On June 29, more than 80 Bay Area media organizations contributed to an unprecedented wave of coverage on homelessness. SPUR, together with HandUp, hosted an evening forum, “Housing, Homelessness and the Way Forward for San Francisco,” to report on the challenges the city faces, uncover solutions and inspire action. The convened experts included: Darcel Jackson, founder of “Shelter Tech” and “Ask Darcel”; Jeff Kositsky, director of San Francisco's newly created Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing; Gail Gilman, executive director of Community Housing Partnerships; Kevin Fagan, reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle; and Kristy Wang, SPUR’s Community Planning policy director, in a conversation moderated by journalist Kim Mai Cutler.
Darcel Jackson’s opening remarks established one of the major themes of the discussion: “The solution to homelessness is to house people.” The presenters sketched out the challenge: There are 6,800 people homeless in San Francisco. The city spends $240 million per year on services, housing and policing of people experiencing homelessness. Homelessness is the number one issue of concern to San Franciscans. The suffering in the streets seems to be worse than ever, and it’s hard to see what progress has been made.
Other numbers point to steps forward: San Francisco is successfully housing an enormous number of people who need help. “This city has put 22,000 people under roofs in the last 12 years,” said Fagan, who has been covering homelessness in San Francisco for the last three decades. Jeff Kositsky, who heads up the city’s new Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, confirmed that there are fewer homeless people in the city now than there were in the 1990s. The last 10 years have brought new challenges at the state and federal levels: economic recession, growing inequality, stagnant wages, funding cuts to housing programs and urban housing shortages. Many cities have seen their homeless populations grow by 10 and 20 percent, but San Francisco has been able to limit the growth of homelessness to 3.9 percent, largely by running very effective programs to get people off the streets and into permanently affordable housing. San Francisco is home to many “housing first” programs, which prioritize stable housing as an individual’s primary need and offer that other issues affecting them can be better addressed once they are housed.
The foremost examples are San Francisco’s supportive housing providers. Supportive housing refers to programs that offer a place to live and deep rent subsidies, as well as onsite social workers, counseling, medical services, job training programs and more. San Francisco was a pioneer in providing supportive housing when the idea first came to the U.S. in the 1990s. Gail Gilman’s organization, CHP, has been building and managing this type of housing in San Francisco since 1990 and has created 1,600 units of supportive housing for formerly homeless in the city. As she told the crowd on Wednesday, this solution “provides people not just a home but also the pathway to rebuild their lives and become self-sufficient.”
One challenge for supportive housing is that the need is growing, thanks in part to the broader shortage of housing in San Francisco and the Bay Area. “I’m going to be bold and say outright that barriers to housing production are contributing to homelessness,” Gilman said. Kristy Wang of SPUR helped explain what’s happening: The creation of new housing hasn’t kept up with the number of people moving into our region. That creates competition, rising prices and pressure on housing at every income level. People who used to be considered “middle income” are now competing with lower income folks for the most affordable spaces. People whose only option is the cheapest housing are now finding even those homes have become out of reach. And people who temporarily lose their housing are finding it harder than ever to break back into the Bay Area rental market. Wang concluded that building more housing overall is key to taking pressure off of the specialized stock of housing that is meant for people who struggle to get securely housed any other way.
Producing more housing overall is also important to creating funding streams for subsidizing housing. Kim Mai Cutler, who has written a comprehensive explainer of the dynamics of housing in the Bay Area, explained why: State and federal funding for housing declined dramatically over the last generation. Cuts to federal funding for housing made by Presidents Nixon through Reagan coincided with the appearance of urban homelessness in the 1970s. In California, funding for affordable housing has dropped by 69 percent since the Great Recession, due in part to the elimination of redevelopment agencies in the state. Building housing is very expensive. The City of San Francisco has more public funds than many cities, but not nearly enough to meet the massive need. The primary local tool now for funding affordable housing is inclusionary housing programs, which require developers of market-rate housing within the city to also build and subsidize below market-rate units.
The trouble, Cutler explained, is that taking from one form of housing to give to another may result in less housing overall. It also contributes to a disappearance of units that might be affordable to people making middle incomes, as market-rate units must be priced as high as the market will allow in order to help subsidize the units that must be offered at below-market rate. Identifying new sources of public, private and philanthropic funding for creating more housing is a vital step in addressing homelessness.
According to Kositsky’s back-of-the-napkin estimate, solving homelessness in San Francisco would take a one-time $1.2 billion investment in capital and an ongoing $200 million a year to support rent subsidies and services. Kositsky and the new department are approaching homelessness on two time scales. San Francisco needs to play the long game, by developing more nonprofit-owned supportive housing, and also a short game. In Kositsky’s estimation, this means adding shelters, expanding master leasing arrangements (where nonprofits engage in long-term leases with building owners and then sublet to special populations like homeless adults), and continuing to enhance programs like Homeward Bound, which reconnects people who are homeless in San Francisco with family and friends who can offer them housing and support elsewhere.
Shelters are a particular area of focus right now. San Francisco has historically focused on permanent housing instead of shelters; as a result, the city has only 35 shelter beds for every 100 people sleeping on the streets. The city is now working on building several more large shelters, including more in the popular "navigation center" mold. In this model, people can bring all their belongings, their companions and their pets with them and stay for up to 90 days, while making use of services and receiving counseling from case managers who can help them access other longer-term services.
What about people who remain in the streets? Kositsky advocated for “the two Cs: compassion and radical common sense,” adding, “we are not going to criminalize people for living on the streets. It’s not humane or effective.” But neither is it humane to institutionalize encampments, he added. Four in five women in living in homeless camps are sexually assaulted, hundreds of fires break out, crime is frequent and some camps are being used as a front for violent criminal trafficking. It’s not fair to the homeless or the neighboring residents and businesses to call encampments an effective answer, Kositsky said. He advocated for not polarizing or politicizing this issue and instead exploring the middle ground in every discussion of housing solutions.
One audience question asked what San Francisco can learn from New York City, which according to the questioner seemed to have significantly decreased its homeless population. Not true, said Fagan and Kositsky. New York City actually has a higher per capita homeless population than San Francisco. According to Kositsky, what New York has managed to do is shelter more people — but the shelters are effectively human warehouses, located almost exclusively in the outer boroughs. People are virtually forced to go there, and there are few pathways out. “The amount they spend to maintain people in misery is ridiculous,” he said, adding that San Francisco’s model of prioritizing permanent housing over shelters is a better approach.
Gilman led the panel’s request of the audience: Support the location of homes for the formerly homeless in your neighborhood. One of the major challenges for adding more supportive housing and opening new navigation centers is where to put them. In many areas of the city, neighbors stand in the way of efforts to place homes or services for homeless people nearby. As a result, San Francisco has a significant and inequitable concentration of homeless services in a few districts near its commercial and tourist center.
As two measures to disrupt encampments head to the fall ballot, Gilman offered the idea that we need to disrupt our own system, too, by saying yes to measures to expedite the production of housing, particularly supportive housing for the most vulnerable in our midst. San Francisco must welcome that housing in every neighborhood, not just a handful of districts like the Tenderloin and SoMa. The rest of the city needs to do its part. “We are changing people’s lives,” Gilman said, “and you probably won’t even know we’re there.”