S.F. tally shows big spike in homeless Latinos

Many in RVs as city’s unhoused ranks fall overall

Aylin Rosales had never lived in an RV until last year.

After her mom lost her job in a cafe and family members couldn’t afford rent on their Daly City apartment, the 18year-old moved with her mother, stepdad and younger sister into an RV near Lake Merced.

They moved right next to Rosales’ older sister and her family, who live in another RV, while her mom’s cousins moved into two more campers down the road. They too had lost jobs and apartments in the pandemic.

“It is a lot different because we really don’t have our privacy,” said Rosales, who started City College on Wednesday to study nursing.

Many more Latino families fill dozens of RVs lining the busy roads around the lake. They reflect a worrying trend in San Francisco: The number of Latinos experiencing homelessness skyrocketed even as the city’s overall number of homeless people has dipped.

(While Rosales doesn’t consider herself homeless, she fits the city’s definition of unhoused.)

New city data shows homelessness among Latinos increased by 55% from 2019 to 2022, compared with a total citywide drop of 3.5%. Latinos now make up 30% of the total homeless count, although they are only 16% of the general population.

The data comes from the Point-in-Time Count, a federally mandated one-night tally of homelessness conducted every other year. The city skipped a year because of the pandemic.

Latinos are not the only ethnic group disproportionately impacted by homelessness. The city’s Black community has long been hard hit, with Black people making up 38% of this year’s homeless count despite being only 6% of the city’s population.

But the numbers among Latinos, and their share of the total homeless count, have spiked since the previous count. In both 2019 and 2017, Latinos were only 15% of the homeless count. Community leaders believe the Latino population has long been undercounted, but was more accurately tallied this year because the count’s teams included more outreach workers instead of volunteers and COVID made it harder for people to move around. The official count also increased, officials and advocates said, because Latinos were hard hit by pandemic-related job losses, and those paid in cash didn’t qualify for unemployment. That put pressure on — and in some cases forced out — people already living in overcrowded conditions due to the region’s dire housing crisis and increasing gentrification.

Data shows that when the pandemic hit in March 2020, Hispanics in the nine-county Bay Area faced unemployment at nearly double the rate of non-Hispanics. On average, the region’s Hispanic population is generally younger, less likely to have a college degree and more likely to work in service industries.

Roberto Hernandez, a Mission resident and CEO of nonprofit CANA, which organized a food bank catering to Latinos during the pandemic, said the Latino housing crisis started before the pandemic. He pointed to the dot-com boom in the late 1990s and the explosion of tech startups within the past decade that gentrified the Mission and drove up housing costs.

Many Latinos ended up moving into overcrowded housing with relatives or into garages or backyards, he said. One woman he knows rents a closet for $700 a month. In another case, 24 people share a single hotel room, sleeping in three eight-hour shifts.

Even though the official count documented a spike in Latino homelessness, it doesn’t track people in these situations.

“It’s a whole community within the homeless that’s invisible,” Hernandez said.

People were already in crisis when the pandemic hit, but when low-income service workers lost their jobs, it created a “snowball effect,” he said. Even though employment has bounced back, not everyone has returned to work — some restaurants closed and hotels aren’t calling back workers every day, Hernandez said.

“There are a lot of people who can’t pay rent to this day,” he said.

Managers at Dolores Street Community Services, which runs the only shelters that cater to Latinos in San Francisco, said they have noticed the spike — but also say this population has long been undercounted.

“All of our beds are full, and we have folks lining up outside every day waiting for a spot,” said Yesenia Lacayo, who runs the single-adult shelter on South Van Ness Avenue, where only half of the 108 beds are being used because of coronavirus concerns. “Folks get demoralized, and it breaks my heart to turn people away.”

She said a majority of the shelter guests are recent immigrants from Latin America, and three-quarters are working in some capacity.

One of the shelter’s guests is 49-year-old Jesus Luvanos, who lost his housing during the pandemic and was sleeping on the floor of a friend’s van until he scored a Dolores Street bed in June. His gig work as a painter dried up, he said, and now he can’t send money home to his wife and three children in Tijuana.

“It’s very hard without jobs to be able to help my family, or even get a room,” he said in Spanish. “I feel really bad, but there are lots of other folks on the street too.”

He said the most he can find is a day gig painting once every couple of weeks. “When the pandemic hit, jobs went down and it was bad for everyone, but I think things might be getting better,” he said. “At least I hope they are.”

Emily Cohen, spokesperson for the city’s homelessness department, said, “We know this community has been hit particularly hard by the impacts of COVID in terms of job loss.” Cohen said the city is expanding shelter in the Mission District, increasing partnerships with Latino organizations and opening up a site in the Mission for adults to connect with city housing providers.

Around Lake Merced, a group of RV dwellers — including one of the Rosales’ cousins — all lost their jobs at the same catering company when the pandemic hit. His girlfriend lost her job cleaning at a hotel.

The couple couldn’t afford to stay in their apartment after their roommates moved out and moved into the RV in April 2020. But they and their two kids feel unsafe after a drunken driver hit their vehicle at night. Fortunately, no one was hurt.

Alejandra, who asked that her full name not be used, wants more city help to find affordable housing.

“Everybody works, we just need to have the right support to get those resources, housing and jobs,” she said.

Hernandez said the wealth inequality in San Francisco is sickening and the city needs to do more to find permanent solutions for Latino homelessness by increasing housing supply and homeownership.

“We pride ourselves as a social justice city,” he said, “but the very same people who live here who are the hardest-working people, the dishwashers, janitors, hotel workers ... are the worst off.”

Mallory Moench (she/her) and Kevin Fagan (he/him) are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: mallory.moench@sfchronicle.com, kfagan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @mallorymoench, @KevinChron

Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle Jose Diaz, who lost his apartment after losing work because of the pandemic, lives in his RV near Lake Merced in San Francisco. Many other Latinos in RVs on the street are also trying to get back on their feet.

Jessica Christian / The Chronicle Mia Garcia, 10, holds her nephew Jayven Caballero, 3, while sitting in the RV she shares with her family along Winston Drive near Lake Merced in May.