San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Treating a chronic condition
The coronavirus pandemic has lent urgency to the homelessness crisis in a state that has grown all too accustomed to an outrage. There’s nothing like a statewide stayathome order to underscore the dire reality that more than 150,000 Californians have no home in which to stay.
Governments’ newfound determination to get people out of shelters and other settings vulnerable to the ravages of the virus is belated in most cases, and probably insufficient, but welcome. With the aid of federal subsidies, the state has leased hotels and motels for over 14,000 homeless people exposed to or in particular danger from the virus, emergency accommodations that have been pressed into service in most counties. The recently enacted state budget includes $550 million to help cities and counties convert such lodgings to badly needed permanent housing.
California’s disproportionate homeless population was susceptible to infections even before the pandemic, as evidenced by outbreaks of hepatitis A and other diseases. Abigail StewartKahn, interim director of San Francisco’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, noted that homeless people are more vulnerable to every crisis. If society is an ocean being roiled by a storm, she said, “They’re all in the water, and we’re all in boats.”
San Francisco has leased some 2,500 rooms and instituted distancing, testing and other measures that have helped prevent a repeat of the outbreak that infected more than 100 at the city’s largest shelter in April. The Tenderloin’s sprawling tent encampments, the focus of a recent lawsuit by the UC Hastings law school and other neighborhood plaintiffs, have shrunk by more than half.
Unfortunately, the push to house homeless Californians, who account for about a quarter of the nation’s unhoused people and half those who are unsheltered, comes as state and local budgets are being strained by the virus and the related downturn. And while the federal government is contributing to the emergency housing effort, Congress has dedicated relatively little of the stimulus so far to shoring up state and municipal revenues.
The crippling of government resources is only the beginning of the dangers posed by the combination of the deadly virus and the underlying condition of California’s housing shortage and runaway homelessness. Another is the possibility that the problem will grow worse.
The sickened economy has eased the overheated Bay Area real estate market as tenants have lost jobs or settled into remote work, making some of the country’s most expensive real estate incrementally more affordable and available to rehousing programs. But with the state unemployment bureaucracy overwhelmed by nearly 7 million claims since March, lost incomes will put more renters on the brink, especially among poorer tenants who are most vulnerable to homelessness; nationwide, only about a quarter of tenants in the most affordable properties paid their full rent in June, according to one survey. And with everyone more hesitant to share housing due to the risk of spreading the contagion, those who lose their homes will be less likely to find refuge with a friend or relative.
Evictions have been paused by state and local moratoriums, but those measures are temporary and being contested on multiple fronts. Moreover, they leave accumulated rental debt in place, threatening a wave of evictions after they’re lifted. Lawmakers continue to debate measures to aid tenants further by forgiving or subsidizing rent. While that would be more humane and costeffective than swelling the ranks of the homeless, any government intervention would be hampered and complicated by the region’s grossly inflated rents.
For all the added risks of homelessness and the renewed will to house those facing the pandemic on the streets, what’s most remarkable is how little the latest crisis has changed the longerterm conditions that have deprived so many Californians of shelter.
Shortly before the pandemic struck, the governor’s homelessness task force recommended making housing a constitutional right to no apparent avail, though the Legislature is still considering making it a legal right in half a dozen years. In late January, the week before the first known coronavirus death in the Bay Area and the United States, the state Senate killed a landmark bill to boost housing production, replacing it with a package more in keeping with Sacramento’s tradition of tinkering around the edges of the housing shortage instead of taking on the local obstruction that suppresses supply and pushes rents ever higher. Even the watereddown measures face fierce opposition from antihousing forces.
With less housing per capita than nearly any other state, California entered the pandemic at a deficit of over 3 million homes and counting, with production lagging below half the estimated need. The latest regional census found a 13% yearoveryear increase in Los Angeles County’s homeless population, matching the steep growth in the Bay Area and across the state the year before. Despite the extraordinary budgets California and its cities devoted to the problem in better times, the housing shortage is the chronic condition spreading homelessness faster than any program has been able to administer a cure.