Tiny homes may be big for housing
What we reported:
The best way to pull the hardest-core, most visible homeless people off the streets of San Francisco is to provide them with supportive housing — rooms or apartments in buildings with counselors on-site to shepherd them through the addictions, mental or other afflictions that had ruined their lives. But the city doesn’t have enough of that kind of housing.
For years, San Francisco has had a steady population of 1,500 to 2,100 chronically homeless people, those who have lived outside for a year with a range of serious problems. But only about 300 units of supportive housing are created each year. The city has placed 14,000 people into supportive housing since 2004, and it has sent another 11,000 home to their families. But with about 450 additional chronically homeless people being added to the streets every year, it can’t get ahead of the curve.
The main trouble is money: Each supportive housing unit costs more than $400,000 to build from scratch. However, there are other ways of creating supportive housing.
Among them is “master leasing” existing buildings — landlords leasing out rehabilitated residential hotels to the city. That method has supplied much of San Francisco’s supportive housing stock over the past decade. Last year, there were about 1,000 more units available in the city that could be converted for this use.
Also promising are two techniques used in New York and other cities. One is commissioning “tiny home” stackable units that can be erected at half the usual cost. At least one developer, Patrick Kennedy, is offering to build them for free and rent to the city.
Another is called Moving On, a program that helps people who have stabilized enough to live on their own to move out of supportive housing. Some cities have been able to free up as much as 25 percent of their supportive housing units a year this way.
What has changed:
About 300 new supportive housing units have opened since last summer, and most of them were drawn from among those 1,000 available master-lease spots. The city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing was also created last summer, and made putting chronically homeless people under roofs one of its top priorities.
The Tipping Point Community charity promised in May to spend $100 million over the next five years to cut San Francisco’s hard-core street population in half. Mayor Ed Lee’s proposed budget would devote an additional $65 million over the next two years toward addressing homelessness.
Among the most promising new programs is the Moving On Initiative. Seeded with $1.2 million from Tipping Point and run for the city by the nonprofit Brilliant Corners, it began in the spring with the intention of eventually clearing out at least 10 percent of the city’s supportive housing units each year. That would be the equivalent of creating at least 650 new units annually for hard-core street people at practically no cost to the city.
What’s missing:
Kennedy’s offer to create as many as 1,000 tiny-home stackable units in San Francisco at no cost to the city, and to lease them to homeless services for $1,000 a month apiece, has made little headway. Deal-stoppers include concerns by local unions that the units would be built in China, and by city homeless policy managers that usable public space is hard to find.
Another proposal, for 100 tiny-home multiunits to be built from wood by the nonprofit Community Housing Partnership, has also stalled while the organization searches for land.
Kennedy has garnered interest from Berkeley and Los Angeles for his micro-units, and says he remains committed to crafting a deal in San Francisco. City homeless policy leaders say they are still interested in hearing proposals from him and Community Housing Partnership.
“Once we get a building done in one city, I think other things will move fast,” Kennedy said.
The city plans to add at least another 300 units of supportive housing in the coming year, with many of those likely to come through master-leasing arrangements.