by XU EER LU JANUARY 21, 2025 (MissionLocal.org)


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Karina Ortiz, a 26-year-old living in the Salvation Army Harbor House homeless shelter with her husband and seven-year-old daughter, will be evicted in March — the same month that she is due to give birth to a baby boy.
On the morning of Jan. 21, Ortiz stood in Room 200 of City Hall, joined by a half dozen other families also facing eviction. The group handed a staffer a letter demanding a meeting to address their urgent needs and asking the mayor to rescind the evictions.
These families all received an eviction letter with the operative date of Feb. 8 or 10 — about three weeks away. Ortiz managed to get a one-month reprieve.
The eviction notices came as a result of a change in policy from the San Francisco Department of Homeless and Supportive Housing in December. Under the new policy, homeless families are now only permitted to stay in city shelters for 90 days; previously, they could stay indefinitely. For families unable to get housing subsidies, this will put them back onto the street.

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“We share the desire to move out of the shelters and into more stable housing,” the families stated in the letter to the mayor, signed by “The Recently Arrived Families Committee” of Faith in Action Bay Area. “But an eviction letter with no plan and no options for where to go means we could end up on the street with our children.”

“At a time when the new federal administration is causing so much fear, we are disappointed that your local administration is also causing fear,” the letter reads.
This policy change is not new: It reinstates the 90-day time limit for families in city shelters that was in place prior to the Covid-19 pandemic. Deborah Bouck, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeless and Supportive Housing, said the city suspended the stay limit to “stabilize the community and support people during unprecedented times.”
Under the policy adopted in December, if a family needs more time after reaching 90 days in the shelter, the shelter can authorize up to three extensions — 30 days each — based on the family’s circumstances. Additional extensions can also be authorized by the department based on family circumstances.
Bouck said that the policy change is aimed to “develop key reforms to the family homelessness response system.” The policy change would give priority to people who are experiencing street homelessness, disability, pregnancy, fleeing domestic violence, or those who have been homeless before.


It is unclear how many families have received the notices across the city, according to Matt Alexander, the communications director for Faith in Action Bay Area, which organized today’s demonstration. But Faith in Action has heard from eight families who have received the notices, Alexander said. And families are still spreading the word across shelters.
Alexander also said that none of the eviction notices so far have been issued from the department; all are from individual shelters.
Nathalie Hrizi, a vice president at the United Educators of San Francisco teachers’ union, also tagged along with the families at City Hall. Hrizi said she heard about the evictions last week and was “upset, angry, and frustrated.”
Some 2,403 San Francisco public school children are homeless, according to the school district’s 2023 report, which accounts for 4.3 percent of the 55,452 students enrolled that year.


San Francisco has 405 families — 1,103 people — experiencing homelessness, according to the city’s 2024 point-in-time count. That number is likely an undercount, however, as the count is not an accurate measure of all homeless people in the city.
Still, that number was almost double that in 2022, when the department reported only 605 people in 205 families who identified as homeless.
“I’m very worried because we don’t have any place to go,” said Maria Zavala, a 37-year-old mother of three children in tears. Zavala’s family is living off of her husband’s biweekly garbage collector salary of $1,300. The family of five is cramped in a room with two sets of bunk beds. She said she can’t work because she needs to take care of her disabled six-year-old daughter full-time.
“With everything my daughter is going through, I just can’t see ourselves [living] in the street.”

The interviews were conducted in Spanish with translation from Cathy Peronius, a volunteer at Faith in Action Bay Area, and from Matt Alexander.
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XUEER LU
Xueer is a California Local News Fellow, working on data and covering housing. Xueer is a bilingual multimedia journalist fluent in Chinese and English and is passionate about data, graphics, and innovative ways of storytelling. Xueer graduated from UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism with a Master’s Degree in May 2023. She also loves cooking, photography, and scuba diving.More by Xueer Lu