New command center seeks faster response on homeless
Given the intensifying urgency of San Francisco’s homelessness crisis, it’s perhaps fitting that the vanguard of the city’s efforts to bring people off the streets is now based in the same building where officials and first responders gather together to confront major emergencies.
For the past month, a quintet of municipal departments has been working side by side within the Department of Emergency Management on Turk Street. Their task has been to create a central hub for the city’s attempts to respond to nonemergency homelessness complaints and to better connect those living on the streets to health and housing services.
The new project is an exercise in cooperation among city departments designed to respond to and resolve homelessness-related complaints more rapidly. The San Francisco Police Department, Public Works, Department
of Public Health, Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing and the city’s 311 system make up the core of what’s been called the Healthy Streets Operations Center. But the project is also receiving support from the city controller, city administrator and the Mayor’s Office of Housing.
“Before this, each department didn’t know what the other had on the to-do list,” said SFPD Cmdr. David Lazar, who’s organizing the operation under what’s known as the Incident Command System, a widely used organizational model that spells out the steps for responding to emergency situations. “What’s better here is that we’re face to face, looking at each other all day. I don’t have to call you and wait for a return phone call, or wait for a return email. That’s the big difference we haven’t seen before.”
Now, all calls to the police or to the city’s 311 service portal about non-life-threatening homelessness issues are routed to a central command center, where a network of officials working together at the DEM assess and address the situation.
When a tent encampment, for example, is filled with people with acute medical needs, Public Health can step in and provide care while Public Works cleans up the debris and homelessness officials work to persuade people to enter a Navigation Center or other type of shelter. Public Health workers are currently administering care or making referrals to about 100 people each week.
“We wanted to customize our efforts to what’s happening at the particular location we’re dealing with,” said Scott Walton, manager of adult emergency and outreach services at the homelessness department. “We don’t want to just move people around. We’re trying to provide placements.”
Walton said that 65 to 70 percent of the people his team encounters end up accepting some form of city service, a first step out of homelessness.
The project represents a major expansion of a pilot program started last year by the late Mayor Ed Lee. It sought to apply a similarly cooperative approach to cleaning up a 100-block area around the Civic Center, which had become overrun with open-air injection drug use, drug dealing and persistent homelessness.
Over a 28-week period from June to December, Public Works and Public Health picked up nearly 274,000 pounds of trash and almost 60,000 used syringes around the Civic Center. Police made 3,258 arrests, including 637 for alleged felonies.
City Administrator Naomi Kelly, who oversaw the Civic Center pilot program, said that while the initiative hadn’t completely rid the area of its problems, it helped provide a template for what can happen “when the left hand knows what the right hand is doing.”
The project wrapped up just in time for the opening last week of a $10 million playground for the neighborhood’s growing population of families.
“Was it a total success? No. But from that, we learned a lot on what needs to happen moving forward,” Kelly said.
The new Healthy Streets initiative is focusing on five zones where tent camps frequently spring up or where street-behavior issues tend to be persistent.
Those zones include parts of the Castro, the Civic Center, the Mission, Showplace Square and the Embarcadero. Kate Howard, deputy chief of staff for Mayor Mark Farrell, said the zones were selected by Lee “based on both his own observation of areas that were of great concern to him and his conversations with department heads.”
Up until a few weeks ago, a 120-tent camp at Showplace Square was crowding sidewalks and bike lanes and littering the streets with used needles and human waste. Today, about 25 tents remain, lined up along the Dore Street alley. On a recent tour of the area, homelessness department head Jeff Kositsky said that 70 percent of the people who had been living on the streets there had been directed to Navigation Centers or other shelters.
“When I came here a year and a half ago as a supervisor, I couldn’t believe my eyes,” said Farrell, referring to the previously squalid conditions at Showplace Square.
The new mayor visited the Healthy Streets command center on his second day in office. “I asked them to go full steam ahead,” he said. “This needs to be part of a permanent solution for addressing homelessness in our city.”
As the program enters its second month, Walton, from the homelessness department, said everyone involved knows there’s a long way to go. But he’s optimistic that, with an emphasis on collaboration, the city will continue to refine its methods for addressing homelessness and cleaning the city’s streets.
“We’re still learning what we need,” he said. “It’s not just about resources, it’s learning what other departments need to be involved. Because we’re talking, we’re also seeing the gaps. It’s not like our work here is done.”