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.
The draft recommendations total $320.9 million in the upcoming 2023 fiscal year, and $311.4 million in FY 2024. This includes $185 million for adult housing, $53.2 for family housing and $180.9 million for mental health services across the two years. The draft recommendations will be reviewed by the OCOH oversight committee, which will then submit the final recommendations to the mayor’s office. In turn, the mayor’s office will release its own plan for the OCOH fund on June 1 as part of the city’s draft budget, which is then subject to approval by the Board of Supervisors.
Other recommendations that the oversight committee members highlighted included funding for behavioral health and clinical health services in 2,000 units of permanent supportive housing and $16.6 million for overdose prevention services.
Issues with several of the draft recommendations revolved around the question of whether the recommendation was funding new, permanent solutions to homelessness, which is required under City law. One example was a recommendation for the OCOH fund to establish a ratio of one case manager for every 25 clients across San Francisco’s permanent supportive housing system. Although oversight committee members agreed on the need for smaller caseloads, they questioned whether the OCOH fund should be used to hire case managers in buildings acquired with non-OCOH funds.
Another bone of contention was the allocation of $17.5 million for the acquisition of a behavioral health access and drop-in center.
This fiscal year, 2022, was the first year that OCOH funds were made available for the addition of permanent housing for over 2,000 adult households, 300 families and 300 youth households, as well as 132 treatment beds for drug sobering, mental health residential and managed alcohol treatment.
Members of the public can join monthly meetings of the OCOH oversight committee on the fourth Thursday of every month.
