Homelessness affects all of us, whether we have housing or not, but of course it hurts those living without homes worst of all. Having thousands of people without housing, without sanitation, without privacy, living outside and having thousands more in shelter in a small city like San Francisco is a humanitarian crisis. Unlike many crises, this one is a crisis that is man-made through poor policy decisions, and lack of corrective action. This crisis does have true solutions. The beauty of true solutions is that they satisfy everyone – from the frustrated neighbor heartbroken by seeing their unhoused neighbor placed in shelter only to return to the streets, to the exhausted small business owner tired of watching people just being moved from block to block only to return, to the unhoused person who finally has a place of their own.
November 2018 Proposition C, entitled “Our City Our Home,” is a national model for a local municipality to address homelessness. Has it solved homelessness? Of course not, yet 2018’s Prop. C achievements have surpassed all expectations:
~ More than four thousand people sheltered – voters were promised one thousand.
~ More than 5,100 people housed, including 1,700 children, voters were promised four thousand
~ Almost 16,000 people received behavioral health services
~ Almost 23,000 households received prevention services.
Beyond the numbers, Prop. C succeeded in focusing on the following areas:
~ Diversifying innovations in the shelter system to serve individuals who the shelter system failed to serve in the past, such as the addition of tiny homes and semi/non-congregate shelter
~ Expanding housing that serves people with behavioral health issues, such as the opening of board and care facilities, and expansion of step-down (recovery) housing.
~ Diversifying the treatment system to fill gaps in the system such as expansion of women’s beds, and low barrier/high needs care centers.
~ Innovative housing solutions, including rental assistance in the private market, acquisitions of newly constructed apartment buildings, acquisitions of hotels and transforming into housing.
~ Ensuring equity by funding previously ignored populations. We have pushed hard for housing for families and youth, and for members of the Bayview community, all traditionally getting too small a piece of the pie.
San Francisco, like all West Coast cities, has seen rising rents drive homeless rates, and solving homelessness itself is growing increasingly complicated. The longer people are out there, the more their health deteriorates, and the higher mental illness and substance use rates go. This issue has been left at municipalities’ feet. Tired of waiting for the feds to do right, the Coalition on Homelessness decided to take people’s initiative into our own hands. We spent a year and a half gathering input, meetings with allies, opponents and everyone in between, then gathering signatures and getting it passed.
More Than a Moment; It’s a Movement
Staff at the Coalition on Homelessness are embedded in the movement to end homelessness. We approach this work with humility and Ella Baker’s style of “servant leadership” meaning we strive to work side by side with people. Movements happen when a group moves toward a single goal, and there are always lots of different perspectives as it should be – diverse movements are always stronger. Community organizing requires active listening and constantly learning. This experience and expertise has allowed the Coalition on Homelessness to work with the oversight body and city officials to ensure a successful rollout of the measure. We don’t approach this work with rigid ideology, except a commitment to centering research, the experience and expertise of unhoused people and front line service providers. From there it is a matter of developing consensus. Listening carefully to arrive at solutions that are effective is our secret sauce, because we believe the smartest person in the room is the room.
The movement to end homelessness requires the ability to hold several truths at once. We can learn from science on this issue, and we can learn from unhoused people and front line service providers. We need more housing at the same time we need more shelter. We need more traditional treatment programs, while we also need more innovation that meets people where they are at. We need low-barrier housing that is recovery- and service intensive-based, in addition to needing low barrier housing that has a focus on other needs. None of these interventions should be pitted against each other, but according to national best practices, each of our interventions need to be right-sized. This should be based on the science of data-based modeling to determine which mix of investment results in the biggest decrease in street homelessness. National best practices include opening two to three units of additional housing for every additional shelter bed to create system flow and ensure shelter beds open up. All of this work must be coupled with ”by-name” system coordination to ensure every unhoused San Franciscan has a clear pathway off the streets. Some people need treatment, workforce development, medical care, legal assistance securing benefits, and so forth. A home is something everyone needs to thrive, and it is a prerequisite to addressing any of these issues. Investments in housing and shelter must be coupled with right-size investment in prevention to keep people from becoming homeless in the first place. Housing is expensive. Shelter is expensive. Treatment is expensive. We can’t solve poverty-related socioeconomic issues such as homelessness without money. But we can make sure every dollar is well spent.
The Beauty of the Voter Mandates
Voters mandated categories for the Prop. C funding to be spent on. The breakdown for housing is that at least 50% of the funds go to housing, with 25% of that housing being for families and 20% for youth. In addition, at least 25% of the entire budget must be spent on Behavioral Health, and at most 10% of the fund spent on shelter, and at most 15% of the fund spent on prevention.
The categories were deliberately designed based on evidence-based best practices and City-provided data. There has been much said about the Prop. C categories and the desire of some electeds to move money from housing to shelter. Their idea is typically explained that shelter is quicker to get up and running and less expensive. Neither are true. Housing First is an evidence-based model, has been massively researched and it works across the country. In SF, our supportive housing has a 97% success rate. Regardless of current political winds, nothing solves homelessness like a home.
Obviously, building housing takes time and is expensive; however it does save money in both the long run and in the short term. It is worth the effort. Private market rental assistance, acquisitions, fully utilizing public housing stock all have equal if not lesser costs than shelter, and can be put in place just as fast. For maximum results, a combination of housing interventions work best. Housing is so popular that we ran out of it. It is not as the Trump Administration says a failure because there are still homeless people on the street, the failure is that the country has not invested enough.
Of course, we must do more in addressing the needs of those in supportive housing, we need more housing for people with higher behavioral health/health acuities, and we need more just simply extremely low-income housing. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water. The lack of investment is the failure, not the housing itself. Blaming homelessness on providing housing is akin to blaming hunger on the type of food rather than the lack of it.
Sure, it is preferable to have people in shelter than on the streets. The City has been adding shelter beds, however the problem is shelter beds are full because few people are leaving them. When that happens, homeless people in shelters are left in limbo without the stability of a home, indicating an inefficient use of expensive shelter funding, and street homelessness increases dramatically as soon as just one year out from the initial shelter investment. The path off the streets looks different for everyone, but the data is clear; a system that puts all its eggs into band-aids only leads to dead ends, revolving doors and increased homelessness. This is where system modeling comes into place. This is not a personal opinion, it is science. It is important to add the right amount of investment in each category to maximize results.
Moreover, Prop. C does have plenty of flexibility within it. We designed it that way. For example, many policy makers and community members would like to see more housing for individuals leaving treatment, as well as short-term housing such as the restore beds that are designed to quickly house people with severe acuities. Prop. C requires at least 25% of funds be spent on behavioral health, and housing for that population is delineated in the legal text as an approved use of those funds. These interventions can be and have been funded with behavioral health funds.
While Prop. C funds are being fully used for yearly operational costs, there are still one-time funds left over from the first two years when money was collected—but not expended—during the court battle. Our work has been to find creative uses for those one-time funds—because of rent income disparities, often homelessness requires ongoing investments. However, an intervention like the five-year housing subsidy is a way to utilize one-time funds in a way that can lead to permanently leaving homelessness behind.
More importantly, the funding categories offer SF voters accountability. Designed based on science rather than political winds, they compel conversation. Each year, that conversation has resulted in better decisions, saving valuable housing dollars for families and youth at a time those populations were increasing. For example, when Mayor London Breed wanted to cut housing from families and youth, and use that funding for single adult shelter, the conversations led by then-Supervisor Hilary Ronen, resulted in finding funding. We asked the Controller about interest accrued by the fund and if we could use that. That allowed the Mayor to get her priorities funded, a more reasonable per person budget for tiny homes—it started at $120k per person per year— and the preservation of housing for families and youth. This turned out to be incredibly important because we were on the cusp of a massive increase in childhood homelessness. These conversations have often improved outcomes with all parties being satisfied and, in the end, producing results through consensus building. We are confident Prop. C would never have been nor continue to be successful without them.
Homelessness policy in SF has failed because of the constant use of homeless people as political footballs, forcing smart policy to take a back seat as a result. Having categories forces the conversation. In each of these negotiations, SF did move money around. We ended at a good place with all parties being more informed. We protected valuable resources while getting creative in a new expansion. We found new funding sources. We cut exorbitant costs. Again, these positive results would not have occurred if the categories did not exist. For example, it is clear that very few resources would have gone to hidden homeless populations like families and youth without the categories.
Mayor Newsom cut shelter from 1,800 beds to 1,200. Since then, Mayors Lee, Breed and Lurie have focused on expanding shelter. Today we have 50 sites with 3,700 beds. However this massive investment has some shortcomings. We have two issues in our shelter system in SF that are happening. Many people are entering shelters and leaving right away, but very few are moving into housing. (Across all clients in the reporting period, only 13% exited to permanent housing – no data for half of clients.) We have an issue with flow. We also have more people entering homelessness than are exiting it. That is why prevention investments are so valuable. We still have shortfalls, especially in ongoing prevention housing subsidies that keep people on fixed incomes in their rent control apartments. Such shortfalls drive up the number of elderly San Franciscans experiencing homelessness. The data suggests we need expansions in all three areas – but the science of modeling, not the political trend of the moment should dictate how much investments in each area. San Francisco does have a strategic plan for single adults that does just that and lays out what proportion of new resources should go to each category. Let’s make decisions based on science, not politics.
