S.F. hotels offer rooms to isolate first responders, homeless, others

8,500 may be available this week; officials may ‘commandeer’ more

San Francisco supervisors are working on making as many as 8,500 hotel rooms available this week to homeless residents, health care workers and first responders who have nowhere to isolate during the coronavirus pandemic.

There are more than 5,000 people living without shelter on the city’s streets, leading to a “very urgent crisis” as officials struggle to keep the unhoused safe from COVID-19. Gov. Gavin Newsom has ordered residents to shelter in place to prevent the spread of the disease, but for weeks experts have worried about what that means for those who have no home to shelter in.

“Those people are unable to abide by the rules and procedures to keep themselves safe and healthy, and that puts everybody at risk,” Supervisor Matt Haney said Monday during a video briefing.

San Francisco officials sent requests for help to local hotels and received responses from more than 30 hotels offering about 8,500 empty rooms. Supervisors are working out deals with those hotels and figuring out which rooms will be usable and which won’t.

Even 8,500 rooms won’t be enough, supervisors warned, and if they don’t get more offers, they may start forcing hotels to hand over rooms.

“We have an ability to commandeer hotel rooms if we must under the governor’s emergency order,” Supervisor Hillary Ronen said. “We hope that we don’t have to.”

San Francisco officials couldn’t estimate Monday how much it might cost to rent thousands of

rooms for coronavirus quarantines, but they said state and likely federal money will be available to help.

Newsom recently pushed plans to convert hotel rooms across the state into housing for the homeless during the pandemic. The governor said last week that the state had secured 393 rooms in two hotels in Oakland to house homeless residents, and then handed over control of the initiative to local counties to implement.

Alameda County officials were set to meet Monday afternoon to plan.

“We’re working as fast as we can, as diligently as we can,” said Sgt. Tya Modeste of the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office. “And as soon as we have that information that we can put out to the public, we will.”

Santa Clara County officials also are working on a

plan to use hotel rooms as temporary housing for the homeless.

Because the state-mandated shutdown has put the brakes on the region’s tourist economy, San Francisco’s hotels are only about 5% full, Haney said. That means the city has 30,000 to 40,000 vacant hotel rooms.

Under the supervisors’ plan, the rooms would be used to house first responders and health care workers who need a place to quarantine away from families.

The rooms also would house people living on the streets or in homeless shelters that are too crowded to practice safe social distancing.

Among the city’s homeless residents, only those who have tested positive for COVID-19, who have been exposed to someone who tested positive or who are at a heightened risk of dying from the disease because they are 65 or older or have underlying medical conditions would qualify for the housing.

“We should for once in our lives do the right thing,” Ronen said. “If there’s housing available, get people into those units who don’t have housing.”

Supervisors could not offer specifics Monday on several key aspects of the program, including how long residents would be able to stay in the hotel rooms, what the rules of the program will be and how services will be provided to the residents.

“There are clearly a lot of logistical things that need to be worked out, and these things need to happen very quickly,” Haney said. “The status quo right now is completely unacceptable.”

San Francisco Mayor London Breed addressed the hotel program separately during a livestreamed media conference, saying, “We are grateful to so many of the hotels that have really stepped up to the plate to help support San Franciscans.”