San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
S.F. CYCLE: HOMELESS, HOUSED, EVICTED
After providing homes for S.F.’s neediest, Breed administration spent millions to kick them out
Robert Bowman scanned the aisles of a downtown Target. It was May, and the 49-year-old man with congestive heart failure was about to become homeless. He needed to buy a tent he could pitch on concrete, with fabric strong enough to withstand San Francisco’s summer winds.
He had lived on the streets before, in a life waylaid by trauma, loss and illness. But four years ago, he moved inside when the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing offered him a room at the Elm Hotel in the Tenderloin.
Bowman, though, repeatedly violated the Elm’s visitor policy and owed more than $2,000 in back rent. Now he faced eviction and an uncertain future. Standing in the Target, he spied a red Coleman tent locked in a glass case. The package showed it set up in a woodsy clearing, sun trickling through the trees.
“I’ll take that one,” he told a store employee, wondering where in the Tenderloin he would put it.
Mayor London Breed and her top deputies at the homelessness department have relied on single-room-occupancy hotels like the Elm, known as SROs, as a central solution to the homelessness crisis. Yet the Breed administration has spent millions of taxpayer dollars since 2019 to evict at least 410 people from the same SROs that prom
ised to lift them from the streets, while failing to regulate the process or prevent people like Bowman from cycling back to homelessness, a Chronicle investigation found.
The number represents about a quarter of all court-ordered evictions carried out by the Sheriff ’s Department citywide from January 2019 to May 2022, though these SROs house about 1.3% of the city’s renters. And reporters found that the scope of the problem is even larger, as countless more people are forced out of residential hotels informally or through channels the city doesn’t track.
The Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, or HSH, signs contracts with nonprofit organizations to run day-to-day operations at the SROs, including evictions. Reporters found that the city agency — which reports directly to Breed — does not require nonprofits and their subcontractors to have standardized policies for preventing or limiting evictions, and sets no rules or guidelines for when a property manager can kick out a tenant.
Under these circumstances, records show, people are typically forced out of SROs for the same issues that qualified them for supportive housing in the first place: poverty, mental illness, trauma and inability to care for themselves.
“If they’re being evicted, they are going back out to the streets … or bouncing around from SRO to SRO,” said Andria Blackmon, a case manager at the Winton Hotel, an SRO in the Tenderloin. “I haven’t seen a situation where someone was evicted and they were OK.”
To understand how evictions affect San Francisco’s effort to house the homeless, The Chronicle created a database of hundreds of Superior Court lawsuits, obtained three years of records from the Sheriff ’s Department and analyzed data from HSH. Reporters interviewed dozens of people who were in the midst of an eviction from an SRO, had faced one in the past or had been threatened with one.
They found that the city’s poorest residents have often lost their homes for falling behind on rent. Before local, state and federal laws largely barred landlords from evicting people over nonpayment during the pandemic and additional funding became available for rental assistance, nearly half of supportive housing SRO tenants who were formally evicted were kicked out for owing money.
The other half of the residents were evicted for a wide range of lease violations, from packing their rooms with clutter to assaulting neighbors and staff. In some cases, the infractions, like those Bowman has been accused of, were frequent, but didn’t appear to pose a safety threat. A significant number of other allegations, though, involved violent or destructive behavior that caused a serious risk to other tenants and employees.
Supportive housing SRO residents can be some of the city’s hardest-to-house people — and that’s by design. In 2018, the same year Breed was elected mayor, HSH adopted a system called coordinated entry. It ensured that homeless people with the most pressing issues, and those who had lived on the streets the longest, were offered rooms.
Most of these tenants have physical and mental health conditions, substance use disorders, and emotional scars from significant trauma, and often need far more support than they receive in the centuryold hotels.
Bowman said he lost his parents in a car crash when he was a child and then, in his 30s, felt abandoned by the rest of his family members after they learned he is gay. He has little income through disability benefits and suffers from bipolar disorder. After developing a potentially fatal heart condition, he relied on his small SRO room for some semblance of stability.
The most important thing for his mental health, Bowman said, is to be with his friends. But at times, the Elm’s strict limitations on visitors made that impossible without violating his lease agreement. “Part of my sanity is my friends,” he said. “I don’t have a family.”
Despite filling the buildings with high-need residents, the Breed administration hasn’t sufficiently staffed, funded or provided oversight for these SROs, many of which are plagued by vermin infestations and chronic maintenance problems, a previous Chronicle investigation found. This failure leaves frontline workers swamped, exacerbates tenants’ existing issues and allows problems to escalate.
Instead of getting the support they need, the most vulnerable residents often face eviction — and HSH offers no formal safety net to ensure they don’t end up homeless again.
Deputy Sheriff Alan Tam, who is part of the department’s Eviction Assistance Unit, said in an interview that he sometimes drives frail, elderly and disabled tenants to shelters after executing evictions from city-funded SROs.
“It would be great to have other places available to put them,” he said. “But then again, that’s what supportive housing is supposed to be.”
Over the course of two weeks, Breed declined multiple requests for an interview. After reporters offered to push back their deadline to accommodate the mayor’s schedule, a spokesperson said she would be “unavailable.” Nevertheless, The Chronicle provided Breed’s office with a summary of this investigation’s findings and asked for comment. The mayor did not respond.
In an interview, Shireen McSpadden, director of HSH, said all tenants sign a lease that clearly spells out the rules they must follow. Property managers often give residents many chances to address disruptive behavior, she said, but some people need to be removed to protect the well-being of the broader population.
“These cases are sometimes very, very complicated, and people have been through trauma and are holding onto behaviors that don’t work” in SROs, she said. “We don’t want to see anyone be evicted, (but) we know that there are circumstances that sometimes make that happen.” McSpadden acknowledged the need for more consistent eviction practices. After months of inquiries from The Chronicle, she said HSH is working on standardized eviction policies for all supportive housing providers. The details are vague and, as of this week, McSpadden had not yet seen a draft of the proposal. But she said the guidelines will include a list of resources staff members can access when problems come up, and the steps they should take when tenants break rules.
In response to The Chronicle’s April investigation, San Francisco leaders took significant steps to address the broader deficiencies in SROs. In July, the Board of Supervisors approved a ballot measure for the November election that would create an oversight commission for HSH, and Breed earmarked $67 million of her $14 billion budget for improving salaries and staffing in residential hotels, as well as for making overdue repairs to some of the buildings. McSpadden said HSH was also allotted $50 million in the current city budget for “homelessness prevention,” which includes emergency rental assistance, legal services and support services. Some of this money, she said, will go toward reducing displacement in residential hotels. The city has also expanded in-home support services for SRO residents who struggle to take care of themselves, and has launched a roving team of clinicians that will provide assistance to building staff, as well as physical and behavioral health services to tenants.
McSpadden cited HSH figures showing that in a typical year, just 2% of residents are evicted from supportive housing — a low number given the challenging population, she said.
“Permanent supportive housing, in the way it is set up, isn’t going to work for everybody,” McSpadden said. But “it is a proven and successful intervention for a lot of people. And that’s why we see very low incidences of eviction.”
The Chronicle, though, found that the eviction figures cited by HSH represent only part of the displacement: Over the past five years, housing providers have issued eviction notices to at least 4,760 additional SRO tenants — about 20% of households each year on average, before restrictions put in place because of the pandemic caused cases to drop. Housing providers filed law
suits against 1,270 people, or nearly 5% of residents per year on average.
Many of those people appear to have left without a court fight or after striking a deal with property management to leave by a certain date in exchange for the lawsuit being dropped. The city does not track how often these cases occur.
What is clear is that the displacement from SROs undermines the city’s goal of fixing its homelessness crisis. People like Bowman, who could be housed, return to the streets.
***
In 2007, when Robert Bowman was in his mid-30s, he moved into a six-bedroom home in Antioch that his family owned. He said he was helping to pay off the mortgage, and hoped to gain equity in the property, but then the economy and housing market collapsed.
He lost his job and said he could no longer afford the $2,400 monthly payments. With little money and nowhere to live, Bowman decided to move to San Francisco, where he envisioned finding acceptance. For months, Bowman crashed with friends and slept in shelters.
Soon the Human Services Agency — a predecessor to HSH, which was created in 2016 — offered Bowman a room at the Coast Hotel (the name has since been changed to the Crosby Hotel). The SRO in the Tenderloin is operated by the nonprofit Episcopal Community Services, the second-largest supportive housing SRO provider in San Francisco.
Supportive housing SROs typically outline a number of rules about visitors in their lease agreements. Tenants can have people over only during established visiting hours, and are allowed a limited number of overnight guests each month. Everyone who enters the SRO must have a valid ID and check in with a desk clerk. If tenants break these rules too frequently, they can lose all visitor rights for 30 days.
Bowman struggled to adhere to the Coast Hotel’s restrictions on guests. Growing up, he said, “We always had people come over; we’d have big cookouts. That’s just what I’m used to. It’s a tough change to go from a normal life to an institutionalized one.”
In less than two years, Bowman violated the guest policy multiple times, according to court records. John Stewart Co., at the time contracted by Episcopal Community Services to manage the hotel, moved to evict him. Episcopal, which has overseen a relatively high rate of evictions compared with some other supportive housing nonprofits in recent years, declined to speak with The Chronicle.
Bowman left, eventually moving into a tent in the Dogpatch neighborhood with his boyfriend, Bryan Fikes.
Then, in 2018, an outreach worker from HSH successfully placed him at the Elm Hotel, also operated by Episcopal Community Services. Bowman used his general assistance income to pay $318 in monthly rent.
But the Elm had similar guest rules to the Coast. And Bowman allowed Fikes to stay in his room without permission, among other alleged violations. Within four months, Bowman was served with another eviction suit.
Although the vast majority of the complaint focused on Bowman’s alleged failure to follow the visitor policy, Caritas Management Corp., which has a contract with Episcopal to manage the Elm, also accused Bowman of selling “illicit drugs outside the building” on one occasion. In court filings and interviews, Bowman denied the allegation. “That’s not true,” he said.
When Caritas tried to remove Bowman from the building in September 2019, a judge dismissed the motion, saying Caritas “failed to present sufficient competent evidence.”
Internal HSH emails obtained by The Chronicle revealed that Caritas, which oversees more than 1,400 supportive housing SRO units in San Francisco, does not have an “express eviction policy” at the properties it manages. Instead, each building can decide when to pursue an eviction “based on its tenant population and the staffing and services available for that building or program,” according to an April 22 email from Julius Wilson-Kermah, the agency’s director of property management, to David Kim, Episcopal’s senior director of asset management.
Over the course of a month, The Chronicle sent emails and left voicemails for Devesh Patel, the president of Caritas. Reporters also called and emailed the property management company’s general line. They did not receive a response to any of these inquiries.
In October 2020, Bowman received a new eviction notice. Caritas had lodged 18 additional complaints against him, court documents show.
Caritas once again accused Bowman of violating the visitor policy, including by bringing guests into the building whom the property manager had banned. Caritas also cited Bowman for fighting with his boyfriend in a hallway, putting a new lock on his broken door and damaging the building’s front gate by yanking it too hard. The nonprofit said Fikes had gotten into “heated verbal arguments with residents.”
The Elm’s goal, according to its city contract, is to help tenants “improve their health and retain their housing.” During Bowman’s time at the SRO, the building was budgeted to have two case managers for 80 tenants — a ratio nearly 3 times worse than federal recommendations of 1 to 15.
Because of high turnover, Bowman had several case managers at the Elm. He said he lost trust in them after the property manager’s first attempt to evict him. Even when he was on the verge of losing his home, Bowman said, his case manager did not help him find another place to live.
Bowman called the Eviction Defense Collaborative, a cityfunded organization for people who can’t afford legal services. His lawyer helped him strike a deal: Bowman could stay at the Elm if he promised to follow the rules for a year. If he broke them, the property manager could swiftly remove him without a trial.
Often referred to as “behave and stay” agreements, these settlements are a common strategy of supportive housing providers, attorneys and nonprofit directors told The Chronicle. HSH says the goal is to give residents facing eviction an opportunity to change their behavior. But some tenants told The Chronicle they felt set up to fail: The agreements typically last for a year and can include a range of rules unrelated to the reason for eviction. Bowman was familiar with these agreements, having entered into one with Caritas the first time it had served him papers, just after he had moved in. He felt he could navigate it.
He signed the settlement, promising to follow the rules.
***
The Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing and the nonprofits it contracts with say evictions are pursued only as a last resort, when residents create dangerous situations or repeatedly fail to correct destructive behavior.
But a Chronicle review of city data and hundreds of lawsuits revealed that residents have frequently been evicted for nonviolent infractions or because they’ve fallen behind in rent. In other cases, tenants were kicked out for behavior stemming from physical or mental health conditions — issues that social workers say could often be addressed through more robust support.
To better grasp why hundreds of people have been displaced from supportive housing, Chronicle reporters created a database of 210 eviction lawsuits filed since 2016. State law allows public access only to records of evictions in which the landlord won the case within 60 days, so a limited subset of records was available. Most of the cases reviewed by reporters were default judgments, meaning residents failed to respond to the complaints within five days and were evicted automatically, without being able to defend themselves in court.
The total number of evictions in supportive housing SROs has sharply dropped in recent years, largely because of laws that prevented nonprofits from kicking people out over rent and city leaders’ desire to keep people inside during the pandemic. But as those protections wane, defense attorneys worry that evictions will return to preCOVID levels.
Nearly half of the suits reviewed by reporters cited late rent. Building managers kicked some people out for owing just a few hundred dollars, while others fell thousands of dollars behind in rent before losing their home. Both nonprofit directors and eviction defense attorneys said these cases often involved additional violations not detailed in the lawsuits.
In 2016, a judge ordered the Sheriff ’s Department to remove a man from the Knox Hotel on Sixth Street who had defaulted on a payment plan for the two months of rent he owed. Court records show that the man — a military veteran with posttraumatic stress disorder — pleaded for more time, saying the legal process was “extremely overwhelming and confusing.”
“If I am evicted tomorrow I’ll be homeless,” the man wrote. A judge pushed the date of the eviction back several times, but eventually sheriff ’s deputies showed up at his door.
The other half of the evictions reviewed by The Chronicle were because of “nuisance violations.” Some were cases like Bowman’s, in which tenants were accused of habitually breaking rules — violating visitor policies, failing to keep their rooms clean, arguing with staff and neighbors, or barring pest control companies from entering their units.
Even with this breadth of cases, HSH provides no guidelines for when a supportive housing program should pursue eviction. Moreover, city contracts reviewed by reporters contain sparse, vague language on how nonprofits should attempt to keep people housed.
In these contracts, staff members are required to offer on-site services to tenants showing signs of instability “within a reasonable timeframe.” They are encouraged to “find creative ways to engage with tenants to prevent housing loss” and take a “housing retention approach to lease enforcement.”
Notably, HSH does not require nonprofits — or the property managers hired as sub
contractors — to adopt standard written eviction prevention policies. Some agencies include guidelines in their training manuals, outlining steps staff members should take to try to resolve problems and to keep people housed. But Caritas does not have a written eviction policy, something HSH appeared to discover only when inquiring with the property management firm about Bowman’s eviction, emails obtained by The Chronicle show.
On April 19, an HSH program supervisor wrote to a senior director at Episcopal, asking for a copy of the Elm Hotel’s eviction policy. Episcopal looped in the property manager at the Elm, Tai Anthony, who responded on April 22, saying: “There is no formal written policy for evictions. Acts of violence and threats of violence are automatic (to) send the resident to legal for eviction.”
Wilson-Kermah, the property management director for Caritas, said in the April 22 email to Episcopal that it was important for each program to have some discretion over evictions because the buildings each serve unique populations. WilsonKermah said Caritas would be open to working with its nonprofit partners to develop formal policies at its SROs.
With no clear direction, evictions vary broadly from address to address. Some nonprofits and programs rarely evict tenants, while others are much quicker to pursue legal action. The Henry Hotel on Sixth Street, for example, has evicted at least 26 residents from its 121 units since 2019, records show. The SRO — also operated by Episcopal and managed by Caritas — serves chronically homeless people with disabilities.
In this patchwork system, tenants and staff told The Chronicle they are sometimes confused over why people get evicted.
One case manager said she has a client who is being kicked out for cursing at a front-desk employee while under a “behave and stay” agreement. Meanwhile, a social worker recalled an SRO resident who repeatedly assaulted other tenants, even throwing an elderly man out of his wheelchair — but never faced an eviction lawsuit.
McSpadden, director of HSH, said she hopes the policies her department is developing will create more consistency around evictions. But she added that property managers are ultimately responsible for how to respond to lease violations.
These nonprofit providers, McSpadden said, are “very much trying to keep people in their units,” but sometimes evictions are unavoidable.
Indeed, many of the eviction lawsuits reviewed by The Chronicle concerned serious behavioral issues that put other tenants’ health and safety at risk. In these cases, residents threatened or assaulted people with weapons, destroyed their rooms and set fires inside the buildings. But some nonprofit directors say a shortage of other long-term care programs and the city’s failure to provide SROs with proper funding and support has magnified these problems.
Shortly after taking office, Breed told a local radio station that she was “really excited” about coordinated entry, the new system that prioritized housing for the most vulnerable people. She said it would help those struggling with homelessness get the support they need in a streamlined way.
Yet the Chronicle investigation published in April found that the Breed administration did not subsequently increase funding or staffing for most SROs. Counselors working in some hotels had caseloads of up to 85 residents, far from the 1-to-25 ratio that HSH officially recommends in agency guidelines. (After the Chronicle report, Breed earmarked $62.4 million in the current budget to lower caseloads and increase salaries.)
Because case management services are voluntary, counselors can’t force clients to take medications, seek substance abuse treatment or access other services. Housing providers said they often see no other option but to file an eviction suit when people refuse to engage with them — threatening to send the people with the most intensive needs back to the streets.
“Those cases are my saddest cases. Those are the things I feel the worst about,” said Anne Quaintance, executive director of Conard House, a nonprofit that operates several SROs for formerly homeless people experiencing mental health issues. “We need new solutions, but they’re not there.”
Taxpayers fund both the defense and prosecution of evictions from supportive housing.
Officials estimate that the city spends an average of $4,500 to defend a tenant, a process that can stretch for months. The cost of pursuing an eviction is somewhat murkier: Financial records from Tenderloin Housing Clinic, the largest operator of supportive housing SROs, show the organization spent an average of nearly $2,000 per eviction suit in 2019.
HSH declined to provide similar records for other nonprofits and said the agency does not track how much money its contractors spend on evictions. Other supportive housing providers said it is not uncommon to spend $10,000 to $20,000 to litigate a complex case.
McSpadden defended the cost of litigation as a “fairly low amount” compared with the $160 million a year that the city directs toward its permanent supportive housing programs. Still, taxpayers have spent millions of dollars on evictions in recent years — money that many lawyers, nonprofit directors and advocates for homeless people contend would be better spent addressing the underlying causes of the evictions.
In March, John Stewart Co., the property management firm, filed an eviction lawsuit against a woman at the Bayanihan House on Sixth Street for allegedly hitting and threatening residents, playing loud music, cursing at staff members, and using homophobic slurs. She was given several chances to correct her behavior, the suit alleges, but was evicted after she slapped a former resident in a wheelchair, and called a neighbor a “bitch” and another tenant an “asshole.”
In a written statement to the court, the woman and her attorney detailed a string of events in an effort to explain her behavior: Over the previous year, she said, her mother had taken her own life and her son and grandson had been slain. The woman said she was in chemotherapy for cancer and had multiple disabilities that caused mood swings. The man she slapped, she said, had blamed her for her son’s death.
She provided the court with records showing she was in anger management, as well as a note from her health care provider that said she was processing her grief from the catastrophic year. If she lost her home, she wrote, she worried her progress would be undone. She was evicted anyway. Jennifer Wood, a vice president of John Stewart Co., said she could not discuss the case because of privacy concerns. In general, Wood said, the property management company seeks to balance the needs of an individual with the needs of the community. “We only file a lawsuit if there is a direct health and safety threat to other people in the building,” she said.
Reporters tried to contact the woman evicted from the Bayanihan House, reaching out to her attorney and a friend, but neither knew where she had gone. Presumably, they said, she was back on the streets.
***
Around the same time that he signed the settlement agreement, Robert Bowman began to feel very ill.
He had not felt well for a while, but now his ankles, feet and stomach swelled. Even while resting, he gasped for air. His doctor diagnosed him with congestive heart failure, an incurable disease that can only be managed and, according to studies, within five years kills about 1 in 4 people Bowman’s age who suffer from it. Bowman, who found himself dozing off throughout the day, said he was terrified by a doctor’s warning that some people with congestive heart failure fall asleep and never wake up. He didn’t want to die alone at the Elm Hotel.
He leaned on his friends, many of them currently or formerly homeless gay men. Bowman allowed Fikes, who was in the process of becoming a registered live-in aide, to move into his room, where he kept tabs on Bowman’s medications and made sure he was resting and eating regularly. Sometimes Bowman’s friends who didn’t have homes asked to sleep on his floor, too.
After years of struggling with homelessness himself, Bowman said he had a hard time turning his friends away. Some of them had been violently assaulted on the streets. He usually said yes when they asked to stay with him. In return, his friends ran errands for him; Bowman’s
heart condition made it increasingly difficult for him to get around the city.
Just before Bowman’s “behave and stay” agreement was set to expire, Caritas said in court that he had breached it. Bowman had not paid about $2,300 in back rent and legal fees, Caritas said, and had also continued to flout the visitor policy, racking up roughly 80 violations over the previous year. Almost all of the infractions were for not signing guests in and out at the front desk, having people over after visiting hours, and allowing banned people into the SRO.
“The volume of activity is way beyond normal or acceptable behavior,” an attorney for Caritas wrote in an April email to Bowman’s lawyer.
Bowman, who said the hotel manager had barred his closest friends because he had previously failed to sign them in, fought the eviction. There were no complaints of his guests being violent toward staff or other residents, he said in a legal declaration. Many of his writeups were trivial, he asserted in court records, including one instance when a friend came into the Elm for one minute without being signed in.
In a bid to prevent Bowman from returning to the streets, a caseworker at the Eviction Defense Collaborative asked to speak with the counselors at the Elm to find a solution to the conflict. But Caritas’ attorneys denied the request, saying they were “not willing to agree” to the meeting, court records show.
Had the case managers been allowed to speak, there was a “far stronger possibility” that the parties could have resolved the issue, Bowman’s attorney said in a legal filing. “This is supportive housing,” the attorney wrote, and Caritas had “blocked the defendant from getting support.”
On April 14, the court sided with Caritas. Bowman would have to pack up his things.
HSH typically offers no next steps for tenants kicked out of city-funded SROs. On-site support staff are supposed to help residents achieve a “successful transition out of the program” when they leave, city contracts state. But most people return to the streets or emergency shelters, according to case managers, attorneys who represent these residents and the Sheriff ’s Department.
But another Bay Area county has shown that, even when a resident struggles profoundly in supportive housing, homelessness doesn’t need to be the result.
In 2015, using public and philanthropic funds, Santa Clara County set out to house 200 of its highest-need residents, similar to the population moving into San Francisco’s SROs through coordinated entry. The participants in the program, called Project Welcome Home, were the highest users of medical or mental health services; they frequently spent time in jail or homeless shelters.
But unlike in San Francisco, Project Welcome Home’s tenants in Santa Clara County received robust support from a behavioral health clinician, a harm reduction specialist and a peer counselor — each with a caseload no higher than 15 people.
Even with this high level of support, the county-funded nonprofit provider, Abode Services, anticipated that Project Welcome Home residents would present challenges. Many tenants have difficulty shedding behaviors that helped them survive outside — such as constant vigilance and hoarding — but cause problems inside.
Recognizing this, Abode rented several vacant units for tenants struggling in their current housing, ensuring they would have a place to live while they looked for their next home. Abode also hired staff members whose sole focus was to work with landlords to try to resolve issues and, when necessary, help tenants relocate.
Under this system, 86% of participants in Project Welcome Home remained housed for several years, according to an independent UCSF study that had been required by the program’s contract and was published in 2020. Tellingly, most tenants weren’t successful at first: Almost three-quarters moved at least once after racking up complaints or running into problems in their apartments. Some residents moved as many as 10 times.
“Folks that are living on the streets that have really complex health, mental health, substance abuse needs aren’t expected to be successful in housing on the first try,” Vivian Wan, chief operating officer of Abode Services, said in an interview. “People need multiple chances. … We really didn’t give up on them.”
In San Francisco, no such formal program exists. Nonprofits sometimes try to transfer tenants to other buildings “when something isn’t working” to prevent an eviction, said Emily Cohen, a spokesperson for HSH.
But when it came to Bowman, the agency offered no safeguards to ensure that he didn’t return to homelessness. Fearing that his severely ill client would die on the streets, Bowman’s social worker through the Eviction Defense Collaborative scrambled to secure him a room in a privately run residential hotel in the Mission District. Using a rental assistance program, the social worker ensured that Bowman could live there rent-free for up to three months.
When the time runs out, though, the private room will cost more than Bowman can afford. And the hotel is in an unfamiliar neighborhood, far from friends and his doctor. Because of his bad experiences at the Crosby and the Elm, Bowman said, he thought he’d be setting himself up to fail. He was convinced he’d be better off living on the streets of the Tenderloin.
And so Bowman sold his laptop for about $500 to a man who worked at a convenience store off United Nations Plaza. He used some of the cash to buy the $70 tent at Target.
On a bright Wednesday morning in May, he sat in a folding chair in his bare room as a stream of neighbors came to say goodbye. They drank soda and picked through the few remaining belongings that wouldn’t fit into a storage unit he’d rented.
The sound of pounding footsteps was heard down the narrow hallway of the Elm. A friend popped into Bowman’s room to deliver the news: The sheriff ’s deputies had arrived.
***
When asked about evictions from city-funded SROs, Mayor Breed and her top deputies in the homelessness department point to a statistic: 2%.
Self-reported data from nonprofits show that roughly 660 people, or 2% of tenants each year, on average, were evicted from these hotels from 2017 to 2021, even as pandemic-driven restrictions caused cases to sharply drop. Breed and HSH tout that figure as proof of the supportive housing program’s success.
But reporters found that an untold number of tenants are forced out of SROs through informal channels and other avenues not tracked by the city. While HSH counts an eviction only when a judge has ruled in favor of the landlord or the Sheriff ’s Department has been ordered to remove a resident, these de facto evictions occur when people leave before that point, under the threat of eviction.
HSH used to try to track some of these departures as part of an annual report provided to the mayor and Board of Supervisors. But it stopped in 2019, the year after Breed took office. Cohen of HSH said the additional information was tedious to collect and prone to errors, and went beyond what city law required. However, the move stripped taxpayers of insight into the true scope of displacement in supportive housing.
From 2017 to 2021, housing providers issued eviction notices to at least 5,420 tenants in city-funded SROs — 8 times the number of people officially kicked out. These notices served as a warning: If the tenant didn’t pay rent or correct other lease
violations, the property manager could pursue legal action, which happened in about 1,270 of the cases.
An untracked number of these residents voluntarily left their units because they did not understand they could fight the eviction, or weren’t mentally equipped to do so, according to interviews and city reports. Others signed agreements with property managers to leave on their own to keep the evictions off the books, hoping to protect their chances of securing housing elsewhere in the future.
Rita and Wesley Magnenat signed such an agreement to leave the Crosby Hotel by Aug. 31. They received an eviction notice after Wesley got into a physical fight with a neighbor last year, which ended with the neighbor going to the hospital for a cut on his arm. The couple, who said they were threatened by the other resident and were acting in self-defense, are preparing to be homeless.
“We have nowhere to go,” said Rita, who is disabled and uses an electric wheelchair. “It’s scary. … I can’t be homeless. I can’t do that again.”
City records from 2018, the last year that HSH attempted to track de facto evictions, provides a limited window into the practice: 55 SRO tenants “voluntarily surrendered their unit during eviction proceedings” that year, according to the agency report. Hundreds of additional tenants who were not in the middle of an active lawsuit either abandoned their rooms or left for unknown reasons; it is not clear if some of these residents “self-evicted” after receiving a notice.
Regardless, none of these cases counted toward HSH’s official tally of 172 evictions in city-funded SROs that year. In other words, at minimum, 1 in 4 functional evictions was overlooked.
Meanwhile, some nonprofits counsel staff to encourage tenants to move out during litigation, after other efforts to prevent a formal eviction fail. Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corp., which operates hundreds of supportive housing SRO units, states in its training manuals that workers “should explain the consequences of a recorded eviction and can encourage residents to surrender the premises,” according to records obtained by The Chronicle through the California Public Records Act.
Blackmon, the Tenderloin Housing Clinic case manager, estimated that about half of the people who were forced out of the buildings she has worked in over the past three years have left without Sheriff ’s Department intervention — and therefore were not counted as an official eviction. At least 131 people have been officially evicted from the provider’s buildings since 2019, sheriff ’s records show.
“Some people feel automatically defeated, and they have been through this before and know that they should just leave,” Blackmon said. “Some people don’t even try.”
Officials at HSH say the city’s official eviction rate of 2% is accurate, even though the figure doesn’t capture people who leave during litigation or abandon their units after receiving an eviction notice. By investing in additional support services — including more physical and mental health care, higher salaries for case managers and more manageable workloads — they hope to see that number drop.
“We want to make sure that we’re being proactive and keeping people in housing when we can,” McSpadden said. But in a small number of cases, “it takes a few tries for somebody to be in permanent supportive housing before it really sticks.”
It’s true that many people threatened with eviction from city-funded SROs have in the past been ejected from another placement. Of the 210 lawsuits reviewed by The Chronicle, at least 30 involved tenants who appeared to have previously been evicted from supportive housing. Some residents went through two to three placements, each time getting kicked out for similar behavior.
In 2012, John Stewart Co, then a subcontractor of Episcopal Community Services, evicted a man from the Mentone Hotel, mostly for failing to keep his room clean and free of clutter. He went to live in a tent under a freeway before HSH placed him at the Baldwin Hotel, where he was again evicted in March by the Tenderloin Housing Clinic for failing to maintain “acceptable housekeeping standards” and damaging his room, according to court records and news clips.
A 2020 survey by the San Francisco advocacy group Coalition on Homelessness, done with the help of academic researchers and shared with HSH, found that nearly 1 in 5 homeless people in San Francisco previously lived in supportive housing. Many were evicted or abandoned their units under the threat of eviction. Although the survey had a relatively small sample size, it found that Black residents were twice as likely to be kicked out as white residents.
“The problem is bigger than we know,” said Scott Weaver, supervising attorney for the Eviction Defense Collaborative. “And the city has to know that.”
***
A sheriff ’s deputy said good morning to Robert Bowman. He and another deputy crowded into the doorway of the thirdfloor unit in the Elm Hotel. Three more stood guard in the hallway, one of them holding a shotgun that fired less-lethal “bean bag” rounds.
“Everyone needs to get out,” the first deputy said.
Bowman replied, “We’ve been waiting for you.”
He calmly stood and left the room, carrying his tent and a tarp. Fikes trailed behind, wearing a backpack containing Bowman’s heart medication. The deputies followed the two men down to the lobby and then out of the building.
“Good luck,” one said, shutting the heavy metal security gate. The sun beat down on Bowman and Fikes as they stood outside the Elm, wondering where to go next.
Heading west on Eddy Street, Bowman pushed his electric bike, which no longer worked. He stopped at the end of each block to catch his breath. His face was puffy, and fluid was building in his legs. “Did you take your pills today?” Fikes asked.
Bowman is prescribed a diuretic that allows his body to expel excess liquid. Without it, his lungs would become choked, making each breath a struggle and increasing his odds of a stroke or heart attack.
“I haven’t taken them since yesterday,” Bowman replied. The stress of the eviction had made his health less of a priority. He was also reluctant to take his medication because it made him need to go to the bathroom frequently, he said. And now he
didn’t have one.
After about 30 minutes of wandering the Tenderloin, Fikes found a mural-lined thoroughfare between Geary and O’Farrell streets known as Veterans Alley. The sidewalks were lined with discarded mattresses and trash. A small community of homeless people lived there, some of whom Bowman knew from his time working as a cook at an emergency shelter.
As Fikes began setting up the red Coleman tent, Bowman leaned against the wall, looking exhausted, his jeans clinging to his swelling legs. “Take your pills,” Fikes said. Bowman ignored him.
In the next few days, Bowman deteriorated in the Tenderloin alleyway.
He didn’t think he’d be able to manage the side effects of his medication outside, so he stopped taking it. His legs became so swollen that he could barely pull his sweatpants over his ankles. His back and kidneys ached, and just getting out of the tent left him gasping. He said it was the “worst I’ve ever felt, and the worst I’ve ever been.” After about a week, Bowman realized he was too sick to live in a tent, so he went to the SRO in the Mission that the Eviction Defense Collaborative had secured. The room was the size of a walk-in closet. Graffiti marked one of the walls, and the smoke detector was covered in a black trash bag.
The SRO had even stricter rules than the Elm, prohibiting any guests. Fikes crashed with a friend in the Castro. He brought Bowman food every few days, but they saw each other less and less.
Sometimes Bowman went to the Tenderloin to sleep in a tent with friends, just to be around other people. Then, earlier this month, he developed pneumonia. He spent a few days in the hospital recovering.
Sitting in his small room last week, Bowman said he wished he had done a better job of following the rules at the Elm. If he could do it over again, he said, he would do things differently.
His rent at the private hotel is covered through Sept. 15. He doesn’t know where he will go after that. And he isn’t sure he will live that long.
“I’m so depressed, lonely, by myself,” he said. “I don’t want to die in here.”
Joaquin Palomino and Trisha Thadani are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: jpalomino@sfchronicle.com, tthadani@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JoaquinPalomino, @TrishaThadani
“We have nowhere to go. It’s scary. … I can’t be homeless. I can’t do that again.”
Rita Magnenat, who with husband Wesley is being evicted from the Crosby Hotel as of Aug. 31