- By Greg Wong | Examiner staff writer
- Jun 29, 2023 Updated 4 min ago (SFExaminer.com)

A new report has uncovered a spate of “deficiencies” in how San Francisco contracts with and vets community organizations in response to The City’s homelessness crisis.
The San Francisco civil grand jury released Wednesday a 39-page investigation that determined the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing has failed to “equitably provide services to the homeless population.”
In scrutinizing officials’ oversight and evaluation of the community-based organizations it has contracted to run the majority of San Francisco’s homelessness programs, the 19-person panel found that The City doesn’t have a standardized evaluation system to assess the progress of its homelessness programs.
The investigation determined there was an “inconsistent” use of “specific results-based outcome measures” which hampered the department’s ability to “measure and evaluate the success of its programs and the performance of” the organizations.
Grand jurors also found “insufficient” monitoring at the various program sites, which limited the department’s “ability to evaluate and support” the organizations and improve their performance.
The report characterized the department’s monitoring procedures as “concerning.” It could only confirm that homelessness and supportive housing officials performed on-site program audits on 17 of the 49 contractors that met the requirement for program monitoring.
The jury called for more transparency from the department about the progress it has made across its homelessness programs.
The Examiner reached out to the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing for comment and reaction to the report but didn’t receive a response prior to publication.
The report comes two months after The City announced its new five-year, $607 million plan aimed at cutting unsheltered homelessness in half by 2028.
The ambitious plan, called “Home by the Bay,” aims to create thousands of new housing units. It outlines efforts to move people into permanent housing and ensure those who left homelessness don’t end up there again.
Meanwhile, The City’s newly formed Homelessness Oversight Commission conducted its first meeting last month. The seven-person committee, which San Francisco voters approved in a ballot measure last fall, is charged with overseeing the department’s work and auditing its performance.
The City found more than 7,750 people experiencing homelessness in February 2022 during its most recent Point-in-Time survey, a biennial count required by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for cities to receive funding for homelessness services. That’s a 30% increase from 2005, the first year The City was required to collect such statistics.
In addition, 35% of them were considered chronically homeless — people who have been continuously homeless for one year or more or have experienced four or more episodes of homelessness within the last three years. The civil grand jury found they were especially affected by the department’s “failures.”
A McKinsey study released in March determined that of the 20,000 San Franciscans who experienced homelessness in 2022, 2,650 were considered chronically homeless. By the end of the year, 96% of them remained chronically homeless, which the civil grand jury said “shows The City’s efforts to address homelessness are failing this particular subgroup at an alarming rate.”
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors reached a deal with Mayor London Breed on Wednesday to expand temporary shelters in The City using unspent interest in a homelessness account and preserve $60 million in spending for young adult and family housing.
