ABOUT THE DATA

When San Francisco Chronicle reporters began investigating conditions in supportive housing SROs more than a year ago, tenants and staff repeatedly said they were traumatized by the frequent drug overdose deaths where they lived and worked.

To understand the scope of these fatal overdoses, The Chronicle analyzed four years of death records from the San Francisco Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Reporters categorized all accidental deaths attributed to fentanyl, methamphetamine, heroin, cocaine or other illicit drugs as overdoses.

A small number of the deaths included in the analysis were primarily related to prescription or over-the-counter medications, or involved other health ailments, like stroke or heart failure, in conjunction with drug use. Reporters did not include deaths caused by alcohol alone. The data is preliminary, the medical examiner’s office said, because new information could become available as they complete investigations into recent deaths.

Reporters cross-referenced the overdose data with the addresses of 75 city-funded SROs. Most of the buildings exclusively provide permanent supportive housing to formerly homeless people, but some have a mix of subsidized and supportive housing units. Virtually all of the deaths included a unit number or other location inside the buildings. Some of those who died could have been guests of tenants. From this data, The Chronicle identified 341 fatal overdoses inside supportive housing SROs between January 2019 and August 2022. The true number is likely higher: Many deaths in recent months were still under investigation, and people who suffered a drug overdose in one of the buildings but died in the hospital were not captured by the analysis.

To figure out where overdose deaths were occurring in the Tenderloin, The Chronicle used a neighborhood boundary created by the Department of Public Health, the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, and the Planning Department. The Chronicle also included a stretch of Sixth Street between Market and Howard streets that faces many of the same challenges as the Tenderloin and is home to a large concentration of supportive housing SROs.

The city uses a number of different boundaries to define the Tenderloin neighborhood. To account for this, reporters ran the same analysis on several different areas. In each one, they found that the proportion of fatal overdoses occurring inside supportive housing SROs ranged between 40% and 45%.