The shame endures in plain sight
We’re a long way from declaring victory
Many things have changed in the year since The Chronicle led a coordinated coverage campaign about homelessness in California.
In San Francisco, Mayor Ed Lee formed the city’s first Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing. Two new Navigation Centers — full-service, 24/7 homeless shelters — have opened in the southeast neighborhoods, and three more are scheduled to open by early next year.
There have been not one but two major public-private partnerships announced: a $30 million effort to reduce family homelessness, led by donors such as tech investor Ron Conway and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, and a welcome and well-focused $100 million effort from Tipping Point Community to reduce chronic homelessness.
One thing that hasn’t changed? The numbers and visible distress of the Bay Area’s homeless population.
In fact, in some ways, it’s getting worse.
The results of the latest biennial homeless counts in San Francisco and Alameda were sadly unsurprising to most Bay Area residents. In San Francisco, there was a slight decline in absolute numbers — the fortunate result of there being fewer homeless families and young people.
But the number of single adults living on the street has risen, as have the numbers of people on the waiting list for shelter beds.
Meanwhile, resident complaints about tent encampments and all of the problems that come with them — including needles and human feces — have skyrocketed, rising fivefold from 2015 to 2016.
Those are sobering results for a city that spent $275 million on homelessness and supportive housing over the past fiscal year.
Mayor Ed Lee says his last two years in office will be dedicated to improving the situation on the streets, and Jeff Kositsky, Lee’s director of the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, said he’s working on a long-term reduction plan using everyone’s favorite fix these days: data.
“We are going to use what we have more effectively and only spend new resources on strategic, data-driven investments,” Kositsky said. Those investments include new tracking and response systems — along with an evaluation system to provide performance
accountability.
Doing a better job of using information can be a powerful strategy. Matching individual homeless people with the services they actually need means those individuals get better care, and it also means the department gets the best bang for its buck.
But San Francisco has been struggling to defeat homelessness not for years but for decades. Silver bullets seem to be in short supply.
This is especially apparent in San Francisco, which still suffers from a shortage of low-cost housing.
The new Navigation Centers will help. So will a new program, called Moving On, that will assist some currently stable, formerly homeless people in San Francisco’s supportive housing units to find new housing on their own — thereby freeing up the scarce units for others.
But for a dramatic shift in the number of people on the streets, San Francisco would need substantial investments in low-income housing from the federal government.
“Like cities around the country, we’re dealing with an 80 percent reduction in federal spending on housing (for) lowincome people since 1978,” Kositsky said.
The current climate in Washington seems unlikely to reverse the decline. So San Franciscans should expect modest — but not miraculous — declines in the number of distressed people living on our streets.
Kositsky noted that San Francisco has seen double-digit declines in homelessness for veterans, families and young people over the past two years. The small decline in absolute numbers is also a success, he added — “while L.A., San Diego, Portland, Oakland and Seattle have all seen double-digit increases. It’s not a cause for celebration, but it’s an indication we are doing something right.”
Across the bay, Oakland’s double-digit increase is certainly a sign that the city is struggling with homelessness. The housing crisis is a large factor in the East Bay’s stark, dramatic increase for the homeless rate.
Alameda County’s biennial homeless count showed a staggering 39 percent
increase from 2015 in the number of unhoused people — 5,629 people. In Oakland, the increase was 25 percent.
Nearly 70 percent of the county’s homeless are currently unsheltered, meaning that they live in vehicles or on the sidewalk. Many of them live in one of the tent encampments that have spread out underneath highway overpasses.
From April 2014 to April 2017, the median apartment rent in Oakland grew by 60 percent. It’s no accident that 82 percent of the homeless people counted told volunteers that they had lived in the county before becoming homeless, or that the county’s cleanup crews have so many heartbreaking stories to share about throwing away the belongings of homeless people with whom they grew up.
The housing crisis has certainly exacerbated an untenable situation. But decades of underbuilding is only one of the reasons the homeless situation is anticipated to get worse before it gets better in Alameda County.
Both county officials and leadership in cities like Oakland and Berkeley appear to have been caught off-guard by the homeless crisis.
San Francisco has its problems, but being both a city and county has given officials the natural opportunity to coordinate homeless services — and dollars — across different agencies.
San Francisco has also empowered a robust network of community-based nonprofit providers for homeless services. It’s cultivated many philanthropic donors, who pay close attention to the problem.
Both of these outside factors are missing in Alameda County.
Still, it’s had the good fortune of learning best practices from other places. Elaine de Coligny is the executive director of Everyone Home, the organization coordinating countywide efforts on homelessness. Group leaders expect that a data-driven approach combined with personal outreach will help them make progress.
This fall, de Coligny said, they plan to open three coordinated entry hubs for homeless people to get their needs assessed and to be matched with resources. There will be one in Oakland, one in Hayward and one in Livermore.
“Having coordinated entry across the whole county will enable us to assess people’s needs throughout the year, instead of just during the biennial count,” de Coligny said.
At the same time, Everyone Home will also launch outreach teams — similar to San Francisco’s Homeless Outreach Teams — to assess people in the field.
The voters have also pitched in. In 2016, they approved a $585 million housing bond — of which at least $85 million was explicitly earmarked for very lowincome housing development.
“The new housing from that bond will be a few years in the making,” de Coligny said. “But between that money and our new coordinated systems, we do think it will make a difference.”
Like San Francisco, Alameda County will probably see declines in specific populations of homeless people before it sees dramatic declines overall.
That process can be accelerated through targeted services, and it’s already beginning. De Coligny said the number of homeless veterans in Alameda County declined in May. The caveat? Like San Franciscans, residents in the East Bay shouldn’t expect big changes to happen quickly.
“The problem is at a scale when we have to look at ways to solve people’s homelessness rather than just push them along,” de Coligny said. “We are unlikely to see unsheltered homeless numbers go down dramatically because of what the scale is.”
The truth is hard to hear. Homelessness is a dire problem that has plagued the Bay Area for many years. Bay Area residents have invested hundreds of millions of dollars. Our officials and our many compassionate organizations make persistent efforts to get people off of the streets every day. In many ways, they’ve made great progress.
Yet thanks to a confluence of circumstances — including a housing crisis, an opioid drug epidemic and decades’ worth of federal disinvestment from low-income housing — the distress, filth and antisocial behavior we see on our streets will continue to fester for now.
It’s not a hopeless problem. But it will require many tools, and perhaps the most important of all is political will. The enduring deprivation on our streets is a disgrace, and the leaders of this region must never lose their resolve to address it.