Estimate to end homelessness drops to $1B
San Francisco’s homelessness department would need almost $1 billion more funding and more than 6,000 new permanent supportive housing units and shelter beds to end unsheltered homelessness over the next three years — a reduced estimate from the agency’s initial projections last year, but still a huge cost on top of what the city already annually spends on the crisis.
The updated price tag of $992 million was revealed at a Tuesday Board of Supervisors hearing, where the elected officials lambasted the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH) for saying it was “not feasible” to end unsheltered homelessness in the next three years under the current fiscal and political environment in San Francisco. They also questioned whether the agency, which was created in 2016, is equipped to urgently tackle the city’s crisis.
“We have to develop a realistic roadmap to address unsheltered homelessness,” said Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, who called for Tuesday’s hearing. “Failing to meaningfully reduce and eventually end unsheltered homelessness will undermine our long-term efforts to stabilize city revenue and services.”
The hearing was prompted by a report released by San Francisco’s homelessness department in December, which initially estimated that ending unsheltered homelessness within three years would cost $1.4 billion on top of the city’s annual budget, which this year is $636 million.
The Board of Supervisors requested the report in June in an effort to understand and put an actual price tag on what it would take to put an end to unsheltered homelessness.
On Tuesday, HSH updated those figures based on further analysis and new modeling. According to the department, the city would need to add 3,810 units of permanent supportive housing and 2,250 units of shelter. That would cost nearly $1 billion over the next three years, with an additional $378 million per year thereafter.
Echoing the report, Shireen McSpadden, director of HSH, said the department would likely struggle to meet these goals given various hurdles in the system, such as the 30% staff vacancy rate within the department that has made it difficult to prop up new programs and expand existing ones.
“What we have seen is a department that is still not fully developed,” McSpadden said. “We have huge, huge challenges with getting the things done that we need whether it’s actually executing contracts, whether it’s monitoring, whether it’s just getting things out the door.”
In all, Tuesday’s hearing did little more than give supervisors a platform to air their frustrations with HSH and the city’s homelessness crisis, often the top concern from fed-up constituents. The hearing also waded into broader questions about San Francisco’s overall homelessness response, such as whether HSH should double down on temporary shelter over permanent housing or whether the city can — and should — provide a permanent home for everyone who needs one. It also grappled with the sky-high costs of recent proposed interventions, such as tiny cabins in the Mission. Mandelman invited an organization, Pallet, to the hearing. The group argued it could provide the cabins for much less than the city’s projected cost.
Tiny cabins are “not a substitute for permanent housing. It’s meant to be a cost efficient solution to get people stabilized and inside working with services and then move on,” said Amy King, CEO of Pallet. “You shouldn’t have to be using precious dollars that should go to permanent housing to pay developers and architects and designers.”
The hearing made clear the massive challenge of addressing the crisis in a city with limited space, frequent neighborhood pushback on new shelter and housing developments and also a looming $728 million deficit in the city’s budget. Still, Supervisor Dean Preston argued that HSH was not being ambitious enough, and criticized the department for concluding in the report that ending unsheltered homelessness in three years was not possible given the current barriers in the system.
“They make some proposals and they tell us how many units, and these are not shockingly high numbers,” Preston said. “Why in this report do they conclude that these goals are not feasible? That’s a political question and a decision.”
HSH had to prepare the report in response to legislation written by Mandelman called A Place for All, which requires San Francisco to provide enough shelter and permanent supportive housing to meet the needs of all homeless people who currently live on the city’s streets.
Though San Francisco reported a 15% decline in unsheltered homelessness over the past three years and a 3.5% decrease in overall homelessness, the city has received national scrutiny for its crisis. HSH, which was created in 2016, has one of the largest city budgets in San Francisco and also runs the highest concentration of permanent supportive housing among the nine Bay Area counties, according to federal data.
Still, the city is still woefully short of what it needs to meaningfully address the crisis.
To fill in this gap, Mandelman’s original legislation focused on creating enough shelter for all those in need. But he received massive pushback from homeless advocates, who worried it would give the city more power to forcibly clear tent encampments, regardless of whether enough housing was available.
In response, the supervisor widened the scope of the ordinance to also include permanent supportive housing.
Notably, Noelle Simmons, HSH’s chief deputy director, said at the hearing that it would be significantly more expensive to focus on expanding shelter over permanent housing solutions. Mandelman pushed back on that notion, and criticized what he called the department’s overemphasis on permanent supportive housing.
“I don’t think we can provide a permanent home in San Francisco for every person who engages in our homelessness response system, and I don’t think that should be the goal,” Mandelman said. “It’s almost like we’re almost ideologically committed to this PSH (permanent supportive housing) outcome and are almost unwilling to contemplate a more shelteror transitional housing-based approach.”
Meanwhile, Simmons also cited funding, land and the city’s difficult and slow approval process as barriers that would make it extremely difficult to achieve goals outlined in the report.
These hurdles were highlighted in stark terms in the Mission earlier this year, when Supervisor Hillary Ronen iced plans to create a village of 70 tiny cabins on an empty lot near the 16th Street BART station. That project was sharply criticized over its exorbitant cost estimates compared to other Bay Area cities, which HSH said would cost approximately $100,000 per cabin, not including operating costs, vs. $10,000, for example, in Oakland.
Ronen also put plans for the project on hold after intense neighborhood opposition, and her concerns that HSH would not be able to keep conditions around the site clean and safe.
On Tuesday, Ronen questioned where the city would place the additional shelter given the situation in her district
“If we can’t figure out a way to show our communities that these sites improve conditions in neighborhoods and don’t make them worse, I just don’t know how we can ever find more sites,” she said. “And that’s a big problem.”