Hotel shelter stays ending in S.F.
City scrambling to place homeless into housing
Last year, Steve Cane’s fortunes flipped: He moved from San Francisco’s streets into a free cityrun hotel room with a private bathroom, cable TV and three meals a day.
He wants to move into a permanent place, but is wary about the quality and location of the city’s subsidized housing, which he’s lived in before.
“I don’t want to be in the Tenderloin, right in the middle of drug central, and in a room that doesn’t have my own bathroom,” said Cane, who struggles with medical issues and drug use. “I can’t go through that torture again.”
As Cane worries about where he’ll end up, San Francisco faces a daunting task with a looming deadline: Find housing for him and more than 1,700 other homeless people staying in hotels before federal reimbursement for the program runs out at the end of September. The city, which opened the shelterinplace hotels at the start of the pandemic to slow the spread of the coronavirus, has pledged not to turn anyone out onto the streets who moved in before Nov. 15.
But as of Monday, the city had rehoused only 181 people out of more than 2,000 since November. Most went into supportive housing, which provides social services. The city’s new goal is to get 200 people a month out of hotels and into housing starting next month. The city didn’t say how much it would cost to reach this goal, but most costs, including salaries, are reimbursable by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The pressure is on for City Hall to make sure these folks don’t end up on the streets again after the city faced a lawsuit over an explosion of tents last year and as advocates
say the population of unhoused people has only grown during the pandemic.
Hurdles abound, including a limited number of units, a referral system that can take months to get people into empty spots and the uneven quality of supportive housing, which some people in hotels already turned down.
The city is trying new approaches and wants to give residents as many options as possible — but officials say they need to be straight about the limits of the situation.
“We need to incentivize folks ... and to be clear about the consequences that there are going to be options, these are the options that are available to you, and that, at a certain point, those options will cease to be available,” said Mary Ellen Carroll, director of San Francisco’s Department of Emergency Management, which is overseeing the rehousing program. “These are folks who have experienced trauma, this isn’t something that is necessarily easy to communicate or easy to digest, and that is really the challenge.”
Carroll said she feels “really confident” that with city departments and nonprofit partners, “together we are going to do this.”
To accomplish the task, the city recently hired Chris Block, a leader with the nonprofit group Tipping Point, as a temporary employee to run a team of around a dozen city workers. To speed up the process, the team is giving out rental vouchers with social services so people can get their own apartments and sending “batch referrals” to housing providers to place them in available units.
The city sent the first batch of 50 to the nonprofit group Delivering Innovation in Supportive Housing two weeks ago. The organization had about 40 vacancies, codirector Doug Gary said. So far, 18 have been interviewed, and of those, four people have declined housing and five have moved in, with more moves and interviews planned this week, he said.
Gary said the new approach allows the organization to more quickly match people with available units and offer them another option — in a different neighborhood, for example — if the first isn’t a good fit. Previously, the city would send one referral at a time for a specific unit. If it didn’t work out, the process would start over.
Providers pushed the city to bundle referrals during a meeting in midFebruary, Gary said.
“Unfortunately with the systems that the city has been so deeply committed to, it’s locked itself out of a lot of speed and creativity,” he said, adding that the new system is a “breakthrough.”
Providers have been frustrated at the pace of referrals over the past two years under centralized, cityrun placement systems. During that time, supportive housing vacancies have risen to 10%.
Vacancies more than doubled during the pandemic, Gary said, as the city prioritized rehousing hotel residents, worried about when federal reimbursement would end.
Randy Shaw, executive director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which runs more than 2,000 supportive housing units, said his organization received only two referrals in December.
The city has set a goal of dropping its vacancy rate to as low as 3%. It plans to do so by improving the database that tracks empty units, lowering documentation barriers to get into an open spot, funding providers so they can staff up and turn over units quickly and launching the new team. There has been progress: Shaw said referrals for his units ticked up to eight a week by midMarch.
One challenge the city faces is that supportive housing doesn’t have the same amenities as shelterinplace hotels. Early this year, the city referred 148 people to 68 available units in the Granada Hotel, where residents pay 30% of their income for a room without a private bathroom, said Beth Stokes, executive director with Episcopal Community Services, which runs the hotel. Only 51 signed leases, with some not showing up to appointments and others not wanting a unit, she said. Once the city opened up Granada Hotel spots to people living on the streets, the remaining 17 vacancies filled up quickly.
Providers and the city understand that staying in a shelterinplace hotel is “more attractive” for many and the timeline on when they had to move out hasn’t always been clear. There is now a firm end date.
“We are really trying hard to offer folks choices in the sense of where they want their home to be,” Stokes said.
Some are ready to leave. Susan Griffin was one night away from sleeping on the streets when she got into a hotel near Union Square in late October last year. She’s applying for apartments, but said her income from Social Security and a temporary job during tax season is too low to afford a marketrate apartment, but too high to qualify for the city’s subsidized housing.
“I’m saving like crazy to try to get living arrangements that are not this motel,” Griffin said. “As wonderful as it is from keeping the rain off my head, it’s not where I see myself living forever.”