City Hall Digest: Updates to Homelessness Services and High-Profile Crimes Strike a Nerve for Residents

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.

People Experiencing Homelessness Need More Than a Roof to Thrive

The city has announced it is expanding Homeward Bound, the program that helps people experiencing homelessness in San Francisco return to their homes and support networks if they are from somewhere outside the city. The program will be administered by the San Francisco Human Services Agency going forward in addition to the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, which will hopefully make it easier for unsheltered people to access the program.

Created in 2005, Homeward Bound is one of the city’s most powerful and cost effective tools in getting people off the streets and into their support networks, and has successfully reconnected over 11,000 homeless people to their home communities. While this is a great decision by the city to address homelessness, we’re simultaneously learning a very expensive lesson from the less-than-stellar decision to temporarily shelter nearly 3,700 homeless people during the early days of the pandemic in hotels. 

The Shelter In Place hotel program ran between April 2020 and December 2022, and as of today, the city has approved approximately $10 million in payments to hotels that participated in the program for damages incurred by people who were placed there during the program’s duration, with more settlements in the pipeline. 

The program was controversial from the start, and criticisms gained steam as the city confirmed it was giving out drugs and alcohol (in “limited quantities”) to people staying in Shelter In Place hotels. While the program claims to have gotten 1,656 people into permanent supportive housing, city data shows that more people died in hotels than entered into substance use disorder treatment and mental health treatment programs (109 to 8 people, respectively). 

What these numbers show us is that placing people in permanent housing even when they may not be able to care for themselves or their surroundings is not a good solution.

People experiencing homelessness need more than a roof over their heads to lead thriving lives. Programs like Homeward bound that help them reconnect with their networks are a step in the right direction. So are shelter programs that forbid drug use and which require people to also enroll in mental or behavioral health services in order to participate.

High-Profile Crimes Strike a Nerve for Residents

Last week, San Francisco saw back-to-back heinous and high-profile crimes that once again brought public safety into sharp relief for the general public and the nation. The stabbing death of CashApp founder Bob Lee in the tony Rincon Hill/East Cut neighborhood elicited outrage from the tech community. Then, former fire commissioner Don Carmignani was assaulted with a tire iron in the Marina, sending him to the hospital with serious injuries. 

News outlets have been swift to point out data showing that San Francisco has very low rates of violent crime compared to other major cities, while others have been equally swift to criticize and condemn the city for being a land of “lawlessness.” But arguing about whether or not crime rates are up or down is a moot point. Residents shouldn’t hear about their friends and neighbors being stabbed while also worrying about car break-ins and public drug dealing. It is up to our city officials to hold people accountable for their crimes. What the data shows about crime is ultimately less powerful against a backdrop of daily illicit activity in the open—and if people don’t feel safe, numbers and data do little to assuage those feelings. 

Communities across the city have been raising the public safety alarm for years now: look at the activists who’ve rallied against Anti-Asian hate crimes and the business districts banding together to demand protection from the city. For those who see themselves or their families in these high-profile incidents, this weekend was an inflection point that made them, too, start wondering what the city is planning to do in response to this violence.

Our elected officials need to come up with a plan to make sure that open-air drug dealing and use, violence, property crimes, and public health crises are not tolerated on our streets. It is the only way forward.

City Moves Forward on Converting Empty Offices to Housing

Because San Francisco so heavily relies on companies in the financial and technology sectors, our economic health is almost directly tied to theirs. With many tech companies downsizing, a raging drug overdose crisis and persistent concerns about public safety, our city is facing a pivotal moment. 

In its most recent budget projections, the City Controller’s Office projected that by the 2025-26 fiscal year, 33 percent of San Francisco’s office space will be vacant. It’s a dire picture and a major contributor to the projected $780 million budget deficit over the next two years. 

Last week, Supervisor Matt Dorsey introduced legislation that would cut down on office conversion costs. Specifically, it would exempt office converters from paying fees on bicycle parking, child care, transit sustainability and public art. These fees total less than 10 percent of project costs, which are high, but the city is getting desperate for solutions to revitalize downtown.

A recent Stanford study showed that, pre-pandemic, office workers spent an average of $168 a week near their workplaces, totaling $1.2 billion per year. Replacing these missing, temporary office workers with new permanent residents might be magical thinking—but it could also be a creative way to skirt fiscal ruin. 

Making downtown more desirable to live in is a several-phase process, of which creating more housing is definitely one—but downtown’s high levels of public drug dealing and use and their associated negative externalities have to be acted on as we look to the future of a more lively and bustling downtown. 

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?