by Lukas Illa
In May, the Mayor’s Office announced a new “Citywide Good Neighbor Policy” that aims to punish homeless and public health nonprofit providers for inadequately responding to neighborhood complaints about streets conditions around their sites.
This new policy applies to all “shelters, transitional housing programs, access points, drop-in centers, permanent supportive housing sites, and (Department of Public Health) client-serving programs.” For providers contracted to run these sites, it would require provider staff to “acknowledge or respond to Good Neighbor concerns within 24 hours,” meaning that if a neighbor were to complain about the presence of a person they’ve profiled as homeless in front of a particular site, the provider of said site would be required to respond to that complaint within a day or face retribution by the City.
A Good Neighbor concern is broadly defined by the City: “A concern related to site operations or behavior in the immediate surrounding area that affects health, safety, accessibility, cleanliness, or neighborhood conditions, including but not limited to litter, blocked sidewalks or entrances, excessive noise, public drug use, trespassing, graffiti, unmanaged animal waste, threatening or harassing behavior, repeated disruptive conduct, or failure to respond to community complaints.” But later in its draft policy, the City includes encampments and loitering as examples of concerns providers would be required to “actively discourage” and report to City agencies,
After responding within 24 hours, providers must “make reasonable efforts to resolve routine concerns within 72 hours, including forwarding complaints related to the presence of visible homelessness to carceral city departments, like the Police Department and neighborhood street teams—predominantly staffed by the Police Department.
Even with 30 funded ambassador programs that aim to regulate and police street homelessness from block to block, the new policy mandates cash-strapped nonprofit providers to do perimeter checks at least three times a day and to “take reasonable, proactive steps to reduce neighborhood impacts connected to site operations.” This nebulous directive includes “actively discourag[ing] loitering that obstructs access or creates repeated neighborhood disruption,” which could mean that a continued complaint of a homeless person existing in their own neighborhood could qualify as creating a “repeated neighborhood disruption” and serve as cause for their service provider to be punished.
Throughout the draft policy, there are multiple mentions of discouraging “public drug use,” but where are drug users supposed to go? The Tenderloin Linkage Center provided the privacy and safety of supervised drug use, and yet the same reactionary forces compelling this new policy closed the sites within the calendar year it opened.
If providers fail to document, regulate, and report their clients they are attempting to serve, they risk “restrictions on expansion, administrative payment holds where legally authorized, scope modification, re-procurement, or termination.” There is a serious concern among harm reduction providers who have long felt the ire of conservative San Francisco media and Supervisors that this policy will force them to either police their clients with whom they are attempting to build trust or refuse and face closure.
Notably absent in the policy is any additional funding for the expansion of community or recreation spaces at these sites. There are already rules that restrict clients from bringing in carts or other property that they need to keep safe on the street simply due to spatial capacity. In their shelters—if they have a bed at all, as the adult shelter waiting list hovers above 500 people in May 2026—homeless San Franciscans are barred from having visitors or guests. As social creatures, unhoused folks congregate where their community exists; at times, it’s in the public right-of-way because they cannot afford privacy.
This new policy regulating nonprofit providers does nothing to expand dignified services—it serves simply to create yet another means for angry neighbors to weaponize their aggravation of having to witness visible poverty in their neighborhoods. For the City unhoused San Franciscans, the question should be: With the City hundreds of shelter beds and thousands of extremely affordable housing units short, where are people who cannot afford anywhere but the sidewalk to exist supposed to go?
