By Christin Evans, HANC Board

The pandemic emergency had its silver linings.  One was the unlocked federal funding from Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) which allowed the city to contract with 25 hotels to temporarily house over 2000 people experiencing homelessness.  The Shelter-In-Place (SIP) hotel program was scrutinized, criticized and lauded. It was a policy choice made at the height of fears that emergency rooms would be overwhelmed but it proved that when we focused our attention on the housing problem we could actually make strides in solving it.  

The emergency health order cleared the way for hotels to serve as temporary emergency shelters and over 2000 rooms were contracted and allocated in a few short months.  Skeptics and politicians who decried homelessness as a personal failing instead of a systemic failing were proven wrong – more than 95% of people offered a hotel room on the streets of San Francisco each day in June, July, and August 2020 accepted those rooms. 

PLACING LIMITS

As the City feared the FEMA funding could quickly disappear at a month’s notice, the program was capped and new intakes were at first limited to the elderly and disabled – and then in the Spring of 2021 as the COVID vaccine became available all new intakes were paused and the City started the slow process of winding the hotel program down. 

As of early August 2022, there were 5 of the original 25 SIP hotels remaining.  A little less than half of guests had received housing assistance to permanent housing exits, the remaining had been shifted to shelters or other institutions such as hospitals or “exited for disciplinary or unknown reasons.”  The City has postponed the closure program a few times with pandemic uncertainty, and virus surges.  But for now the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH) says it will wind down the remaining SIP hotels by the Fall 2022.   Three former SIP hotels have reopened as non-congregate shelters and are expected to remain open until late 2023. 

But the re-housing process has been arduously slow.   In spite of having an average 800 vacant permanent housing placements and hundreds more housing vouchers, the City is housing people at a rate of only 50 adults per month – a rate which would take 15 years to house the current number experiencing homelessness.  That’s just TOO SLOW.  And the old standby excuses (lack of staffing, lack of resources) no longer hold as the Prop C funding has unlocked tremendous financial resources. 

LACK OF URGENCY

At this stage blame falls solidly on the Mayor and her administration who lack urgency to dedicate the staff needed to accelerate the re-housing process.  Community advocates have seen the administration’s failure to adequately address the affordable housing crisis and the homelessness crisis as one in the same - not a lack of finances and resources – we are after all a rich city – but rather an expression of political will – a strong-mayor city administration unwilling to fully commit the resources necessary to provide all San Franciscans a place to call home.