Care Not Cash

When Care Not Cash went to the ballot in 2002, homelessness had reached peak levels. There were 8,640 residents without homes on a given night in San Francisco, according to a biennial survey for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. That’s about 8 percent more than the 8,011 homeless residents counted during the same survey in 2019.

At the start of the decade, Dot-Com companies were swarming San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood, while elsewhere in the city, rents rose and evictions spiked. The average two-bedroom apartment in 2001 was going for about $3,500 in today’s dollars, according to a 2002 report.

A majority of progressive politicians, many without prior political experience, had swept the Board of Supervisors in 2000 — a citizen revolt to the pro-development Mayor Willie Brown, said Richard DeLeon, professor emeritus of political science at San Francisco State University. Newsom was seen then as somewhat of a pariah, DeLeon said, a centrist who had been hand-picked by Brown to fill a mid-term vacancy on the board in 1997.

Then the Dot Com bubble burst and office spaces in the city’s South of Market neighborhood started becoming vacant. Care Not Cash, Newsom’s signature issue, became a test of the city’s values.

Newsom and other city officials claimed out-of-towners were coming into San Francisco to get public assistance checks. And those that were here were likely using that money for drugs and alcohol. In one television ad for Care Not Cash, a series of disheveled men speak directly into the camera.

“I take your cash, and I buy drugs,” the commercial begins, “crack, heroin, alcohol.”

“That was pretty harmful to public sentiment around supporting real solutions,” said Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness.

Voters sided with Newsom, and the measure won with 60 percent approval. It was the boost Newsom needed to launch his mayoral campaign a few months later, De Leon said.

“It put him on the map, politically,” DeLeon said. “It certainly put a spotlight on him.”

Trent Rhorer, who has served as the executive director of San Francisco’s Human Services Agency since 2000 and oversaw the implementation of Care Not Cash, remembers a young supervisor and later mayor who seemed to genuinely care about the plight of homeless residents.

Rhorer received so many requests for information from Supervisor Newsom that he set up weekly meetings. Reports that Rhorer gave him would return dog-eared and highlighted.

“We would have these two-hour sessions ... and the meetings would just go on and on and on,” Rhorer recalled. “When he left the office, [Newsom] knew more about homelessness than I did, honestly.”

Care Not Cash officially launched in May 2004, reducing the amount of money homeless residents received from a maximum of $410 per month to $59. In exchange, program enrollees got food and a guaranteed bed at a shelter or in a single-room occupancy hotel.

When the city updated its homeless survey in 2005, it saw a 28 percent reduction in the number of homeless people compared to 2002. Friedenbach believes it’s unlikely Care Not Cash contributed to that reduction since the program didn’t create any new housing. Newsom’s predecessor, Mayor Brown, approved thousands of new affordable housing units, which Friedenbach said had just finished construction around that time and probably made more of a difference.

But Rhorer says ending homelessness was never the goal.

“It was about welfare reform,” Rhorer said. And in that way, it worked.

Once Care Not Cash began in the spring of 2004, the city immediately saw a reduction in the number of homeless people claiming benefits. In December 2003, there were 2,632 people who received assistance, which dropped to 642 in December 2007.

In Newsom's Wake

The number of people experiencing homelessness then remained relatively stable during Newsom’s tenure until it began to increase again in 2011, right around the time he left to become lieutenant governor, growing from nearly 5,700 people to more than 8,000 in 2019.

Whether Newsom’s leadership would have helped stem the increase is impossible to know, but Bevan Dufty thinks it would have helped. Dufty, now a BART board director, served on San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors with Newsom. He later served as Mayor Ed Lee’s head of homeless policy.