Sobering Center: 1st boost from big gift for homeless

Mayor Ed Lee, his top homelessness advisers and Tipping Point Community founder Daniel Lurie got a peek Monday at the city’s newly beefed-up medical respite center for acutely ill homeless people, but it was no typical rollout. They mostly kept their game faces on, but underneath they all were practically giddy knowing this was just the beginning of what is expected to be a $100 million tsunami of charity-funded improvements to San Francisco’s homeless programs over the next five years.

The Medical Respite and Sobering Center on Mission Street has been a key tool in helping sick homeless people since it opened in 2009, and not just because it manages to permanently house 30 percent of the people who land in its beds. It saves big money. One bed in the center, which comes fully staffed with a doctor and nurses, costs $350 a day — as opposed to $1,200 a day for a regular hospital spot.

Tipping Point gave the city’s Public Health Department $612,000 for construction to add 34 beds to the center, bringing the total to 79. Patients will start filling those spaces over the next couple of weeks. But the big story beneath Monday’s little walk-through was the rest

of the money Tipping Point is promising to hand over to the city and some of its nonprofits: $100 million over the next five years for supportive housing, mental health and a galaxy of other issues core to solving chronic homelessness.

The goal, Lurie, the mayor and his managers said, is to cut the hardest-core street population in half by 2022. Expanding the respite center was the first visible part of that effort.

“This gives us such great momentum,” Lee told Lurie as they strolled through the center. “Of all the segments of the homeless population we looked at, this is the hardest to treat. Thank you for that.”

The center sits unobtrusively near Seventh Street, and though Mission Street traffic is always roaring by, inside, the beds and clinics and meeting rooms are an oasis. Here, chronically homeless people fighting diabetes, heart disease and other conditions can recover while plans are made to house them or place them in long-term care.

“This place saves lives, and now it will be able to save even more,” said Barbara Garcia, director of the Department of Public Health, her face still looking a little like that of someone who just got a holiday gift she had no idea was coming.

— Kevin Fagan

And then there were two: The race to succeed Fiona Ma on the state’s troubled tax board just got easier for San Francisco Supervisor Malia Cohen.

Cohen’s odds shifted abruptly last week after former Assemblyman Rich Gordon dropped out, citing concerns over a damning Department of Finance audit that led Gov. Jerry Brown to call for an investigation of the board. The audit, released in March, found that several Board of Equalization members were redirecting staff to do work that was outside their Board of Equalization duties at events and conferences.

In a letter to supporters, Gordon said he no longer thinks the board should be an elected body, so it would be hypocritical for him to seek the office.

Gordon, a Democrat from Menlo Park, would have been a formidable opponent, said San Francisco political strategist Ace Smith, who is running Cohen’s campaign.

The former assemblyman’s decision to drop out “is a gamechanger,” Smith said. He noted that Gordon and Cohen would have been sparring over the Bay Area voters who form an essential piece of District Two, a coastal swath that runs from Santa Barbara to the Oregon border.

Now Cohen’s main challenger is Democratic state Sen. Cathleen Galgiani from Stockton.

Smith downplayed the findings of the audit, saying only that Cohen “has her eyes wide open about all the reforms that need to be done.”