City Hall Digest: Unspent Funds at Homelessness Department and Mayor Breed Chats With Jon Stewart

City Hall Digest is TogetherSF Action’s weekly dispatch from San Francisco’s City Hall, broken into bite-sized pieces—because understanding local government is your fundamental right.

Homelessness Department Has Let Tens of Millions in City Funds Go Unspent

Chronic overspending by city departments is a known problem, but its equally problematic counterpart, underspending, is not as well-known. The Chronicle reported last week that the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH) has failed to spend between $30 and $40 million of its $600+ million budget for several years in a row. This money should be going to furthering their mission of sheltering and housing people—instead, most of the excess funds roll over into the next year. 

Several crucial deficiencies in the city’s bureaucracy are responsible for this underspending. 

• Overly Rigid Contracts: Contracted service providers said that contracts are too prescriptive, and prevent money from being spent on services. 

• Low Referrals: Housing service providers rely on HSH to make referrals to their programs. But the department is failing to make these referrals, leaving beds empty and the funds meant to support them unspent. Last year, HSH had a monthly average of 10 percent of its 9,000-unit housing stock ready to use but unfilled.

• Understaffing: Underpinning these problems is the fact that HSH has a 30 percent vacancy rate in its full-time employee positions, partly due to the department’s explosive growth since its inception in 2016. The department’s budget ballooned from a little over $200 million at the outset to over $600 million this year. This could explain poor performance of contracts, as they take human resources to oversee and manage.

The solution to these problems likely includes contract reform, hiring more employees, and greater accountability for a department whose growth has outstripped its human resources.

City Lacks Consistent Performance Tracking for Nonprofit Service Providers

The city spends over a billion dollars on contracts with nonprofits every year—we’ve called attention to how the lack of oversight for these contracts is part of why San Francisco feels broken. 

Though we wish it weren’t necessary, it’s a story we have shared many times.

In a similar tone as the story above, another story on HSH's contracts revealed that their standards for monitoring outside work leaves something to be desired. The San Francisco Standard reported last week that some city departments, including the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, have wildly inconsistent levels of attention paid to their performance and adherence to their multi-million dollar contracts. 

For instance, one housing provider for those suffering from mental illness only met 40 percent of their contracted goals for a year, which included improving clients' life skills and life skills recognition, as well as enrolling them in vocational or other meaningful activities. This facility’s contract was pulled by the city—but not for performance reasons. (This facility was run by a nonprofit that asked the city for two separate bailouts to balance their poor fiscal management.)

Another nonprofit, contracted to help homeless people suffering from both substance use disorder and mental health issues, met only 50 percent of their contracted goals, which included such low standards as simply providing at least one of their other services to all of their clients. 

And yet, the city seems to have done nothing to hold these service providers accountable for their performance. Supervisor Catherine Stefani has been working on legislation to solve this problem, which we are looking forward to when it is introduced next month.

Jon Stewart Discusses “Complicated Soup” of Problems Facing City with Mayor Breed

Last week, Mayor Breed appeared on The Problem with Jon Stewart and discussed the state of the city. Stewart discussed what he called a “complicated little soup of problems” facing San Francisco with Breed, and what could be done to solve them. 

One issue that Stewart and the Mayor spoke about at length was the fact that countless people experience mental health crises every day on the streets and are not getting the care they need to stabilize their condition. As Breed pointed out, these people are being cycled in and out of emergency care with no lasting chance for improvement. 

The current situation is inadequate for solving homelessness and addressing residents’ mental health problems. In order to be compelled into long-term care through conservatorship, an individual must be held involuntarily for mental health reasons on eight separate occasions—a high bar that has created a revolving door of the same people entering and exiting the emergency room. In addition to taking a toll on the individual in crisis, it also puts a lot of stress on hospital staff who render care. The other part of this problem is that even if an individual is conserved, there may not be a long-term bed for them to stay in. 

Mayor Breed pointed out that we’ve placed so much value on individual liberty that we’ve lost sight of the social contract. During this conversation, Breed advocated for an expansion of conservatorship because the status quo is simply not working, saying that conservatorship “has to be put on the table” to afford an extra degree of “flexibility.” She summed up her point to Stewart by saying, “Wouldn't we want somebody to make the decision that's going to save our lives...so we don't lose all our self-respect and our dignity?”

In order to provide as much long-term care as possible, the city and state should work collaboratively to create viable solutions that meet the needs of our current moment, balancing what works for an individual with what works for our larger society.

TogetherSF Action is making advocating for an end to the drug epidemic in San Francisco a top priority this year. Our first step? Flooding inboxes at City Hall. We need thousands of concerned San Franciscans to send letters to their leaders demanding they end open-air drug markets in 2023. Are you in?