By Aldo Toledo, City Hall ReporterNov 26, 2024 (SFChronicle.com)
The gym at Buena Vista Horace Mann school in San Francisco is used as a family homeless shelter at night. San Francisco officials are setting new limits on how long homeless families can stay in city shelters and restricting who is eligible.Michael Macor/The Chronicle
San Francisco will set new limits next month on how long homeless families can stay in city shelters and restrict who is eligible, the Chronicle has learned, a move that critics said would push families back onto the street.
The San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing confirmed the contents of a memo that the Chronicle obtained summarizing the policy changes, which its staff discussed with homeless service providers at a Nov. 4, meeting.
The department said the changes, which will take effect Dec. 10, are an effort to improve a system that doesn’t prioritize families with the most critical needs, but homeless advocates warn the new rules will be catastrophic for families facing homelessness.
The policy changes “are about improving the effectiveness of the system and ensuring that we have the beds available for families in the most pressing crisis, like street homelessness or living in a vehicle,” said HSH spokesperson Emily Cohen in an email.
But Coalition on Homelessness Executive Director Jennifer Friedenbach told the Chronicle the changes are a “black eye to the city” and its homelessness strategy.
“Enforcing punitive limitations on how long a family can stay in a shelter will not help families get housing, it will only push them back onto the street,” Friedenbach said.
There were 437 homeless families in January, a 94% increase from 2022, with 308 of those in shelters, according to San Francisco’s most recent point-in-time count. The biannual federally mandated survey of homelessness is generally considered to be an undercount of the number of unhoused people in the city.
Right now there are two shelter options for families: a 14-day placement provided through a voucher program — designed to provide immediate intervention for families in emergency situations facing a gap in housing — and a 90-day temporary shelter placement.
The city’s current policy allows families in any HSH temporary shelter or voucher program to extend their stay for up to 90 days. Homeless advocates say HSH often grants additional extensions for families.
Under the new rules, families will only be allowed to stay in their shelter for 90 days total, unless they meet more strict requirements for an up to 30-day extension or they are granted an additional extension by HSH.
The HSH memo outlines new rules around shelter eligibility for families. Those living in single-room occupancy hotels or doubled up in apartments will no longer be eligible for family shelter, unless they are being evicted or their room is deemed uninhabitable. The changes would also restrict who is eligible to be placed on a waitlist for a longer placement.
Also under the new rules, families who decline an offer of housing would no longer be eligible for shelter unless they can prove extenuating circumstances.
The reforms prioritize families facing street homelessness, disability, domestic violence and pregnancy. In the past, HSH has provided shelter to families in precarious living conditions, such as those living in SROs or doubled-up with other families in single-room apartments unless they are facing eviction.
HSH told the Chronicle the changes are meant to ensure that the city’s family homelessness response system is more efficient by “increasing flow through the family system,” reinforcing the use of shelter for emergencies, improving coordination between families and the system, refocusing on the most vulnerable families and reducing the waitlist for longer placements to households who have no alternative.
“HSH is grateful to the family providers and parents with lived experiences of homelessness who helped inform these reforms,” the department said in a statement. “Throughout November, HSH is training providers in the family homelessness response system on these policies.”
As of the beginning of November, there were more than 500 families on the shelter waitlist, according to HSH.
Friedenbach of the homeless coalition said the changes will only serve to “make it look like there’s less demand” for family shelter by artificially reducing the number of people on the waitlist for longer placement without actually helping families.
“Providers and families need more supportive services, long-term subsidies, and deeply affordable housing in order to get housed. That is the point of shelter — a bridge to … provide stability and a jumping off platform into housing.”
Shelter is often a last-resort option for families who only turn to it when they are desperate, she said, adding that the city needs to provide more access to family shelter, not less. She said the coalition would lobby the Homelessness Oversight Commission, which oversees HSH, to rethink the policy changes.
The shelter policy changes come after the city earlier this month paired down its “problem-solving” strategies for homeless families. Until this month, HSH could pay for things like move-in assistance, furniture and lease agreements, or smaller issues like credit checks, security deposits and even car repairs and smog tests that can keep families housed.
According to a separate HSH memo, starting Nov. 6, HSH stopped helping families with those costs.
Cohen told the Chronicle the HSH has had to restrict the eligible uses of problem-solving funds because of a shortfall in the fund.
“In order to preserve the resources we do have, we are focusing problem-solving dollars on the interventions most likely to end homelessness and that are most impactful,” Cohen said. “That’s how we narrowed the eligible uses for problem-solving, to meet the state of the current budget.”
For Hope Kamer, director of public policy and external affairs at Compass Family Services — a nonprofit serving homeless families — the changes in the problem-solving program and the shelter policy are “heartbreaking.”
She said of the 56 cases Compass resolved last year, none would get help under the new rules.
“It’s at the level of humanitarian crisis to me that we can’t find money to meet this need,” she said. “Why are we limiting the dollars we have for a low-cost, highly flexible intervention that can be used sometimes to remedy a family’s immediate unsheltered situation? It’s unacceptable.”
Nicole Rowland, 32 — who was formerly homeless with her 8-year-old daughter — told the Chronicle that if these policies had been in place, she believes she would have been forced to leave the shelter and end up on the street.
Rowland was fleeing domestic violence when she was placed at the Oasis Inn on an emergency basis, but she got enough extensions to stay in the shelter from November 2023 to September 2024. While families fleeing domestic violence will be prioritized under the new rules, Rowland said she relied on shelter extensions to get back on her feet. Now she lives in Antioch through a subsidy.
“There’s no doubt in my mind I would’ve been homeless if these rules were the case,” she said. “Someone going through domestic violence is already going through so many traumas. If I had that time limit weighing on me, there’s no way I could’ve found a place for me and my daughter.”
Reach Aldo Toledo: Aldo.Toledo@sfchronicle.com
Nov 26, 2024
CITY HALL REPORTER
Adalberto “Aldo” Toledo is a city hall reporter with The San Francisco Chronicle covering the mayor and Board of Supervisors. He is a Venezuelan American from a family of longtime journalists.Before joining the Chronicle in 2023, he reported on Peninsula governments and breaking news for the San Jose Mercury News. He also has bylines in the Dallas Morning News, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Champaign, Illinois News-Gazette.Raised in Texas, he studied journalism with a print news focus at the University of North Texas Mayborn School of Journalism, where he worked as News Editor for the North Texas Daily student newspaper.
