San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Concerns raised over homeless housing
Residents at a Mission Bay condo complex are raising alarms over what they say are hundreds of violent and disturbing incidents at a recently opened permanent supportive housing site across the street.
Located midway between the Giants’ stadium and the Chase Center, HomeRise at Mission Bay is a 141-unit, four-story housing project run by the nonprofit HomeRise for the formerly homeless. It opened in late 2022 to great fanfare, touted as an example of a modern facility in a new, mixed-income neighborhood away from the Tenderloin, the location of most housing projects for the formerly homeless.
However, calls to 311, 911 and HomeRise’s front desk staff have skyrocketed to more than 1,166 service calls — 656 of them police-related — since opening, according to data from the San Francisco police Southern District Station, which shared it with Supervisor Matt Dorsey’s office. The station is adjacent to HomeRise.
“This is causing a great deal of pain for neighbors and HomeRise residents,” Mission Bay resident Deanna Terzian said Thursday during a tense hearing on the issue at City Hall. “Fixing this location of HomeRise at Mission Bay is critical because we need a model that can work successfully.”
Many elected San Francisco officials have long complained that the city warehouses its most troubled residents in the Tenderloin, mostly in single-room occupancy hotels where addiction, poverty and mental illness are pressing concerns. Mayor London Breed and others have advocated to place more formerly homeless people in other areas of the city to help them escape the grip of the Tenderloin. But placing those buildings in affluent, resource-rich neighborhoods like Mission Bay comes with its own challenges, and proposing new supportive housing can often draw the ire of nearby residents.
Supervisors pressed the Department
of Homelessness and Supportive Housing Thursday on its strategy for ensuring safety when it opens supportive housing sites across the city.
HomeRise “is literally adjacent to the public safety building, so this should be the safest block in town,” said Dorsey, whose district includes Mission Bay. “Instead, it is, honestly, a public nuisance.”
HSH spokesperson Emily Cohen countered the idea that supportive housing sites lead to increases in crime. She pointed to a 2018 study by the UC Berkeley Goldman School of Public Affairs on shelters in San Francisco that showed they had “no effect on neighborhood crime” or property values, and that instead visible homelessness decreased.
The vast majority of supportive housing sites operate without complaints. Cohen said police data shows crime in a quarter-mile radius of other sites did not increase between six months before and after the sites’ opening. HSH cited three sites where the number of incidents reported to police went down by between 12% and 28%.
Permanent supportive housing is “the most effective and evidence-based solution to chronic homelessness,” Cohen said, drawing heckling from the audience.
About 160 of the service calls related to HomeRise were priority A, which the department says are emergency calls that “require a paid response because there may be an immediate threat to life or a substantial risk of major property loss and damage.” Incidents residents have complained about include people openly doing drugs, a man who broke his window and left glass on the sidewalk, and a man who masturbated outside the HomeRise building. The Southern District’s report says there were reports of 121 fights in the past 14 months — 20 of which involved either a gun or a knife.
Marcel Davis, senior interim director for resident services at HomeRise, told supervisors that the incidents in question involve just 3% of HomeRise tenants. Some of the calls for service and to the front desk came from residents at the Madrone, a building across the street that opened in 2011 with home prices from $1 million for a one bedroom to up to $2.9 million for a three-bedroom, two-bath unit. The nonprofit has been working with Madrone residents and HomeRise tenants to ensure that the neighborhood is safe, Davis said.
During Thursday’s hearing, furious Mission Bay and South of Market residents criticized
HSH officials and others, demanding that HomeRise evict troublesome residents of the Mission Bay site. They called for safety measures to prevent the same concerns from popping up at a soon-to-open site for youth experiencing homelessness at 1174 Folsom St.
Supportive housing providers and supporters raised concerns about the framing of Thursday’s hearing, saying that they have been advocating for more investment in staffing, medical and mental health services, and clinicians to better help the few residents who cause problems.
The hearing became heated at times with heckles, boos and hisses interrupting public comment and prompting Supervisor Catherine Stefani to demand order in the chamber.
In light of the concerns, Dorsey told city officials he wants full-time private security for all supportive housing sites. Cohen told Dorsey it could cost $60 million to $70 million a year to provide full-time security at all such housing sites in the city. Cohen also said she’s concerned with using private security to address the concerns since security guards, unlike supportive housing staff, often are not trained in crisis de-escalation. As of midMarch, HSH said it had about 13,000 supportive housing slots.
One provider said she was concerned about the wrong message being sent at the hearing. Lauren Hall from the Supportive Housing Provider Network — whose members operate more than 11,000 units in San Francisco — said thousands of supportive housing residents in the city are “thriving and doing well.” She criticized participants in Thursday’s hearing for “othering” residents of supportive housing.
“This hearing focused on a small number of residents that highlighted the system’s shortcomings and created a false narrative that (permanent supportive housing) as a whole is dangerous,” Hall said.
“Fixing this location of HomeRise at Mission Bay is critical because we need a model that can work successfully.”
Mission Bay resident Deanna Terzian