New leader expects resistance, results
One tent encampment cleared, 77 more to go — not to mention building an entire department devoted to moving thousands of homeless people off the streets.
San Francisco’s new homeless czar, Jeff Kositsky, spent an hour talking with The Chronicle’s editorial board Monday, and despite his street outreach team dismantling the biggest encampment in the city that morning, he wasn’t doing much crowing.
The task of combining the efforts of at least five city departments into the new Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing is going to take years, he warned. Clearing one camp — the first operation for his freshly created Encampment Resolution Team, is just one of many, many steps ahead.
Kositsky wants to make sure the people of the city understand that the mere creation of the department, which he took charge of officially on Aug. 15, is not going to change the city’s most vexing problem overnight.
“We’re not the department of everything wrong on the streets in San Francisco,” he said, noting that some problems, like drug dealing and prostitution — even if they at times involve homeless people — are at their core police matters rather than indigence problems. “Our No. 1 priority is we want to get people who are homeless into housing.”
And for that goal, he said, “We have many arrows in our quiver here.”
One goal is to streamline the efforts of the more than 70 nonprofit agencies that work with city government on everything from shelters to job programs. That will help get people more efficiently into drug rehab beds, mental health centers and housing.
He also intends to put up a map showing all the city’s significant homeless camps — 78 before Monday’s dismantlement of the 50-person colony near Cesar Chavez and Indiana streets — so that people can see what’s being prioritized and where.
Key to all of these efforts will be creating an integrated tracking system that will show every service each homeless person has been connected to — jail, rehab, food agency, housing and more. That can eliminate repeat tries at something that didn’t work and illuminate each person’s most severe problems so a realistic approach can be crafted to help him or her into a healthier life under a roof.
That system may take as many as two years to be fully operable, he warned. But given the success of such integrated tracking programs in Houston and Salt Lake City, the effect should be dramatic.
Streamlining of the nonprofits’ roles means some programs will be reduced, cut or combined with others, and that will meet resistance. But Kositsky, who meets weekly with Mayor Ed Lee, said he’s ready for that.
“I took the job knowing the spears would come out,” he said. “But I care about this city, and I care about the people who I see on the streets who are desperate. I’m sure I’ll get knocked around a little on the way.”