Mandelman’s homelessness tour
lessness,” he told the group. “And I’m supposed to solve it. So I need your help.”
The group laughed. But he wasn’t really kidding.
As the newly elected District Eight supervisor, Mandelman, whose mother suffered from severe mental illness and became unable to care for him, is determined to help the city’s sick and homeless population. But first, he said, he needs to understand the problem. So during the August recess, a month that supervisors often spend on vacation, Mandelman and his team have been touring mental health facilities, shelters and nonprofits around the city.
So far, his team — the “Mandelman Operation,” as he jokingly called it during a tour of Larkin Street Youth Services — has taken 15 meetings, tours and site visits around the city, with 15 to 20 more planned through the end of September. The point, he said, is to get an idea of what is and isn’t currently being done in the city.
Though he eventually hopes to integrate all this knowledge into some type of legislation, he said he doesn’t have any “grand conclusions” yet.
But he has some takeaways. The first one?
“If San Franciscans knew what was being done, both by the local government and nonprofits, they may feel a little better,” he said from the East Coast, where he is spending a few days off before getting back to work. “There are a lot of really committed public servants that are working really hard to grapple with this problem.”
About $284 million of San Francisco’s $11.1 billion budget goes toward homelessness services in the city through the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing. This is spent on housing, ranging from shelters to permanent housing units, as well as new Navigation Centers, outreach teams, mental health and job counselors, and shelter workers.
Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness, said supervisors often take tours of mental health facilities and shelters around the city, but Mandelman’s efforts are some of the most extensive she’s seen.
“He’s taking this time to really learn the system,” she said. “Its a huge eye opener ... You also get the perspective that the public doesn’t have of how hard people are trying to get help, and how desperate they are and how much they get moved around constantly by police.”
Other tours and meetings he’s attended have been with the Healthy Streets Operations Center, a project that centralized the city’s efforts to respond to nonemergency homelessness complaints, as well as with Episcopal Community Services, which helps homeless and low-income people obtain services such as housing, jobs and shelter.
Still, Mandelman said he’s not naive to the blight on the streets: While he was on his circuit of tours, his office was flooded with complaints from District Eight residents about tent camps, drug use and human waste in their neighborhoods. And while the city has more than 1,000 shelter beds, the wait lists are still in the thousands every day.
“The outreach is happening,” he said. “But is this the work that is actually going to make San Francisco more livable for neighbors and for housed people?”
Specific changes Mandelman has supported include adding more psych beds and more subacute treatment facilities for people who are healthy enough to leave psychiatric wards, but still need attention. He also supports Sen. Scott Wiener’s proposal to strengthen the state’s conservatorship program for the mentally ill, which would give counties more control over their own approaches to committing people.
If it passes, Mandelman suggested he would look for ways to go even further, particularly when it comes to dealing with those people who wouldn’t qualify for conservatorship, but are stuck looping in and out of hospitals and jails.
One of the biggest challenges, he said, is that as a politician he will be graded based on how many homeless people continue to sleep on the streets. But, he said, there are so many other issues percolating in the background, like how many elderly people cycle in and out of shelters. He said it is “unacceptable” that the city does not have a safe place for every sick and elderly person.
As he continues to search for solutions, Mandelman said he constantly thinks back to his experience trying to help his mother, who eventually became homeless and lived in a shelter: “You have to figure out what you can reasonably do, and do in a consistent way.”
Even after all of these tours, Mandelman said he still doesn’t have the answer. But he said he’s serious about helping find one.
“You have to figure out what you can reasonably do, and do in a consistent way.” Rafael Mandelman, District Eight supervisor