Just weeks before his death late last year, Mayor Ed Lee pledged to get 1,000 homeless people off of San Francisco’s streets by the end of winter.

Tuesday was the first day of spring, and despite creating a pipeline of shelter spaces expected to open in the coming months, it appears the city has fallen well short of Lee’s ambitious goal — 689 people short, to be exact.

According to data from the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Services, new initiatives sparked by Lee’s pronouncement in November were responsible for housing just 311 people between Dec. 1 and March 15. Most of those people — 227 — were brought to temporary pop-up shelters.

In that same time period, the city’s existing network of Navigation Centers, shelters and housing services brought in 2,177 people from the street. But Jeff Kositsky, who leads the city’s homelessness department, said Lee’s mandate was clear.

“He wanted us to be genuine about how we were counting this,” Kositsky said. “This isn’t people who we were going to house normally — this was 1,000 more people housed. Homelessness is a humanitarian crisis.

“This isn’t time to spin. It’s time to accomplish.”

Kositsky is optimistic that, despite the slow start, the city will bring 1,000 homeless people indoors by summer, thanks in large part to the 357 additional beds that will become available this year at sites identified by the city as appropriate for shelters.

The city also has plans to create 67 units of permanent supportive housing at two locations by June. Since November, it has also added to its stock of medical respite beds for homeless people, opened 110 affordable housing units, expanded its available winter shelter beds, and opened dozens of beds for people facing severe mental health and behavioral challenges.

“We have a bunch of new initiatives in the works, they’ve just gone more slowly than I wished they would have, and I take full responsibility for that,” Kositsky said. “It’s my responsibility and mine alone, but sometimes these things — doing all of these real estate transactions — they just take longer than you would hope.”

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Mayor Mark Farrell said he was “committed to investing the necessary resources” toward bringing more homeless people indoors, which could mean additional funding in the city’s upcoming two-year budget.

“It’s no secret that public safety and homelessness are the two issues on everyone’s minds here in San Francisco. Those are going to be front and center in my budget this year,” Farrell said.

It was an ambitious target from the outset, one meant to reflect the urgency of the city’s homelessness crisis and to galvanize a constellation of city departments to make a tangible impact on a tight deadline.

“Mayor Lee lit a fire under us,” Kositsky said. “A lot of work has gotten done and is getting done as a result of that challenge.”

Kelley Cutler, a human rights organizer with the Coalition on Homelessness in San Francisco, said she wasn’t dispirited by the city falling short of its goal. The city’s homeless problem “didn’t happen overnight, and it’s not going to end overnight,” she said.

“Even before they put out that number, the homelessness department and the community have been working really hard at this. By putting out that goal, it was showing that the city was committing to doing even more, which is a very good thing,” Cutler said. “As long as there is a concerted effort to keep moving forward and creating more resources, that’s a positive.”

Many hard-core street campers said they hadn’t heard of any plan to bring 1,000 people indoors, but they thought it was a great idea. They quickly added, though, that the details would be tough — shepherding people indoors is usually a lot more complicated than simply offering beds.

Some street sleepers don’t like curfews or other rules they have to follow in shelters, or they don’t like being bunched together with dozens or hundreds of other homeless people. They also get frustrated that a typical stay in the more-lenient Navigation Centers only lasts about a month.

Perhaps the most pointed example of the difficulty of trying to move people inside can be found at the corner of Fifth and Bryant streets. The city’s biggest shelter, the 340-bed Multi-Service Center South, is on the southeast corner there — and directly across the street are more than a dozen soggy tents. They’ve been there for weeks.

“I stayed at the MSC across the street a couple of years ago for about nine months, but they have too many rules, and you have to sleep and hang around so close to a lot of people who have such disrespect,” said Jay Uso, 53, who’s been homeless off and on for 27 years. “I need my pot — and meth, sometimes — to stand this life outside, and they don’t like that.”

He lives in a tidy red-and-gray tent, with a white office chair at the door where he sits and watches cars grind up the Interstate 80 on-ramp a few feet away.

“I’m stuck,” he said. “All I really want is a real house, but it seems like whenever I go away to apply for it I come back here and my tent’s gone. So I stay here.”

One tent over, Heidi Hawthorne and a friend were getting ready to shoot that morning’s bag of heroin. They shook their heads angrily at the idea that 1,000 could be given roofs that quickly.

“I would love to get housing,” said 32-year-old Hawthorne. “We’re killing ourselves out here with all the drugs and stuff, but I never heard of any plan. I actually went into a Nav Center two months ago, but I left because someone stole my bike there right after I moved in, and I can’t have people stealing my stuff. I don’t know what else I can do.”

Most of the campers with Hawthorne moved to that location earlier in the winter when a longtime, bigger tent camp nearby along Fifth Street under I-80 was cleared. Lee had set the goal of putting a pop-up Navigation Center there, but so far the space is empty.

Across the street at MSC South, a line waiting to get in Tuesday morning gazed with mixed looks of pity and sadness at the tent camp while a steady rain created little streams around it. Several said they had heard of the 1,000-person plan, and they felt like grateful beneficiaries.

“I came back inside here 90 days ago, and I tell you, it’s good to be inside if you want to relocate your life into some real housing,” said Sean Prentice, 48. “They hook you up here. They got me on health coverage, SSI. It’s a decent place.

“I would wish this for everyone, and I hope they really can get 1,000 people in off the streets,” Prentice said, staring at the drenched encampment about 75 feet away. “It would be very important for a lot of people, especially bachelors like me.”