San Francisco gets $100 million boost to reduce chronic homelessness
San Francisco is about to get a $100 million infusion of private donations to help address its most unrelenting challenge: chronic homelessness. The monetary contribution, significant as it is, might not be the most important contribution the city will be receiving in this initiative by the poverty-fighting nonprofit group Tipping Point Community.
After all, San Francisco learned long ago that money alone will not bring an end to homelessness. The city spends about $250 million a year on the issue, and still the presence of people living in tents, beneath underpasses and on sidewalks remains pervasive. Scores of nonprofit organizations are engaged in the cause of preventing and managing homelessness.
It is of no disrespect to the individuals within the city who are trying mightily to help our fellow residents without homes to conclude that doing more of the same is not good enough.
Enter Tipping Point, with its goal of reducing chronic homelessness by 50 percent in five years.
Tipping Point has established itself as skilled at raising money — it already has raised $60 million toward its goal on homelessness — but vigilant in demanding and tracking results. Rather than pour $100 million into a city-county government that has yet to get a good handle on the effectiveness of the many private and public programs it funds, Tipping Point plans to operate as an outside force working in collaboration with City Hall.
“We’re in charge of the $100 million,” Tipping Point CEO Daniel Lurie explained in a meeting with The Chronicle last week.
Its effort is both audacious and focused. It will be aimed at the 1,700 to 2,000 San Franciscans classified as “chronically homeless,” defined as someone who has been on the street for more than a year and has a mental or physical disability. Tipping Point has a three-pronged approach to the problem: Creating more housing units, both with new development and optimizing existing residential buildings. One obvious barrier: It takes five years and $500,000 to build each unit of supportive housing. One of this campaign’s goals will be to pinpoint regulatory barriers that can be lifted to bring new units online faster.
Attacking the causes of homelessness: especially focusing on the child welfare, criminal justice and mental health systems.
Boosting the capacity of the public sector, especially in areas such as the use of data.
As Lurie pointed out, its outsider status will allow Tipping Point and the nonprofits it enlists to be more nimble than the government bureaucracy in experimenting with new approaches. It can identify and try best practices that then could be incorporated into the city’s strategies.
It was heartening to hear the city’s homeless czar, Jeff Kositsky, welcome and encourage the Tipping Point initiative. He praised it as an “unprecedented commitment” with a “bold goal attached to it.” Kositsky, appointed by Mayor Ed Lee, has positioned himself as a change agent. The expansion of Navigation Centers for people emerging from homelessness is showing promising results.
Still, there is a searing need to address the chronically homeless with the greatest underlying challenges — typically addiction or mental illness — who consume a disproportionate amount of available resources and often live in the most dire conditions. The city estimates each costs the city about $80,000 a year in issues ranging from hospital visits to jail time. To focus on their plight is a matter of saving money and saving lives.
Now he has a partner with the will and the means to help take on San Francisco’s challenge of the times.
“We have seen too many people on the streets suffering . ... It’s time we draw a line in the sand. Things need to change.” Daniel Lurie, CEO, Tipping Point Community