Point man on homelessness tries to mend ‘broken people’
You might say Bevan Dufty has the most difficult job in San Francisco’s city government. Certainly it is the most thankless. He is director of Housing Opportunity, Partnership and Engagement or HOPE.
Dufty, 60, needs a lot of hope in his job. He is the city’s point man on homelessness.
He is in charge of the most intractable of the city’s many problems. He knows the scope of the problem and can rattle off the numbers in an instant: There are 6,436 homeless people in the city, he says. There are about 3,400 on the street, 1,150 in shelters, 1,800 in jail.
Two thousand of the street people are hardcore homeless. They have drug problems, mental problems, health problems. “They are broken people,” Dufty said.
They represent what he calls a new model of life: “people who have failed or been failed.” Family life didn’t work for them, or jobs, or school, he says. So they are on the streets. There are 45 homeless camps around the city.
San Franciscans are angry about the homeless, and Dufty hears about it all the time, especially in the past two weeks, with columns in The Chron- icle. “I’ve had a crappy week,” Dufty said, looking the reporter right in the eye.
He offered a morning tour of one corner of his world — the area around 16th and Mission streets. It’s only two blocks from hip Valencia Street.
The tour began at the Navigation Center on 16th. This place was pretty much Dufty’s idea, a beacon of hope where homeless people can stay while they navigate toward some kind of home, a room in a hotel maybe.
They can bring their partners, their dogs, their shopping carts full of baggage to the center. There is free food, television, showers, a laundry room, a place to sleep and professional help. The average stay is 30 days.
The morning of the tour was sunny and the atmosphere was upbeat; 57 clients were on hand that day. Dufty thinks the Navigation Center is a big step in the right direction. In the three months it has been in operation it has served 89 street people.
We took a walk, up Mission Street to the BART station plaza. The reporter counted 11 homeless folks there, some camping, others merely waiting out the day. Sixteenth Street is tough and dirty. We saw a woman wearing a T-shirt that said “All Stressed Out” and pushing a shopping cart containing a stuffed dog. Two police officers were talking to a man who had passed out on the street.
“We offered services,” one cop said. “He declined.” They drove on.
Two people were sitting at Capp Street, a block off Mission, a rough-looking man and a small woman. He asked for money and Dufty gave him a few coins. The man got up and drifted off. Dufty talked to the woman and she began to tell her story in a soft voice. Dufty had to lean closely to hear.
Her name is Shelli, and she used to be a nurse, she said, a native San Franciscan, born and raised. Something went wrong with a house her family had. It wasn’t clear what happened, but she ended up on the street. She’s been out there for two years, and she has two shopping carts and a husband. They sit together on the sidewalk most every day.
Dufty told her about available programs. He thought they could get the two of them into the Navigation Center.
“It would be perfect for you,’’ he said. But there are papers to fill out, and Shelli has no identification, no Social Security card, no address. Nothing. Though help is there, there are rules and forms, and it is complicated. Though Shelli is not invisible — she is on Capp Street nearly every day — officially she doesn’t exist.
The key to getting Shelli and her husband off the streets is to get them a home in a low-rent hotel that’s under some kind of city contract or management. Dufty thinks that is the solution. “I think we can do good things,” he said.
Mayor Ed Lee’s budget for next fiscal year includes $14.5 million to acquire 500 rooms for people without homes. That would bring the city’s budget for homeless services up to $196.9 million next year. That sounds like a lot, but it is only 2 percent of the city’s budget, which is nearly $9 billion.
Dufty is a true believer; he’s optimistic and he wants to help. “I wholeheartedly believe that we can end homelessness,” he wrote in an e-mail. “By that I mean making homelessness episodic and no longer chronic or pervasive.’’
But there will be a long road before that happens. On his way back to City Hall, Dufty was stopped by a panhandler outside the 16th Street BART Station. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I gave all my change away.”