A Publication of the Coalition on Homelessness
Funding for public showers across San Francisco was combined with funding for bathrooms in this fiscal year’s budget, leaving advocates and service providers doubtful that the showers will actually be implemented.
The Coalition on Homelessness’s original budget request called for $1,070,636 as a stand-alone program through fiscal years 2022 and 2023. These funds would have been sufficient to provide 112,000 showers free of charge in locations in the Mission, Bayview and Haight.
However,
Our budget campaign “Our City, Our Budget” to house San Franciscans, keep San Franciscans housed and protect the civil and human rights of those forced to remain on the streets, has come to fruition. Due to hard work and organizing, many victories were achieved for unhoused San Franciscans. For one, the second installment of funding for Our City Our Home, Proposition C, which passed in November 2018, is about to hit the streets and it will result in dramatic numbers of people having the opportunity to exit homelessness.
Supervisor Rafael Mandelman’s shelter legislation is going to the full Board of Supervisors after the Public Safety and Neighborhood Services Committee approved it on a 3-0 vote on May 26.
After several amendments through two committee meetings in May, one thing is for sure: Mandelman’s “Place for All Ordinance” is now a different animal from the legislation he introduced two months before with its primary focus on shelter softened as it moves to the full board on June 7.
City College of San Francisco has already laid off 38 faculty members with more staff cutbacks to come while reducing classes and student resources. Instructors and staff have already taken a pay-cut to encourage class maintenance, while the boards have increased their personal pay. Students and staff are demanding transparent and open statements from the board: why are classes and teachers being cut during a California budget surplus?
City College is facing another round of class and service cuts under the stance of budget reform.
Don’t Wait Until We Break!
On Wednesday May 4, homeless and formerly homeless moms, children, and individuals converged on San Francisco’s City Hall to deliver one message, loud and clear: “Our mothers need housing.” The action was designed and carried out by unhoused members, mostly moms. In planning the action, they talked about how being homeless is literally breaking their mental health and came up with the slogan “Don’t Wait Until We Break”
Age-old sayings tell us to save “mothers and children first” in any crisis or catastrophe.
In early March, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced the Community Assistance, Recovery and Empowerment (CARE) Court program, which would create yet another separate court for poor and unhoused people with mental health conditions and substance use disorders. Governor Newsom has explicitly discussed CARE Court as a tool to address street homelessness, and the proposal is consistent with a string of bills nationwide that seek to increase the power of the state to institutionalize unhoused people under the pretense of “compassion.” The devil is in the details,
Rental assistance for 2,000 households, seven street crisis response teams and over 1,400 units of permanent supportive housing for adults, families and youth are some of the highlights from draft recommendations for the city’s Our City, Our Home (OCOH) fund, presented on April 21 and 22 by the OCOH Oversight Committee.
The OCOH fund, required under Proposition C, was created by San Francisco voters in 2018 to fund permanent solutions to homelessness. The fund raises over $300 million per year through a tax on gross corporate revenue.
In the 2021 San Francisco budget process, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously supported the implementation of the Compassionate Alternative Response Team (CART), but Mayor London Breed refused to execute this ordinance, which would activate the peer-led CART teams, because she launched her own version of street outreach called Street Wellness Teams. Yet, $3 million in funding was secured to begin the implementation of CART, which currently sits untouched in unallocated reserve for a year.
As the pandemic continues and the shelter-in-place (SIP) hotels made available to unhoused community members begin to shut down, the most marginalized are suddenly being forced back onto the streets. As this occurs, one can only imagine the influx of calls to 911 dispatchers requesting the presence of police for nonviolent unhoused folks.
That is why it is so critical for San Francisco to implement the Compassionate Alternative Response Team, or CART,
San Francisco, like many cities, is in a challenging place economically with over 200,000 workers on unemployment, a $1.5 billion deficit due to loss revenue, and exponentially higher needs for city services such as rental assistance, health care, child care and other city essential activities. San Francisco has a very unique budget process, where the legislative branch receives the budget from the much more powerful executive branch and has the opportunity to cut things out of the Mayor’s budget in order to fund other things they deem as higher priorities.
