San Francisco’s damaged promise to resolve homeless encampments

More than three years and a pandemic after San Francisco created a new organization to coordinate the city’s response to homelessness, critics say the program’s promise remains largely unfulfilled.

Granted, in a way it was successful. The number of citywide registered tents fell 65% between April 2020 and April 2021, according to data from the Mayor’s London Breed office.

Tents can be cleared, but that doesn’t mean that the people who live in them will end up being housed.

When a camp is removed, residents have a choice: move or take up accommodation.

Some try a variety of urban services for a short time while others prefer to stay on the street. The reality, however, is that many San Francisco residents who are homeless find themselves on a revolving door between outreach programs and street life.

When the Healthy Streets Operations Center was founded in 2018, it was cited as the best way to solve some of these challenges.

Police officers are part of the teams that are dispatched to the scene, accompanied by medical professionals, sales representatives and street cleaning teams. Together they should offer an optimized response to tent sites, connect residents with services, better care for the most vulnerable and finally move tents off the street to create a clean passage.

‘Disbanded’ but not accommodated

When the HSOC clears a warehouse, the situation is said to be “resolved”. What happens to many people in these tents remains decidedly unexplained.

HSOC teams met 5,621 people living in tents between June 2020 and October 2021.

Even those who took protection often returned to the streets at some point.

According to Emergency Management, the teams encountered 747 people from the same period who were using tents for purposes other than living, even though they already had city-provided accommodation. These individuals were told to remove their structure and return to the residential alternative provided.

In another example, HSOC placed 650 clients in emergency shelters in 2019, but 619 of those people returned to the streets afterwards, according to documents received from the examiner. People affected by homelessness told social workers that they felt traumatized and distrusted service providers.

HSOC critics say these results show that the initiative does not address the root causes of extreme poverty and homelessness. Rather, they say it makes the homeless population – and the reality of their conditions – less visible to the public.

“The goal has always been to remove tents, and that has always been the point, a concerted and cross-departmental effort to remove tents,” said Jennifer Friedenbach of the local advocacy group, Coalition on Homelessness. “We had a problem with the concept. It should be about freeing people from homelessness, regardless of whether they have a tent or not. “

For those who do not go to temporary accommodation from a camp, the situation can be dire.

According to Emergency Management, a staggering 2,318 people encountered by HSOC teams in camps were “unwilling to accept services,” a premise questioned by lawyers and academics who have studied homeless care challenges in other cities.

Stay on the road

Skeptics of this logic say reticence is common among many who live on the streets – often for good reason.

Many people affected by homelessness have had negative experiences in emergency shelters, such as the theft of their belongings or fear that they lack privacy. Many are afraid of having to give up certain belongings or abandon a long-term partner or, after years of failure, they simply lack confidence in the system.

California Highway Patrol officials watched Caltrans workers remove barricades from a homeless campground that residents were about to evacuate in a parking lot under Interstate 80 in May. (Kevin N. Hume / The Examiner)
A homeless man tore down a tent during an evacuation operation in May. Many homeless people continue to live on the streets after the forced relocation. (Kevin N. Hume / The Examiner)

Sometimes they just find it easier to stay on the road. Research by the journal Qualitative Social Work calls this a “socially rational decision in which individuals weigh the costs and benefits of participating in certain services based on their previous experience and personal situations”.

HSOC critics also claim that when a team is sent to a camp, the city does not always have enough accommodation available for all residents. The coalition’s latest report claims that the search will continue anyway as people are removed, and then those who remain will be classified as draft evaders.

The HSOC vehemently denies this claim, saying that teams will suspend the operation until beds are open when beds are not available.

The mixing

Whatever the reason, nearly half of the people The City encountered during the clearance process over a 16-month period were not connected to services. You were asked to move. These people’s lives become a tragic street shuffle, moving from block to block to find peace between searches.

“There is the idea that The City is a leader in services, and they are not,” said Friendenbach. “They are leaders in cleaning.”

Campsites are often made inhospitable to future residents once the city has done its job. The HSOC calls these efforts “prevention of re-storage”.

Last year the east side of Octavia Street in the Hayes Valley was the location of a large group of tents. On a few days in July, these tents were cleared and temporary guard rails were put up. Near Safeway on Market and Church streets, signs on a small concrete island remind people that camping is forbidden.

“For unoccupied parishioners, this just continues the cycle of The City being pushed around and their belongings trashed or destroyed,” the Coalition on Homelessness report reads.

The city recognizes that the tandem goal of creating clean and safe roads while providing a dignified and humane way out of poverty for the people they call home is a difficult task.

“We all want the same thing: to help people escape the crisis they are experiencing on the streets while ensuring that our public spaces are safe and accessible,” the emergency management said in a statement. “San Francisco knows there is room for improvement and disagreement about how to address these challenges.”

All of this begs the obvious question: does this have to be the case?

The right way

Many say no. Proponents point to the evacuation of a large camp on Fifth and King Streets in 2012 as evidence of an alternative way to keep public spaces clean while maintaining safety and dignity for the camp’s residents.

The city spent weeks engaging with residents, securing a church to move to temporarily, renting a storage container for belongings, and forging a path to supporting housing.

Bevan Dufty, the homeless tsar at the time, called the venture a “masterclass” of what to do – and what not to do – to strengthen the city’s struggle to better serve the homeless population.

“I learned basic and basic things about what wasn’t working in the shelter system,” he said. “A male and female couple won’t want to split up in different shelters, and the veteran who inherited two pit bulls from a friend who overdosed and died isn’t going to give up his dogs to take a shelter bed. “

Dufty later ran the first navigation center on 16th and Mission Streets, a model he thought was a direct reference to that experience. These facilities offer extensive all-round services and few barriers to entry.

However, this has yet to prove to be a panacea, especially during the pandemic when meeting places were forced to operate at reduced capacity.

The hotel option

Shelter-in-place hotels, most of which had been reimbursed by the federal government by the end of this year, were supposed to bear part of this burden and offer additional accommodation.

For a while they did so with great success and, according to Emergency Management, housed around 3,700 residents during the pandemic. That number fell to 1,271 when The City began shutting down the on-site accommodation program.

“While the SIPs have been an excellent emergency option, we must continue to focus on long-term solutions such as problem solving and permanent supportive housing,” said a statement from the San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing.

The department believes the decision to close the temporary hotels is a long-term investment. Breed is committed to adding 6,000 shelters and permanent supportive shelters over a two-year period.

Others say it shows the city’s reluctance to take bold action.

“From the moment the program started, the greatest fear was, ‘What will we do when we run out of rooms?’ It should have said, ‘Let’s have a great influence and make it impossible for us that the federal and state governments don’t give us money for it,’ ”said Dufty. “It just seemed tepid.”

According to the logic of the city, its ability to reduce the number of tents across the city and invest heavily in more housing and permanent supportive housing units shows that the efforts of the HSOC and the broader approach it advocates are effective.

That thesis will be put to the test in January 2022 when a homeless census will be conducted in San Francisco for the first time since the pandemic. It remains to be seen whether this strategy has really resulted in an exit from homelessness or whether it has forced people living on the streets and in camps to shuffle between less and less noticeable places across the city.

cgraf@sfexaminer.com