It's homelessness. Always homelessness

San Francisco has tried nearly everything. Not much has changed

Last Friday, San Francisco’s Homelessness and Supportive Housing director resigned. City officials said they were surprised that Abigail Stewart-Kahn quit so abruptly, after roughly a year on the job.

Supervisor Matt Haney told the Chronicle that her departure is “both problematic and strange.”

Apparently, City Hall types are baffled. Why would she leave?

I think I can help. I haven’t spoken to her, but I am going to suggest a reason:

Because the job is freakin’ impossible.

I am now two years into my fifth decade since moving to San Francisco. And in those 50+ years, I’d say homelessness was the number one topic every single year. And I would say we are no closer to a solution than we were decades ago.

This week, Randy Shaw, writing in Beyond Chron said there are “roughly “6,000 unhoused people living in tents, shelters and on the street.” In 2015, the city’s official count put the total at 6,686. Not much progress.

Not that we haven’t tried. I think we can make a pretty comprehensive list of every reasonable attempt to get people off the SF streets and into stable housing. We’ve enforced the law, decided that was too mean, allowed tent camping, changed our minds and cleared out tent camps and then put people in hotels temporarily — apparently until some magic housing solution appeared out of the sky.

All while spending hundreds of millions of dollars.

And I would say, if you are reading a study, publication or treatise, and it says their idea has the “potential to end homelessness forever,” you should stop reading. I see no evidence of that happening.

Now, is it possible to make things better? Sure. And, as we come out of this pandemic, it would be a good time to implement a coherent, logic plan.

But first, let’s consider what doesn’t work:

ENFORCE THE DAMN LAWS: Isn’t it a crime to block the sidewalk and sleep on the street? Why don’t the police just enforce it?

Law and order is always a popular choice. San Francisco tried it when Frank Jordan was mayor, with his Matrix Program. People are still arguing over whether it was a good idea that was poorly handled or a misconception from the start.

What we know is that the cries of “This is not the San Francisco I know,” and “How can you arrest someone for not having a place to sleep?” was a big part of the reason it faded away.

It remains a tempting thought. Just this week both San Jose and granola-crunchy Santa Cruz announced new, tough stands on homeless camps. San Jose is proposing to clear them out and move residents to an approved camping site.

Santa Cruz officials have approved an ordinance that will ban daytime camping. That will mean tent-dwellers will have to move every day. The city says it will provide an alternative safe sleeping site.

Good luck with that. The problem is that the ultimate enforcement of those policies is jail. So you put a homeless person in jail. For what? A week?

And then they come out. Where do they go? Back on the street? Probably.

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THROW MONEY AT THE PROBLEM: As noted in the Chronicle’s story on Stewart-Kahn’s resignation, San Francisco currently spends more than $300 million a year on homeless services. And yes, you can argue that some of that is fixed expenses, and shouldn’t be calculated so narrowly.

But that is still a lot of Monopoly money. And the problem is, all that cash doesn’t seem to be making much of an improvement. What should we do?

More money!

Not to pick on Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff (well, maybe a little) but there is always a problem-solver who say, “These programs will work if they just get more funding.”

On the good side, Benioff donated $30 million to UCSF to study the causes of homelessness. That’s fine. (Benioff also got to troll other tech billionaires, essentially saying “I’m helping, what are YOU doing?”)

But Benioff’s big play was in the 2018 election, when he basically wrote Proposition C, that would tax money-rich big corporations to generate some $300 million a year.

And then, according to this Chronicle column Benioff spent $7.9 million to campaign for Prop C , seven times what opponents could spend.

And here’s the funny thing. Among the opponents were Mayor London Breed, state Sen. Scott Weiner and Assemblyman David Chiu. A who’s who of influential local pols, in other words.

Their message: money is not the answer.

“I do not believe doubling what we spent on homelessness without new accountability, when we don’t even spend what we have now efficiently, is good government,” Breed said.

Prop C passed, although it was held up in the courts for a while, it is now dinging local corporations with new taxes. And that is pumping money into the swimming pool in the basement of City Hall where city officials use big nets to pull up bushels of cash.

And that’s one problem, once the city gets the Prop C money, there are loopholes aplenty. God knows where all of those hundreds of millions might end up.

Which is what Breed was trying to say. Unless there’s a comprehensive homelessness plan, the result is wasted funding, duplicate efforts and confusion. More money only makes that more likely.

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HOUSE THEM IN HOTELS: In a classic SF strategy during the pandemic, it was decided to house the unhoused in vacant hotels.

For a while.

No one really knew how long. And worse yet, no one seemed to know what would happen when someone’s hotel stay ended.

Yet, we’ve heard for years that they are lots of vacant rooms in single room occupancy hotels, that could be used for supportive housing.

Now we are hearing the city will go all in, with the Office of Housing Opportunities hoping to provide rooms for 2,000 people by the end of the year. The idea is that the pandemic has created vacancies that can be used as homeless housing.

This is not a terrible idea. Just a couple of points. Are you presuming the economy isn’t coming back and students and tourists won’t rent those rooms in the future? And second, you’re establishing downtown hotels as homeless hubs.

Also, if you’re going to house people, you’re going to have to administrate it. That means you are responsible for safety, security and health. It is a lot of work. Just sayin’.

SAFE SLEEPING AREAS: At this point this may be the best option. Ever since activists began handling out free tents, the person on the street has changed from someone in a sleeping bag on the sidewalk to a person in a tent with personal space.

People like them. They keep them out of the rain, give them zip-up privacy and a place to keep stuff.

The people who don’t like them are the residents and businesses who find their sidewalks blocked with tent cities.

So a possible solution is to create a supervised tent space. There’s a fenced one at Civic Center now and it appears to still look like a little community. There are tents in socially-distanced spaces and residents sign in and sign out for security.

So there you go, right? Maybe add a formal RV parking site and you are housing people without hassling people.

The problem is as this KPIX story says the 262 tents, housing and feeding some 300 people, is costing the city $16.1 million. And this Chronicle story says the cost, per tent, is over $61,000 a year.

Supervisor Ahsha Safai said he’s as interested as anyone in solving the problem, but “we really need to dive deep to see if this is a sustainable model.”

And so, we return to the beginning, still trying new ideas and finding them problematic.

Personally, it seems the best idea would be to expand safe sleeping sites, but put them in inexpensive, vacant areas of the city, with lots of room. As they do in other cities, police officers could go to a tent-dweller and say, “You can’t stay here, but we have a safe sleeping site on the edge of the city. So you can leave or we can take you to the site.”

Actually, the city tried that one too. Back in 2016, the city set up a large shelter on Pier 80. There were bathroom facilities and meals. Couples were allowed to stay together and pets were welcome.

It seemed like a good idea.

But we dropped it after a couple of months.

Then we tried something else.

Contact C.W. Nevius at cwnevius@gmail.com. Suggestions and compliments welcome. Criticism, not to much. Twitter: @cwnevius