiveness of existing programs and identify opportunities for stronger coordination of services,” the report states. “The development of a clear policy for addressing the needs of the homeless population will be an essential first step in this process.”

Currently, two policies have largely defined the city’s response to homelessness: its 2004-14 10-year plan, which formalized the shift to a “housing first” model, and the 2002 ballot proposition Care Not Cash, which reduced the amount of cash given to homeless adults and instead invested the money in shelters and other services.

But the city lacks a single system to track people as they move among the various agencies trying to help them. Without such a system, the city can’t keep track of where homeless people are, what help they have received, and what has and hasn’t worked.

Board of Supervisors President London Breed, who requested the report, said it underscores the lack of coordination between departments.

“Each has its own set of systems in place, but they don’t necessarily overlap or seem to complement each other so they are actually effective,” she said. “That’s the frustration here.”

Breed said an individual-focused tracking system is essential.

“As more and more homeless people are on the street, we can’t keep up the pace of basically getting them housing, getting them into services without trying to make sure that leads to somewhere where they can eventually take care of themselves. We are helping more and more people, but it’s not clear that translates to eventual self-sufficiency.”

Sam Dodge, deputy director of the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, said the department is already on its way to implementing the recommendations included in the report.

“These are marching orders for the new department,” he said. “What we have set out to do is create a coherent system using data that helps people navigate to the best possible housing solutions.”

The report’s key recommendations for the department include:

• Create a single system that tracks people as they move among the various agencies looking for help. While the city has a plan to create such a system, the report says the requests for proposals don’t sufficiently outline the technical details to ensure data integration among the various agencies. Other cities, including Houston and Salt Lake City, have found great success with such tracking systems.

• Conduct regular and formal analyses that look at the needs of homeless people and identify service gaps. Currently, assessing need is done informally on an “ad-hoc and reactionary basis,” the report states. “Without a needs assessment that clearly documents where service weaknesses exist, city officials have a limited ability to understand the dynamic needs of the population and cannot ensure proper policy direction and funding for critical areas, including outreach and housing exits.”

• Change city policy to prioritize responses to homeless-related calls by the Homeless Outreach Team rather than the Police Department. It notes that most of the $37.7 million a year the city spends on outreach and responding to incidents involve police responses that do not lead to referrals to homeless services.

• Identify why variation in vacancy rates exists in shelters and develop strategies to increase occupancy at shelters that regularly have vacant beds.

• Expand rental assistance and rapid rehousing programs to serve more clients, particularly younger people and the newly homeless. Compared with permanent supportive housing, which includes on-site case managers and counseling programs, rapid rehousing and rental assistance may be more cost-effective and better suited for these groups, the report finds.

• Conduct a more robust assessment of the homeless population that takes into account their psychosocial needs to determine who should receive permanent supportive housing versus other forms of assistance. The report speculates that many of the homeless adults who left permanent housing had undiagnosed or untreated medical or mental health conditions that impacted their ability to stabilize. “Permanent supportive housing, the most expensive housing placement, is not necessarily the most appropriate place for every homeless individual,” the report says.

Emily Green is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: egreen@sfchronicle.com Twitter: emilytgreen