Breed’s remark could hurt S.F. Boast about breaking law might spur federal audit
San Francisco Board of Supervisors President London Breed bragged publicly about breaking a federal law so that 179 homeless families could be placed in subsidized housing, an audio recording obtained by The Chronicle shows.
Breed said she had circumvented federal guidelines during a meeting of the Hayes Valley Neighborhood Association on July 28, 2016, which was attended by police officers and other city officials.
“Police officers, please close your ears,” Breed says on the recording. “We broke the law to get those 179 formerly homeless families in public housing. We did not follow federal guidelines.”
A Chronicle review of San Francisco Housing Authority records showed that the city did not, in fact, break any laws in 2014 when it placed the
families from San Francisco’s shelter system into formerly boarded-up public housing dwellings that had been remodeled at a cost of $2 million. Breed, who grew up in public housing and persistently advocated for the money, never explains in the recording how she skirted the rules.
In an interview Wednesday, San Francisco’s former housing czar, Bevan Dufty, said he and Breed had been frustrated that the Housing Authority was leaving units vacant and not giving priority to homeless people.
“So the decision was made to work on the city’s homeless family list,” he said, meaning that families from that list, which is compiled by the nonprofit Compass Family Services, would be offered public housing. “Some of those families were on the Housing Authority wait list, and some of them weren’t.”
Dufty later backtracked and said that no rules had been broken. The Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development said it’s “standard operating procedure” for social workers and case managers to put homeless families on the Housing Authority’s wait list “immediately.”
Pressed about her statement in the recording, Breed replied, “I have never been afraid to push the envelope. The truth is, our 1968 fair housing laws are not meeting the needs of San Francisco during this tremendous housing affordability crisis . ... I will always stand up for our values, and housing 179 homeless families was absolutely the right thing to do.”
However, Breed’s public remarks — which several city officials dismissed Thursday as mere bravado — appear to expose the city to risk at a time when San Francisco is fighting the federal government on multiple fronts.
“We may get in trouble one day, but the fact of the matter is 179 formerly homeless families are housed because we invested $2 million into empty units that were empty for years,” Breed said at the neighborhood meeting.
Breed is a front-runner in the June 5 race for mayor. She took over as acting mayor after Ed Lee’s death of a heart attack on Dec. 12 and was replaced last week, when the board chose Supervisor Mark Farrell to serve as mayor until the election.
The restoration of public housing units for those 179 homeless families has become part of Breed’s political platform. She touted it in a 2016 opinion piece for the San Francisco Examiner, published when she was running against tenant activist Dean Preston for re-election to her district seat. Breed also lists the $2 million rehabilitation as one of her legislative accomplishments on her campaign website for mayor.
After the audio recording became known, city officials scrambled to prove that the Housing Authority had not, in fact, violated the Fair Housing Act — which bars all forms of housing discrimination — when it placed the homeless families in the newly remodeled public housing units. Phone calls between city departments began Wednesday afternoon and continued Thursday morning, as officials formulated a message to deflect Breed’s statements.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development allows cities and counties to set aside public housing for certain populations, as long as housing authorities are explicit about those set-asides in their administrative plans, said Ed Cabrera, a spokesman for the agency’s regional office. The San Francisco Housing Authority changed its administrative plan in 2012 to create a special preference for homeless people.
In a statement Thursday, the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development said it adhered to an “HUD-approved administrative plan” in leasing the 179 housing units to homeless households.
The San Francisco Housing Authority “violated no laws in the leasing process,” the statement read.
Several legal experts said Thursday there probably wouldn’t be any severe consequences from Breed’s remarks, though they may have been ill-considered.
“It’s not likely that the (federal) money spigot would just be turned off, but it might trigger an audit or inquiry,” said UC Hastings law Professor David Levine.
“If the Trump administration wants yet another reason to slap San Francisco around, yes, it’s another reason,” he added.
City Attorney Dennis Herrera is fighting two lawsuits against the federal government — one over an executive order to strip funding from sanctuary cities, and another against Attorney General Jeff Sessions for trying to withhold law enforcement grants from cities that don’t cooperate with federal immigration enforcement. San Francisco has also submitted numerous friend-of-thecourt briefs in lawsuits filed by other cities and states.
In its statement, the Mayor’s Office of Housing acknowledged that Breed “was instrumental in advocating for the repair of the (San Francisco Housing Authority) units and their occupancy by homeless families.
“She often spoke passionately about it,” the statement read.
Loyola Law School Professor Laurie Levenson noted that it’s become trendy for politicians “to make questionable comments in order to portray (themselves) as antiestablishment.”