A Publication of the Coalition on Homelessness
Dear Mayor London Breed,
On Tuesday, April 14, all eleven members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to pass the Emergency Ordinance – Limiting COVID-19 Impacts through Safe Shelter Options. The Ordinance calls for the City to secure 8,250 private rooms by April 26, 2020, including 7000 rooms for homeless San Franciscans. This would allow us to quickly meet the needs for thousands of homeless residents in our streets and shelters who currently have no way of sheltering-in-place.
Doctors, public health experts call for testing and housing all shelter residents in hotels
Yesterday, California experienced its most widespread outbreak of COVID-19 in any homeless shelter to date where nearly half of 144 shelter residents tested positive. For some perspective, the outbreak in this single shelter of 70 shelter guests comprises 8.5% of all positive cases in San Francisco, which total 857 as of Saturday.
When looking back on the lead-up to this catastrophe we see a series of policy missteps that got us here.
A partial victory, but congregate shelters are still being used to house the majority of homeless people
Less than 24 hours after our story “Mayor Breed Opts for Mass Indoor Camps” broke, the City announced a change of approach for addressing the pandemic in shelters. But don’t be misled by the headlines!
The real change, which is significant, is that the city has abandoned its plan to move shelter residents into the Moscone Center,
UPDATE: Our coverage of this outrageous plan prompted a shift for the city. Get the latest coverage HERE
A look inside the new Moscone Center congregate “Shelter”
While hundreds of advocates have been desperately contacting Mayor London Breed imploring her to place homeless people in hotel rooms and vacant units, it seems she has her own plan for addressing poverty during the pandemic: opening indoor camps to further concentrate vulnerable people.
HOUSE HOMELESS PERSONS IN VACANT HOTEL ROOMS NOW.
The Current Situation: The City is only placing homeless people being discharged or diverted from SFGH beds who test positive or who are symptomatic into hotel rooms. The city announced today they are prioritizing hotel rooms for vulnerable people on streets, in shelters and in SRO’s but they have not moved any of them into a hotel room.
What We Want: We are calling on the City to shelter all homeless people and those in congregate settings into vacant units as a preventative measure, … READ MORE
In the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, San Francisco Mayor London Breed has refused to use executive powers to house San Francisco’s 9,000 homeless residents living in the City’s streets and shelters. Under the Mayor’s emergency powers in the Charter and Administrative Code, Breed has the authority to commandeer a portion of the 33,000 vacant hotel rooms to house homeless residents, but has yet to utilize those powers in spite of the dire situation at hand.
Unfortunately we will not be publishing a print version of our April 1st edition because of the risk to our vendors and readers. In the midst of this pandemic, our Street Sheet vendors need your support more than ever. Please consider making a donation to our EMERGENCY VENDOR SUPPORT FUND to help vendors cover essential costs while they are unable to sell the newspaper.
Today we spent time figuring out how to organize collecting and distributing tents across the City for folks who have no place to ‘shelter in place’ during the pandemic.
Project Homeless Connect planned to host their regular homelessness services fair that centralizes services for unhoused people to access on March 4th. But two days before the date, the group sent out an email alerting participants and providers that the fair was cancelled, on the recommendation of the Department of Public Health (DPH). Health officials were gearing up for Coronavirus to hit the city, and bringing together thousands of providers and volunteers and unhoused people could pose a risk to the health of all in attendance.
As information regarding the coronavirus and its potential threat of becoming a pandemic permeate every media outlet arising in pandemonium, prolonged homelessness as a social problem continues to fall through the cracks. According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness in 2018, a total of 552,830 people experienced homelessness. This is an estimate calculated by using the U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department’s annual Point-in-Time (PIT) count which is collected through Continuum of Care (COC) communities who self-report the homeless population.
Jeff Kositsky, director of the city Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH) stepped down into the much lower position of running the embattled Healthy Streets Operation Center (HSOC), after admitting the operation was a complete failure.
HSOC started in January 2018 following a surge of encampments in the Bayview, Mission and South of Market. It started as a mixed bag. Part Encampment resolution, where the homeless department would identify a large encampment,
