A perpetual crisis is magnified
There’s a swingingdoor quality to San Francisco’s handling of the homeless. The city veers from sweeps and laws banning lying on sidewalks to serviceladen centers that take in hundreds of street campers and offer hotel rooms. Thus, progress is always hard to measure — especially during a pandemic and its resulting economic crash that has filled the city with thousands more homeless people turned away from crowded shelters or laid off from jobs.
Adding to the dismal picture is a confounding city report: About $26.5 million of the $364 million homelessness budget sits unspent, and the agency in charge has a 26% job vacancy rate.
“We’re spending more and getting less,” noted Supervisor Matt Haney.
This situation hasn’t stopped a fresh initiative that could bring relief to one part of the problem. The city is taking up the plight of the mentally ill and addicted who are beyond the reach of conventional programs. It’s a bid to go after the hardest of the hardcore.
The city will field mental health teams specially trained to handle those with severe psychiatric and alcohol and drug problems. The plan will take the job out of the hands of the police, who are usually the first to respond to complaints or sidewalk trouble. The idea is also one of the first instances of police reform born out of public protests over law enforcement.
The teams will have a lot to do. An emergency services official said some 50,000 calls were made last year to police about lost souls on sidewalks, possible suicides, or drug issues, all areas the mental health teams will be taking on. The usual police process of taking people to emergency rooms will change to a fuller assessment and better treatment under the plan.
The public is impatient for results. In the past year, the city has set up an RV parking lot and outdoor homeless camps known as safe sleeping sites, the latest in a long string of ideas. But the numbers continue to march upward. From 2015 to 2019, the homeless count has increased from 6,686 to 8,011.
Other cities might be tempted to give up, especially with a pandemiccrushing economy and slumping tax revenue. Mayor London Breed is going in another direction along with the city supervisors. While trimming the overall city budget, she wants to increase the homelessness budget to $500 million, spending big on her goal of moving 6,000 into permanent housing.
The mental health teams will cost $17 million over two years, including new treatment beds, extra counseling and followup care. It comes with another feature: a political meeting of the minds between progressive supervisors and the more centrist mayor who had battled over health coverage.
But the outcome hinges on more money. It will take a public vote in November to overhaul a business tax and free up about $300 million frozen by legal challenges. There are other worries as revenue drops and the coronavirus adds to health care costs.
If those issues can be overcome, San Francisco could have a free hand in taking on the homelessness crisis more broadly with extra housing and mental health care. Then it will be time to expect results the city hasn’t seen. For all the new programs and promises, there needs to be a genuine, visible change.