San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
SEARCHING FOR UNDERSTANDING
The pandemic has raised new questions on the crisis. Here are some answers.
Homelessness was already a confounding crisis, but the coronavirus pandemic and the economic ruin it wreaked have amplified the existing challenges and created new ones.
While housed residents hunker down indoors as much as they can, many of them struggling with unemployment, thousands of people on the street have nowhere to go and little hope of climbing out of their predicament. Even those in shelters and governmentrented hotel rooms face an uncertain, frightening future, realizing that there’s more exposure to the virus in congregate settings and that some
day, those safe hotel rooms will no longer all be available.
Ask any dozen people in the Bay Area what they think of homelessness, and you’ll get a dozen different answers. We asked Chronicle readers to submit questions about this most vexing, heartbreaking, seemingly insoluble problem in the Bay Area, and received more than 500 submissions.
Most of them raised issues in a handful of key areas. We’ve pared them down to those specific topics. Here are some answers we hope will be helpful.
The mayors and homeless policy leaders of the biggest cities in the Bay Area, including San Jose, Oakland and San Francisco, regularly consult each other about funding, shelter and housing plans and other key issues, but there is no one governmental agency that coordinates the efforts for the region.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has been encouraging regional cooperation on homeless efforts since he was elected, and this year he proposed creating a system of regional funding oversight administrators. Last year, the Bay Area Council and the California Policy Lab at UCLA both strongly recommended regionalism in studies examining the subject. However, the pandemic has put any ambitious regional approaches on hold, with attention going instead toward emergency measures until the coronavirus crisis subsides. One of the more promising efforts of late was the formation in January of the nonprofit All Home organization, which is compiling techniques and statistics to encourage Bay Areawide coordination on housing, shelter, employment and other programs for ending homelessness. The nonprofit says that, in the Bay Area, every time one homeless person is housed three hit the streets. That will not change quickly, it maintains, unless more federal support for affordable housing and poverty programs makes up for funding cut decades ago and never restored. Homebase is another nonprofit working on coordinating data and efforts toward housing and services throughout the area.
More than 35,000 homeless people were counted across all nine Bay Area counties in the federally mandated onenight tally taken in January 2019, and about 30,000 of them — 86% — were unsheltered. That means they were living on the street or in vehicles and not in homeless shelters. That bracingly high percentage of unsheltered people is reflected statewide, where the onenight count found an overall population of 151,000 with 108,000 unsheltered. Most experts say that because these counts are so hard to do, the actual numbers are probably at least double what’s reported.
The majority of those who are homeless have hit a bad patch in their lives, like a job loss or eviction, and wind up in a shelter bed or outside for a while before getting back to stability. A smaller percentage are considered “chronically homeless,” generally meaning they suffer from substance abuse or another disability and have been on the streets for more than a year. Anywhere from 20% to 40% of any homeless population fits this category; in San Francisco it’s estimated at 38%.
The 2019 count in San Francisco found that 27% of the 8,011 homeless population was LGBTQ, compared with 12% of the general population. Ethnic proportions also did not match those of the overall population: 29% of homeless people in the city are white, compared to 47% of the general population. Black people make up 37% of the homeless, though they are just 6% of the overall population. Among Asians, the percentages are 5% versus 34%, while among Hispanics, they are 18% versus 15%.
Much gets made of mental illness and substance abuse in the homeless community, and that’s attributable at least in part to the visibility of those difficulties in the hardcore street population. Statistics show that 42% of San Francisco’s homeless people struggle with drug or alcohol abuse and 39% suffer from psychological or emotional conditions.
To help the homeless avoid contracting the coronavirus,
officials have decreased the shelter populations to create social distancing and rented emergency hotel rooms for the vulnerable (those older than 60 or with underlying health conditions) or coronavirusinfected homeless people.
Several cities, including San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland, have also fenced off safe spaces for tent encampments or RVs and trailers.
Most shelters have been reduced to at least half of their usual populations, with San Francisco cutting its capacity by 77%. More than 4,500 people in the Bay Area have been moved from shelters or the streets to hotel rooms or safe parking or camping sites, and the federal government is reimbursing cities for 75% of the cost of the hotels, which eases some of the financial strain for cashstrapped localities. One of the unfortunate effects of making the shelters safer is that many clients are turned away due to the reduced space.
What will happen when temporary hotel rooms and safe sleeping sites close as the pandemic subsides?
Several plans are being prepared statewide to try to house homeless people now in emergency hotel rooms or safe sleeping tent sites, and most involve trying to buy or lease some of those hotels and financially strapped properties to use as housing. San Francisco homeless policy leaders hope to obtain at least two hotels, and nonprofits, including the Tipping Point Community, are identifying what they expect will be hundreds of vacant apartments in the city that can be rented using philanthropic donations. The argument for hotel owners will be that, with the economy still expected to be awful for months to come, leasing or selling to governmental agencies will guarantee income at a time when they’ll be hurting for customers.
Is San Francisco really a homeless magnet, particularly during the pandemic?
Several San Francisco leaders, most notably Mayor London Breed, think the famously compassionate city is attracting new street people looking for help in the pandemic. Typically about 70% of San Francisco’s homeless people were housed here before they lost their roofs — it’s more like 80% in other cities — but as early as April, Breed said she believed there was a worrisome influx throwing that figure off. No solid data to date document such an influx, and some homelessness experts say the influx may be more anecdotal than significant.
“People are showing up in San Francisco from other places and asking where their hotel room is,” Breed said. “That’s a real problem for me, because we already have a very challenging problem ... as it is.” Abigail StewartKahn, interim director of the city homelessness department, said people will be prioritized for hotels only if they were already in the city’s homeless registration system and “have roots in San Francisco.”
There have been no definitive street tallies since last year, but several nonprofit organizations report anecdotally that they are seeing rises of 25% or more in requests for help, with the assumption that at least some of those are from newcomers — though much of
the rise could also simply be from massive pandemicinduced disruption in the city’s impoverished populations.
Can cities and counties force people into treatment and shelters?
It’s incredibly hard under state and local laws to force anyone into treatment for substance abuse or mental illness, and also difficult to force someone to accept a shelter bed. New York many years ago passed a law basically forcing street people to choose between jail and shelters if pressed, but the chances of trying that approach in the Bay Area have been considered slim to none.
Police can arrest addicts, who in jail can be encouraged to enroll in rehabilitation programs. But, because the success rate for that is low — typically less than 10% — many big cities, including San Francisco, encourage diverting addicts straight to rehabilitation instead of jail. And state law meant to protect the rights of the mentally ill man
dates that someone can be locked up — temporarily — only if they are a clear danger to themselves or others. Before the pandemic, Supervisors Hillary Ronen and Matt Haney and Mayor London Breed were spearheading an effort to expand mental health and drug rehab services and facilities, but that has been hobbled by the economic crash.
How much have tent camps proliferated during the pandemic, and what’s being done about it?
The explosion of tent camps, up by more than 70% citywide, has left its mark in every major district of the city, most visibly in the Tenderloin. The number of tents there jumped 285% from January to early May, when the mayor began a program to address the problem in response to a lawsuit by residents and UC Hastings School of Law. A settlement reached in early June says 300 of the more than 400 tents in the Tenderloin must be gone by July 20, and hundreds of campers have already been moved into hotels and sanctioned encampment sites.
But the fixes haven’t eliminated the longstanding street problem throughout the city, and the spectacle of string after string of tents on sidewalks is still disheartening. Residents — and many homeless people — are afraid of catching the coronavirus from so many people packed so closely together, and city leaders who had managed to vastly reduce large encampments before the pandemic are frustrated the problem came back with a vengeance with the pandemic.
Some camps, if they are small, are being left as they are, with street counselors telling people they should follow federal guidelines and space their tents 6 feet apart. Dozens of handwashing stations and portable toilets have been installed to help those in the unmovable camps.
How have the state and local budget crises affected homelessness?
The full effect has yet to hit. Gov. Newsom and his homelessness policy advisers are sticking to their prepandemic plan of spending $750 million statewide on the issue, but because of the virus crisis they are now focusing that money on converting hotels being used for emergency rooms for the homeless into permanent housing.
The pain is coming soon, though. The economic collapse is expected to force cuts in many services crucial to assisting the homeless, from health to rental help, and as the state government wrestles with a continuously changing matrix of escalating needs and uncertain revenues, those cuts will become clearer.
Cities and counties, meanwhile, are also running deeply in the red and trying to figure out what to slash. San Francisco, facing a deficit of nearly $2 billion, has shelved many ambitious homelessness plans, including those for a safe injection site and new behavioral health beds around the city. Many city departments are being asked to cut their budgets by at least 10% for the upcoming fiscal year. Several bond measures and new taxes are being proposed for the November ballot around the region, such as a $107 million measure in San Francisco for mental health and substance use treatment facilities, but none can quickly restore the damage hammered into the economy by the coronavirus.