The signs were unmistakable as sick sea lions turned up one by one on the California coastline.

Some appeared to be unusually sluggish, weak and disoriented. Others displayed what is known as head-weaving behavior, with their snouts upturned as their necks tilted precariously to one side in a seemingly drunken sway. Many of the animals were foaming at the mouth; some were even convulsing from seizures.

Last month, the Marine Mammal Center’s 24-hour rescue hotline was flooded with hundreds of calls reporting sightings of the animals in distress, at one point receiving 144 calls in a single day, Giancarlo Rulli, a spokesperson for the Sausalito center, told SFGATE.

Rulli said that 75% to 80% of those calls were regarding individual sea lions in San Luis Obispo County alone, where the center’s team rescued 25 of the animals that they later determined had been sickened by an outbreak of domoic acid poisoning. Marine mammals can contract the naturally occurring neurotoxin through eating fish such as herring, anchovies and sardines, and once the toxin is in their bloodstream, it can lead to significant heart or brain damage, or even death.

Rulli told SFGATE the Marine Mammal Center was the first to diagnose a case of domoic acid poisoning in a sea lion because of a large outbreak in 1998, and since then has dealt with other outbreaks and mass stranding events on a much larger scale.

“That said, the logistics of transporting these mostly 150-200 pound subadult and adult marine mammals from our field office in Morro Bay to Sausalito — on an expedited timeframe due to their serious health condition — can still be challenging,” he said in an e-mail.

Torple, an adult female California sea lion rescued for domoic acid poisoning in San Luis Obispo County on Sept. 5, 2022, exhibits a common behavioral sign of the disease — head weaving — during rehabilitation at the Marine Mammal Center’s hospital and visitor center in Sausalito. The animal was successfully released back to the wild at Chimney Rock in Point Reyes National Seashore on Sept. 30, 2022.

Bill Hunnewell © The Marine Mammal Center

There is no known cure for domoic acid poisoning, though it can be eliminated through urinary excretion. Once the animals arrived at the Bay Area hospital, the Marine Mammal Center’s veterinary team administered a combination of fluids and non-contaminated fish to help flush the toxin from their systems. Some of the more severe cases also required anti-seizure medications.

“Thanks to the quick action of our teams in responding expeditiously to the sick sea lions and beginning immediate treatment, more than half of the sea lions have already been released back to the wild,” Rulli said, noting that the sea lions were still in rehabilitation at the hospital are on target to be returned to their habitat in the near future.

Experience the heartwarming moment of #MarineMammals returning to the wild wherever you are We launched a webcam that shares livestream video from @PointReyesNPS so you can see your support in action Text RELEASE to 65179 to be notified when patient releases are visible! pic.twitter.com/Qr7Ch5IZoX

— The Marine Mammal Center (@TMMC) September 29, 2022

Outbreaks of this nature in San Luis Obispo County aren’t considered unusual, especially during this time of year. The Marine Mammal Center has seen mass stranding events of a similar scale in the region three out of the past five years, and rescues anywhere between 60 and 80 sea lions sickened by domoic acid poisoning across its 600-mile response range on any given year.

“Although concerning to see these cases, it did follow a typical pattern of a late-summer spike in domoic acid cases in the region,” Rulli said. “One thing we do know is that the algae (Pseudo-nitzschia) thrives in unusually warm waters off the West Coast — ocean conditions that have become more frequent in recent years as we see the impacts of climate change increase.”

This event was not related to the algal bloom that spread across the San Francisco bay in late August. Sue Pemberton, a curatorial assistant who is also on the marine mammal response team at the California Academy of Sciences, said she had not observed high numbers of animals impacted by domoic acid toxicosis in the Bay Area.

But the bloom of pseudo-nitzschia in San Luis Obispo County did sicken sea lions in Southern California. And while the Marine Mammal Center said the event was not considered unusual in San Luis Obispo County, the Channel Islands Marine and Wildlife Institute called the outbreak “a crisis situation” in Santa Barbara and Ventura counties. A spokesperson for the rescue organization told SFGATE that volunteers came to the aid of more than 262 marine mammals sickened by domoic acid since Aug. 15, some of which required multiple field responses. Most of the affected animals were adult female sea lions, but they also encountered nine male sea lions, two Northern fur seals and one long-beaked common dolphin exhibiting the telltale symptoms of domoic acid toxicosis.

“This was a very difficult time for CIMWI’s all-volunteer team,” the spokesperson said in an email, noting that the organization was fielding 50-100 calls a day. “This strain was potent and much stronger than CIMWI has ever experienced. CIMWI saw more acute symptoms and higher rates of mortality on the beaches and with animals receiving treatment and supportive care.”

California sea lion needle (right) rests in a rehabilitation pool pen during treatment for domoic acid poisoning at the Marine Mammal Center’s hospital and visitor center in Sausalito. The adult female sea lion was successfully released back to the wild at Chimney Rock in Point Reyes National Seashore on Sept. 29, 2022.

Bill Hunnewell © The Marine Mammal Center

Sea lions can be the first animals to be affected by a toxic algal bloom, Rulli said. Because domoic acid can also sicken humans who eat contaminated fish and lead to amnesic shellfish poisoning, a life-threatening condition, the Marine Mammal Center provides data to the state’s public health department so it can closely monitor and issue warnings on seafood.

In the meantime, Rulli said, the center’s scientists are working to investigate the toxic algal bloom’s links with climate change and other environmental factors.

“The past experience of dealing with mass stranding events, including due to domoic acid poisoning, is invaluable and allows us to perform the logistics of the rescue, transport and animal care seamlessly,” said Aliah Meza, operations manager at The Marine Mammal Center’s Morro Bay field office. “Thanks to our dedicated response volunteers in coordination with our veterinary staff, we’re heartened to know that these sick animals are receiving a second chance to return to their ocean home.”

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Hundreds of workers at the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, the largest operator of single-room occupancy buildings in San Francisco, said they were planning a one-day strike expected to commence on Wednesday.

The employees overwhelmingly voted to authorize a strike in May, with 99% in support. Since then, the union and THC have continued meeting for bargaining talks that have now been grinding on for nearly eight months.

While the two sides made progress addressing worker fatigue — agreeing to allot three mental health days for each employee — they remain at odds over wages, the key issue driving the strike.

“Wages pay rent, they pay rising gas bills, they pay for groceries,” said Evan Oravec, a THC community organizer and president of its union, which is affiliated with Service Employees International Union Local 1021.

So far, THC’s position on wages increases “is not satisfactory for workers,” Oravec said. “It doesn’t raise everyone enough,” he said, referring to the proposed scale of $19 to $21 an hour for desk clerks, $20 to $22 for janitors and $22 to $24 for maintenance workers.

That range is too low, Oravec said, and has triggered fears of pay compression, which occurs when employees with different levels of experience earn roughly the same amount. A desk clerk with one or two years of experience already makes $18.40 an hour, Oravec said, fearing the new rates would effectively lock these employees in at a salary barely better than their current earnings.

Tenderloin Housing Clinic’s executive director, Randy Shaw, said he shares the union’s concerns about setting the bottom of the pay scale too low. Though Shaw believes that Wednesday’s action will have little impact on SRO residents — given its short anticipated duration — he and other managers have pressed the city to raise the proposed bar as contract negotiations wear on.

“We know it’s disruptive to not go in for a day,” clinical case manager Marissa Roarty said, indicating that without janitors, toilets might get clogged and trash might not get taken out, and without desk clerks, guests might not be able to come and go.

She said the workers “feel like this is a last resort.”

Union organizers were threatening to strike for several days, even as they continued bargaining with management. Though the talks appear amicable, workers sent a strong message when they held a picket sign-making party last Wednesday.

Mayor London Breed and the Board of Supervisors boosted funding in San Francisco’s budget this year for city-contracted nonprofits — and specifically those that oversee permanent supportive housing — with an eye toward increasing wages. The budget includes a 5.25% pay increase for all employees of nonprofits funded by the city, plus a 2.5% increase for all nonprofit contracts, which could also go to worker earnings.

Additionally, the city is providing $3 million annually to nonprofits in the permanent supportive housing sector, to bring case manager salaries up to $28 an hour, according to the mayor’s office.

However, Shaw said he’s been assured only that case managers’ salaries would rise to $25 an hour.

Another item in the budget allocates $12 million annually to raise wages of other frontline workers in the permanently supportive housing sphere.

Shaw said he agrees with the union that the minimums established in the current proposed pay scales for desk clerks, janitors and maintenance workers are all too low. He said the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing set those ranges, and the Tenderloin Housing Clinic has emphatically pushed to increase them.

A representative of the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing said officials have prioritized “wage equity” in this year’s budget.

“We’ve been pounding HSH as hard as we can,” Shaw said, adding that clinic management also tried lobbying members of the Board of Supervisors’ Budget and Appropriations Committee, but could not persuade the majority of its five members to mandate that the department set pay at the higher end of the scale.

Robert Crockett, a custodian at THC who currently makes $17.37 an hour, said he’s confident his union will negotiate a better wage.

“The cost of living in San Francisco is very high: telephone bills, washing clothes and then I have grandkids,” Crockett said during a phone interview Thursday afternoon from the Raman Hotel, one of the clinic’s buildings on Howard Street.

Crockett lives in the Galvin Apartments, a separate Tenderloin Housing Clinic property in SoMa.

Chronicle staff writer Sabrina Pascua contributed to this report.

Rachel Swan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rswan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rachelswan

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(TNS) — Tech company layoffs are poised to eliminate hundreds of jobs in the Bay Area, an ominous new round of layoffs that might jolt the region’s primary economic engine.

Malwarebytes, Shift Technologies, Robinhood Markets and Rivian Automotive have notified the state’s labor agency that they have embarked on cutbacks that are slated to jettison about 450 jobs in the Bay Area, according to official notices filed with the government.

Here’s the local impact of the layoffs that are in the works as a result of several tech company job cuts, which together total 453 positions. The layoffs were detailed in WARN notices filed with the state Employment Development Department:

— Rivian Automotive, an Irvine-based maker of electric vehicles, plans to eliminate 208 jobs at multiple locations in Palo Alto.

— Robinhood Markets, a financial services tech company, or fintech, is cutting 146 jobs in Menlo Park, the city where Robinhood is based.

— San Francisco-based Shift Technologies, which operates an e-commerce online marketplace for used-car sales, is cutting 52 jobs in Oakland.

— Santa Clara-based Malwarebytes, an Internet security company that specializes in protecting home computers, smartphones, and companies from malware and other digital threats, is cutting 47 jobs at its Santa Clara headquarters, part of an overall reduction of 125 positions throughout the company .

These layoffs have arrived at a time when multiple tech titans, including Google, Amazon, Facebook app owner Meta Platforms, Netflix and Apple have revealed plans to slow down their pace of hiring. Amazon and Netflix, however, each have launched actual job cuts.

Amazon’s total staffing shrank by 99,000 from the end of March to the end of June worldwide.

Los Gatos-based Netflix has chopped about 500 jobs this year, including full-time workers, part-timers and contractors. The Netflix layoffs include a loss of slightly more than 100 jobs in Los Angeles.

Malwarebyte’s job cuts were effective as of Aug. 15, the company stated in the WARN notice.

Rivian said its staffing reductions would take effect on Oct. 7, Robinhood said its job cuts would be effective by Oct. 1 and Shift said its layoffs would be in place by Oct. 8th.

Electric vehicle maker Rivian blamed inflation and rising costs for its layoffs, saying it had to undertake measures to save cash to cope with the financial squeeze.

Some Malwarebytes employees took to the LinkedIn social network to alert people that they had lost their jobs, using a #layoffs hashtag.

“Due to #layoffs at Malwarebytes today, I am looking for a new role and would appreciate your support,” one Malwarebytes worker posted on LinkedIn.

The cutbacks at Shift Technologies occurred in the wake of the company’s acquisition of CarLotz, a vehicle retailer. The deal gives the new Shift and CarLotz firm a presence in the markets for vehicle transactions via both online commerce and in-person encounters.

© 2022 MediaNews Group, Inc. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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Juliana McNeil greeted reporters in what’s known as the living room, a tranquil space with yellow walls where people use computers, read books and unwind.

She was there as a kind of ambassador for the visitors who come in regularly, and had glowing reviews of her experience at the Tenderloin Center.

McNeil said she had been sleeping on the streets in Oakland before she arrived at the site. She said staff helped her find housing, mental health support and mentors.

“Places like this need to exist in other counties because when you’re homeless, you feel like you have nothing,” she said. “They got me not only a hot meal, they gave me a hygiene kit, clothes. They basically linked me back up to where I’m building myself again, my trust with people.”

Juliana McNeil told members of the media she lived on the streets of Oakland before finding support at the Tenderloin Center. (Holly McDede/KQED)

Donna Hilliard, executive director of Code Tenderloin, took reporters to the courtyard.

“What we tell people is, ‘Welcome to grandmother’s backyard,'” she said.

She pointed toward a mobile shower and laundry station.

“You can come in smelling like pee, but guess what, we have a shower, and we’re going to give it with care,” she said.

Hilliard nodded toward the game area and where guests can get coffee, and gray-and-blue reclining chairs arranged in a circle where people wait for services or nap.

Then reporters were escorted to what staff called “the overdose prevention area.”

The area is pretty basic. Plastic tables and chairs are set up for people to use drugs with relative privacy, while staff are nearby to reverse overdoses.

“There are people we don’t see in treatment, people who leave treatment and have reoccurrence of drug use. And for those people, we believe we have an obligation to care for them so they don’t die of a drug overdose,” said Vitka Eisen, president and CEO of HealthRIGHT 360, a nonprofit health provider that offers harm-reduction services at the Tenderloin Center.

On a typical day, in this outdoor lounge area at the Tenderloin Center, guests wait for services. Vitka Eisen with HealthRIGHT 360 said staff have reversed overdoses at this spot and that naloxone is readily available when needed. (Holly McDede/KQED)

Naloxone, the drug used to reverse overdoses, and clean needles are at the ready. No one has fatally overdosed at the Tenderloin Center, and staff have reversed over 90 overdoses since the site opened in January, according to data from the San Francisco Public Health Department.

Eisen disagreed that the site is a safe consumption site, however, and preferred to call it an overdose prevention site.

“The safe consumption sites are typically indoors. They have nursing staff, a medical model, and this is outdoors in a tent,” she said. “It’s rugged.”

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Bay Area // san francisco

May 26, 2022Updated: May 26, 2022 8:46 am

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PG&E crews work to restore power to around 750 customers in San Francisco’s Noe Valley neighborhood after what appeared to be a blown transformer scorched a utility pole.

Andy Reinhardt / The Chronicleshow moreshow less

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A PG&E worker addressing the burned top of a utility pole in San Francisco, Calif. An apparently blown transformer scorched the pole.

Andy Reinhardt / The Chronicleshow moreshow less

About 750 residents near San Francisco’s Noe Valley neighborhood were without power Thursday morning following an outage that impacted more than 3,000 customers on Wednesday night, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. said.

The outage was first reported at about 11 pm Wednesday and affected 3,272 customers, said PG&E spokesperson Karly Hernandez.

PG&E crews were working Thursday morning to restore power to the remaining 751 customers, and expect full restoration by 2 pm, said Hernandez.

The cause of the outage was under investigation.

Residents reported hearing a loud “bang” around 11 pm Wednesday when a transformer may have blown. PG&E crews were working to replace a burned utility pole Wednesday morning.

Jessica Flores (she/her) is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jessica.flores@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jesssmflores

Jessica Flores is a reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle. Before joining The Chronicle in 2021, she worked for USA Today, NPR affiliate KPCC and Curbed LA. Originally from LA, she received her master’s degree in journalism from the University of Southern California and a bachelor’s degree from Mount Saint Mary’s University in Los Angeles.

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“I can’t be there anymore,” she said when interviewed in December. “Your body goes through a lot being homeless. I’ve had pneumonia for two months now, from black mold on my tent. My tent is literally killing me.”

While the city said it is taking steps to mitigate delays, months of living in a wet tent site took its toll on residents. In text messages sent late one night, Ladybird described the chaos that had ensued as one of her neighbors had a mental breakdown. “This situation is getting worse by the day, it’s more twisted than anything I’ve seen in my decade out here,” she said. “I would be better off on the streets.”

The situation felt hopeless. “This site hasn’t placed anybody,” Ladybird said. “Anybody who’s getting out of there is doing it on their own. There’s no social worker. It’s just a dead end.”

Paperwork bottlenecks stand the process of moving people indoors

While the policies of the last two years left people like Ladybird living outdoors, those living in shelter-in-place hotels haven’t always fared better, with some of them waiting more than a year to be connected to a home.

Marquita Stroud is one of those. She said that she has been homeless for 15 years, but that about a month before the COVID-19 outbreak began in earnest, she was approved for permanent supportive housing. “God was on my side!” she said when interviewed in december.

In April 2020, she was relocated to the Hotel Whitcomb, a historic tourist hotel repurposed to allow people experiencing homelessness to quarantine safely. Stroud was one of 500 homeless people the city moved from large, warehouse-style shelters into 25 hotels around town.

Stroud is an optimist, high-energy and cheerful, who wears her hair tied up neatly in a scarf. “It’s wet!” she exclaimed on a rainy morning, as she confidently strode down Market Street with an umbrella in one hand, pushing a cart containing her small, fluffy dog, blue, with the other. She headed straight to a corner of the public library, a place she knows well.

Under COVID-19-era rules, Stroud isn’t allowed visitors where she lives, so she meets people at their apartments, outside or in public places. The prohibition on guests didn’t bother stroud too much when she first moved in. But she felt isolated and, as the months dragged on, no one contacted her about moving into her own place. Stroud watched her friends and neighbors — many of whom arrived in the hotel the same day she did — move into permanent housing. Her turn never came.

In large part, that’s because the homelessness department’s process for reviewing and selecting unhoused people for referral is slow. And in the period when Stroud was waiting, things were markedly worse. In October 2020, 32% of vacant units had no pending referrals for a resident. In January, that ratio had more than doubled, to 66% of available units, according to the city’s own data. The department did not respond to questions about why this might be.

Gary ran eight buildings through DISH. In February 2021, before he stepped down, he said the problem wasn’t new, but it was getting worse.

“Somewhere there is a bottleneck where the city is not sending us the housing application — that is, the documented representation of that person that we can process,” he said. “We report the vacancy to the city, and those vacancies languish for weeks to months without a referral of a real live human being who can be housed.”

At least part of the problem is a shortage of case managers, who are the crucial link between vacant units and the hundreds of people approved for housing. There is frequent turnover in the high-stress positions, and non-profit struggles to fill new job openings.

Stroud said she has been assigned six case managers in two years. To figure out who is assigned to her, she regularly checks a piece of paper taped to a wall in her hotel, which lists the name of the case manager assigned to each floor. She describes calling her case manager repeatedly to set up an appointment and not getting through.

“They pretty much don’t go knocking on your door,” Stroud said. “You got to ask for them. If I see one in the hallway — like if I see a worker talking to a client in the hallway — I always ask, ‘Are you a counselor? Are you my counselor?’ Because they don’t tell you.”

Nearly two years after being approved for a housing unit, Stroud is still at the Hotel Whitcomb. Although she dreams of going back to school, publishing her journals and giving back to the homeless community, her reality is much different. She’s had items stolen from her room, and the building has fallen into disrepair. “When we first got to this hotel, it was so cute,” she said. “Now they got the bedbugs, the roaches, the mice. Every other day, the pipes are brassing up.”

Recently she met a woman who had recently moved into the Whitcomb, but was already on her way out: She’d been assigned a housing unit.

“I was asking her, what did she do to get her housing that quick? And she said her counselor just came knocking on her door like, ‘You ready to go?’” Stroud said, clearly frustrated. “I haven’t talked to anyone about housing,” she said this month, as she approaches her two-year anniversary at the hotel. “I’m still here just waiting.”

As for Ladybird, she was approved for housing in November, but three months later, she is still without a home. In January, she left the tent encampment for a short-term residential hotel, but it comes with a time limit. “After 28 days, we get put out.”

Are you currently homeless in San Francisco, and trying to get housing? Do you have experience with the city’s housing process? Email the author at nuala@sfpublicpress.org.

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SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX) — As the crisis in Ukraine escalated Saturday, hundreds of Ukrainians and their supporters gathered at San Francisco’s Embarcadero Plaza. The sheer brutality of Russia’s attack has shocked the world community and there is a call to take action now before it’s too late.

It wasn’t just Ukrainians who showed up — people of all nationalities seem stunned by what’s happening.

“It’s surreal,” said San Francisco resident Alex Hoye. “It feels like we’re going back in time to the 50s and 60s. It feels like a 20th century war using 21st century weapons.”

Video showed Russian forces moving into Ukraine, often randomly attacking civilian targets, in mayhem reminiscent of the Nazis’ blitzkrieg of European nations in the 1930s.

“Americans! Putin is not going to stop in Ukraine!” Nataliya Aron told the crowd. The Ukrainian-American said the entire world must act quickly before her homeland is overwhelmed by a far superior force.

“It’s defending itself fiercely but it’s a David versus Goliath battle,” she said. “If the world will not step in … I’m, I’m … we have to help! The whole world has to help Ukraine, at this point.”

Margarita Osipov was in tears as she gazed out at the crowd. She is of mixed nationality and was so torn up that she actually said she felt guilty about being able to speak Russian.

“Right now, I can see people rallying and thank God they’re not talking about peace. Because it’s not about peace right now. War has been started and it’s in our country and what we need is their support,” she said.

There were Russian nationals in attendance as well. A young man named Vitali said those of his countrymen who support the attack believe they are somehow defending other Russians in Ukraine. He said Vladimir Putin has used state media to feed the Russian people lies and is now keeping the truth about the invasion from them.

“I’m almost crying. It’s devastating, it’s really devastating,” he said. “I have friends in Ukraine, lots of relatives in Ukraine, and it just blows my mind. There’s no goddam reason for this to happen! I think the guy is just insane. I mean, he’s out of his mind.”

San Jose resident Ken Borelli isn’t Ukrainian but he wondered how Putin could have amassed the power to do this.

“It’s just stunning to me how one man could galvanize a country to declare war and savagely brutalize another country,” he said. “It’s just incomprehensible.”

Organizers said Ukrainians and their supporters planned to gather again in front of San Francisco City Hall on Sunday at 2 pm

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This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the San Francisco Public Press. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

At a bustling makeshift flea market on a street corner in San Francisco’s Mission District, Ladybird sells her wares. One afternoon in December, wearing a black hoodie, faded black jeans embroidered with roses and carefully applied makeup, she biked three blocks from the city-sanctioned tent encampment where she lives, carrying a bag with a still-sealed Minnie Mouse stationery kit and a brand-new pair of brown high heels. Almost immediately, she was approached by a man interested in buying the stationery kit to give to his daughter for Christmas. “Eight dollars,” she said. He talked her down to five, and a deal was made.

During a pause in bartering, a text message appeared on her phone. “I’ve been assigned a case manager! It happened this morning,” she exclaimed, calling over her friend Johnny to tell him the news. “I’m going to be moving indoors in the next couple weeks.”

Ladybird said she hasn’t lived indoors in seven years. This winter, she said, she finally got approved for a permanent supportive housing unit — a subsidized room with health, employment and social services, paid for by the city and federal government. But despite her optimism, that didn’t mean the end of her wait. In San Francisco, the path from homelessness to housing can take as long as two years, and that’s for someone lucky enough to make it onto the waitlist.

San Francisco’s struggle with housing its homeless population is notorious across the nation. Multiple mayors have promised to get the crisis under control. The city’s dedicated homelessness department, created in 2016, has an annual budget of $598 million — a sum that has more than tripled in its short existence.

Nonetheless, as of early February, the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing reported 1,633 homeless people like Ladybird — approved for housing and awaiting their turn to move in. Yet records provided by the department show 888 vacancies in its permanent supportive housing stock as of Feb. 22. Filling those empty rooms would not just cut the waiting list by more than half. It would be enough to house roughly one in every eight homeless people in the city. The homelessness department said it cannot talk about individual cases, but officials acknowledged that at least 400 people have been waiting more than a year, far beyond the department’s professed goal of placing applicants into housing 30 to 45 days after they’re approved.

Hundreds of Housing Units Sit Vacant as Only a Small Fraction Are Filled

Monthly vacancies in permanent supportive housing compared with the number of people who moved in.

Credit:
Source: San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing

These persistent vacancy numbers stem largely from two new bureaucratic problems. First, the homelessness department created a policy that bumped hundreds of people who had previously been approved for housing to the bottom of a new list. In December 2020, the department rolled out a plan that reserved all available permanent supportive housing units for residents of shelter-in-place hotels, which had been opened during the pandemic to keep people who had been living on the streets safe from COVID-19.

This led to a spike in vacancies as many hotel-dwellers opted to stay in place rather than accept a more permanent option. It also meant that everyone else — people on the streets, in shelters, in navigation centers and in city-sanctioned tent sites — was out of luck, simply based on where they slept at night.

It’s into this void that Ladybird fell. A resident of a tent site, she was behind an even larger number of people on an already-massive list.

Second, even when someone is approved to move in, the city is slow to send the paperwork — what’s called a “referral” — over to the private nonprofit organizations contracted by the city to manage housing units. Over the course of the pandemic, this problem has grown steadily worse.

Doug Gary recently retired from one of those organizations, Delivering Innovations in Supportive Housing. A year ago, he reported that the organization had 38 vacant units, with no referrals. Gary remembered passing people sleeping on the sidewalk as he walked to work, knowing he had empty units languishing in his buildings.

“There are going to be 38 people stuck on the street tonight, and they could be in DISH housing,” he recalled thinking. “And that’s been true for months.”

The last count of San Francisco’s homeless population numbered more than 8,000. There is not enough housing for all of them. To try to help, the city’s mayor, London Breed, is pursuing a new goal: She has allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to procure 1,500 new units by the end of 2022. The city is on track to hit Mayor Breed’s goal, and may even exceed it.

But with so many units of housing already sitting vacant — a number that according to the department has roughly doubled during the pandemic — a critical question arises: Will the city be able to fill them?

A Deprioritized Population Struggles to Get Indoors

Funding for permanent supportive housing constitutes the largest piece of San Francisco’s budget for the homeless, and the supply of housing is growing rapidly. It consists mostly of older hotels converted into single-room-occupancy residences. The city contracts with a dozen nonprofit organizations to run the nearly 150 buildings and manage social services, such as moving people in and out of units, maintaining the properties and managing individual cases, including everything from connecting people to treatment for substance use disorder to helping someone apply for food stamps. Residents pay 30% of their income, including Social Security benefits, toward rent, and the city subsidizes the rest.

All of the 1,633 people in line for a permanent supportive housing unit had to answer a series of questions to determine who is most vulnerable and therefore most in need of housing. Every year, more than 3,000 people take this assessment, called “coordinated entry,” which takes into consideration, among other things, how long they’ve been homeless, if they have any mental or physical disabilities and if they’re addicted to drugs. Those who score highly by the city’s complex algorithm — in theory the most vulnerable — are marked “housing priority status,” and are then put on a waitlist for permanent supportive housing.

But actually getting off of the waitlist and into those units isn’t easy. The city’s software to track vacant units is error prone, unit maintenance problems take a long time to resolve, case managers quit and it can be impossible for people who have been living on the street to meet document requirements. (The homelessness department said that the city is currently working on the software and documentation issues, and has put a raise for case managers into its budget request for next year.)

Bianca Bagnarelli, special to ProPublica

On top of all that, the city’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic made getting housed harder by creating a system that gave top priority to those least likely to want to move in: those who suddenly found themselves living for free in shelter-in-place hotel rooms.

In spring 2020, as the city locked down and its housed residents stayed indoors, advocates raised concern for the thousands of homeless people living outside and in temporary shelters, many of whom had health conditions that increased their risk for severe COVID-19. Those fears were realized when 92 residents of a large one-room shelter contracted the illness just one month after the city shut down.

In response, San Francisco leased hotel rooms to help people experiencing homelessness quarantine indoors. It was always meant to be a temporary measure, and as the pandemic dragged on, the homelessness department strategized on how to wind the program down. The optics of sending anyone back to the street were not great, and the city created a policy of prioritizing residents of the shelter-in-place hotels for housing.

“I will be candid: It is both one of the biggest opportunities and one of the biggest challenges our city has faced in our homelessness space,” said Abigail Stewart-Kahn, then director of the homelessness department, during a Nov. 10, 2020, Board of Supervisors meeting at City Hall, where she justified the new policy. She added that the department would keep an eye on the data, and would “course correct” to ensure the process was successful. In subsequent interviews and email exchanges, the department did not respond to additional questions about why that policy was created and pursued.

The data over the past 15 months shows a gradually increasing crisis: In October 2020 there were 544 vacant units. A year later, vacancies had nearly doubled to 1,064. While units sat vacant, people living outdoors were waiting to get indoors. Any course correction has been slow to come.

From the get-go, the policy of reserving housing for people in hotels was difficult to implement. Although residents knew the hotels were temporary and could close at any time, many were reluctant to move from free, modern rooms with private bathrooms into small, older units with bathrooms down the hall, at a cost of 30% of their income. All of a sudden, one housing provider said, three applicants for housing had to be referred in order to fill one vacant room.

Inside one of San Francisco’s permanent supportive housing buildings, the kind of housing both Ladybird and Marquita Stroud hope to move into

Credit:
Yesica Prado for the San Francisco Public Press

In the first seven months after the policy was implemented, supportive housing vacancies jumped 61%, from 600 units in November 2020 to 964 in June 2021, a period when the city was also adding new units. In February 2021, the homelessness department reported that 70% of shelter-in-place hotel residents who were offered a spot in the Granada Hotel, a newly purchased permanent supportive housing building, had rejected the placement.

When someone turned down an available housing unit, it sat vacant until a new referral appeared. Providers found themselves in a new position: having to offer incentives to persuade potential tenants to move in.

Georgetta Lovett, a property supervisor at DISH, oversees more than 300 units of permanent supportive housing. She said the organization now provides move-in benefits: free rent for the first month, free meals for three months and a free Muni transit pass.

Resistance to moving into permanent housing is not something Lovett experienced when showing units to people who had been living outside.

“People coming directly off the streets would take the place immediately,” she said. “We would be able to show them a room, they’d say, ‘Oh, this is nice.’ Most of them don’t come with a lot of stuff, and they were like, ‘I can move in today, or I can move in tomorrow.’ And normally we can make that happen right away.”

A Feb. 24, 2021, a budget hearing at City Hall on shelter-in-place hotels showed the homelessness department was aware early on that the policy was adding to the vacancy crisis in permanent supportive housing.

“We are noting that people who are not in shelter-in-place hotels are more eager to take permanent supportive housing placements,” Stewart-Kahn said, adding that it was “putting pressure on our system.” She said that the department was “reevaluating” the policy.

Three weeks later, Stewart-Kahn resigned, moving to a new role as an adviser to the city’s Department of Children, Youth, and Their Families. That same month, the city established an 18-person shelter-in-place hotel housing team. Their task: to more efficiently implement the policy and move everyone qualified for housing from shelter-in-place hotels into vacant units. As a result of the change, move-ins did increase. In the six months before the housing team was established, the city moved 325 people into permanent supportive housing. In the six months after its creation, that number grew to 488.

In an email exchange with the San Francisco Public Press and ProPublica in February, Megan Owens, who oversees much of the housing process of the city’s homelessness department, acknowledged that the policy “caused a huge delay” for adults living outside of the hotels.

In June, the department told the news organizations that it planned to open up a portion of permanent supportive housing vacancies to unhoused people living outside of shelter-in-place hotels. But the department offered no transparency about how units were being allocated.

Neither effort did enough to catch up to the growing supply. By September 2021, vacancies were at their height, with 1,064 permanent supportive housing units empty.

The delay in access to housing has been rough for people living outdoors. According to the official numbers, the current median wait time for a unit is 82 days.

But Owens admitted that the software the city uses doesn’t accurately track the time between being approved for housing and moving indoors. The city and federal government spent $8.5 million for that system over the past five years, but information on people trying to get indoors still isn’t recorded accurately.

For example, if someone doesn’t contact their case manager for 90 days, their spot on the waitlist expires. In acknowledgment of the long delays, at the start of 2021 the city automatically reinstated those applications, but the software then started the timeline over from scratch.

“The 300 people that expired off the queue and were reinstated in December and January are now listed as having waited 20 to 45 days, depending when they were reinstated, but their experience is that they’ve been waiting for months,” Owens explained.

That lack of clear data worries Nan Roman, president and CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. People who are unsheltered “have very high needs, and they need to get into permanent supportive housing,” she said. “If you don’t keep good administrative data, you can’t track them. You can’t support them. You can’t find them. You can’t know what their situation is. It’s very important to have good data to make these programs work properly.”

Many of those who are waiting are living in city-sanctioned tent encampments in empty parking lots around the city.

A view inside the sanctioned tent encampment where Ladybird lived for 15 months, starting in late 2020

Credit:
Yesica Prado for the San Francisco Public Press

That’s where Ladybird, ineligible for housing under the policy that prioritizes hotel dwellers, lived for 15 months. (She requested the use of her nickname for this story due to complicated family matters; her identity was confirmed by a member of the city’s health department.)

After years on the streets, Ladybird committed herself to finding a home. She said she took the coordinated entry assessment for housing three times — going through a mandatory six-month wait between attempts. She was finally approved in November.

“Six months is a long time,” she said about the time between applications. “You basically have to be sitting out here waiting to be raped every night.” (A University of California San Francisco study found that 32% of women living outdoors reported instances of sexual or physical assault.)

Research backs up Ladybird’s experience. “The impact of waiting weeks, months or years in a shelter or outside rather than a home has devastating consequences for a person,” said Chris Herring, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California Los Angeles. “Homelessness for even short periods of time has negative impacts on people’s physical, behavioral and mental health, can strain familial and social relations, have lasting impacts on future employment opportunities, and can entangle people in the criminal justice system.”

In the city-owned parking lot where Ladybird lived during the last year, her cheap camping tent, which rested on a wooden platform in a parking lot, got moldy during a wet winter. She developed pneumonia, and said rats would run around at night, hiding under the pallet she slept on.

“I can’t be there anymore,” she said when interviewed in December. “Your body goes through a lot being homeless. I’ve had pneumonia for two months now, from black mold on my tent. My tent is literally killing me.”

While the city said it is taking steps to mitigate delays, months of living in a wet tent site took its toll on residents. In text messages sent late one night, Ladybird described the chaos that had ensued as one of her neighbors had a mental breakdown. “This situation is getting worse by the day, it’s more twisted than anything I’ve seen in my decade out here,” she said. “I would be better off on the streets.”

The situation felt hopeless. “This site hasn’t placed anybody,” Ladybird said. “Anybody who’s getting out of there is doing it on their own. There’s no social worker. It’s just a dead end.”

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A tall fence encircles a city-sanctioned tent encampment in San Francisco’s Mission District.

Credit:
Yesica Prado for the San Francisco Public Press

While the policies of the last two years left people like Ladybird living outdoors, those living in shelter-in-place hotels haven’t always fared better, with some of them waiting more than a year to be connected to a home.

Marquita Stroud is one of those. She said that she has been homeless for 15 years, but that about a month before the COVID-19 outbreak began in earnest, she was approved for permanent supportive housing. “God was on my side!” she said when interviewed in December.

In April 2020, she was relocated to the Hotel Whitcomb, a historic tourist hotel repurposed to allow people experiencing homelessness to quarantine safely. Stroud was one of 500 homeless people the city moved from large, warehouse-style shelters into 25 hotels around town.

Stroud is an optimist, high-energy and cheerful, who wears her hair tied up neatly in a scarf. “It’s wet!” she exclaimed on a rainy morning, as she strode confidently down Market Street with an umbrella in one hand, pushing a cart containing her small, fluffy dog, Blue, with the other. She headed straight to a corner of the public library, a place she knows well.

Under COVID-19-era rules, Stroud isn’t allowed visitors where she lives, so she meets people at their apartments, outside or in public places. The prohibition on guests didn’t bother Stroud too much when she first moved in. But she felt isolated and, as the months dragged on, no one contacted her about moving into her own place. Stroud watched her friends and neighbors — many of whom arrived in the hotel the same day she did — move into permanent housing. Her turn never came.

In large part, that’s because the homelessness department’s process for reviewing and selecting unhoused people for referral is slow. And in the period when Stroud was waiting, things were markedly worse. In October 2020, 32% of vacant units had no pending referrals for a resident. In January, that ratio had more than doubled, to 66% of available units, according to the city’s own data. The department did not respond to questions about why this might be.

Gary ran eight buildings through DISH. In February 2021, before he stepped down, he said the problem wasn’t new, but it was getting worse.

“Somewhere there is a bottleneck where the city is not sending us the housing application — that is, the documented representation of that person that we can process,” he said. “We report the vacancy to the city, and those vacancies languish for weeks to months without a referral of a real live human being who can be housed.”

Credit:
Bianca Bagnarelli, special to ProPublica

At least part of the problem is a shortage of case managers, who are the crucial link between vacant units and the hundreds of people approved for housing. There is frequent turnover in the high-stress positions, and nonprofits struggle to fill new job openings.

Stroud said she has been assigned six case managers in two years. To figure out who is assigned to her, she regularly checks a piece of paper taped to a wall in her hotel, which lists the name of the case manager assigned to each floor. She describes calling her case manager repeatedly to set up an appointment and not getting through.

“They pretty much don’t go knocking on your door,” Stroud said. “You got to ask for them. If I see one in the hallway — like if I see a worker talking to a client in the hallway — I always ask, ‘Are you a counselor? Are you my counselor?’ Because they don’t tell you.”

Nearly two years after being approved for a housing unit, Stroud is still at the Hotel Whitcomb. Although she dreams of going back to school, publishing her journals and giving back to the homeless community, her reality is much different. She’s had items stolen from her room, and the building has fallen into disrepair. “When we first got to this hotel, it was so cute,” she said. “Now they got the bedbugs, the roaches, the mice. Every other day, the pipes are messing up.”

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Recently she met a woman who had recently moved into the Whitcomb, but was already on her way out: She’d been assigned a housing unit.

“I was asking her, what did she do to get her housing that quick? And she said her counselor just came knocking on her door like, ‘You ready to go?’” Stroud said, clearly frustrated. “I haven’t talked to anyone about housing,” she said this month, as she approaches her two-year anniversary at the hotel. “I’m still here just waiting.”

As for Ladybird, she was approved for housing in November, but three months later, she is still without a home. In January, she left the tent encampment for a short-term residential hotel, but it comes with a time limit. “After 28 days, we get put out.”

Are you currently homeless in San Francisco, and trying to get housing? Do you have experience with the city’s housing process? Email us at [email protected].

The post In San Francisco, A whole bunch of Properties for the Homeless Sit Vacant — ProPublica appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

Ukraine’s 41 and a half million people are well aware of the military buildup along its eastern border with Russia. The threat is a big concern for San Francisco’s JustAnswer. One-third of its workforce — 252 people — live in Ukraine.

“A lot of our engineering, a lot of our critical functions are done there,” said CEO Andy Kurtzig. “So it’s very scary, and even more scary on a personal level because these are all our friends.”

We connected with Nadya Semen, JustAnswer’s country manager based in Lviv near the border with Poland. She believes Russia has already initiated cyberattacks.

If you’re on the ABC7 News app, click here to watch live

“We are experiencing a set of cyberattacks on different websites and banking system and some governmental websites were down. So it’s weird,” she said.

She has an 18-year-old son and an 11-year-old daughter. Their safety has already been threatened.

“Two times during class for weeks, I had to pick up my kid from school because someone called that there is a bomb in the school,” she said.

JustAnswer has developed its own action plan. It puts the current threat level at moderate to high because of some military activities. As the threat rises to high and to realized threat, that will initiate more action to protect its workers.

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“We are moving people from the east to the west as we speak and give them time of and putting them up in hotels and then actively helping them move across the country from the more dangerous parts of Ukraine,” CEO Kurtzig said.

Stress levels are rising. School children are drilled about evacuating to shelters, which frightened Nadya’s daughter.

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“She was stressed by that, so she was asking me, ‘When are we supposed to expect the real worst to come here? So why are Russians doing this? Why people are starting to worry? I really can be killed now?'”

Andy Kurtzig and his family lived in Ukraine for six months in 2019, prior to the Russian threat. The people and the culture of Ukraine captivated them.

“We love them,” he said. “We’ve been working with them for a long time, and we’re committed to them.”

As part of that commitment, Kurtzig said he has made arrangements to be able to pay them from Poland, even with cryptocurrency if necessary. He is also supplying them with satellite phones and alternatives if the internet or electricity is lost.

Copyright © 2022 KGO-TV. All rights reserved.

The post San Francisco CEO works to guard lots of of staff in Ukraine amid menace of Russia assault appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

Mayor Breed shared on Twitter on Friday that around 400 city workers were either sick with COVID-19 or are currently isolating themselves from potential exposure – a tweet followed a day later by the SF emergency management department, in which the residents were asked to only call 911 “for” life-threatening medical emergencies. “

At the time of writing, the rolling seven-day average of new COVID-19 cases in San Francisco is 1,218 – a new record high. COVID-19-related hospital admissions in the city now stands at 135; such a number has not been observed in San Francisco since February 2021. Unfortunately, coronavirus infections and hospital admissions aren’t the only things that have risen lately.

Emergency calls have also swelled in San Francisco.

We still look like employees due to COVID including:
184 SFPD members
140 SFFD members
122 Muni workers

Even so, we continue to provide our residents with the essential services they deserve. Thank you to all the frontline staff who work shifts to support our city.

– London Breed (@LondonBreed) January 7, 2022

And the city is completely overwhelmed as it cannot cope with the influx of emergency calls; The fact that hundreds of city workers are absent for reasons related to Covid-19 does not help with the problem either.

“140 City Fire Department employees, 184 San Francisco Police Department employees and 122 Muni employees are out of work due to infection or isolation from possible COVID-19 exposure,” Breed tweeted on Friday, January 7th. “Even so, we continue to provide the important services our residents deserve. Thank you to all the frontline workers who work shifts to support our city. “

Most COVID cases are mild and can be treated at home. Look for emergency COVID warning signs but just call 911 or go to the 911 center. for life threatening medical emergencies. Have doctors ready for life-threatening situations. More information: https://t.co/l1Qs77Hcrr

– San Francisco Department of Emergency Management (@SF_emergency) January 8, 2022

The next day, Saturday, January 8, the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management posted on Twitter that residents “should only call 911 or go to the emergency room for life-threatening medical emergencies.” In a similar tone of voice, the San Francisco Fire Department urges the public not to dial 911 for minor questions or concerns or inquiries not found anywhere else online through the city’s resources.

“Please do not call 911 to ask for a COVID-19 test, or because you have a cold or mild flu symptoms. We really want our ambulances to be available for people with a heart attack or stroke, ”said Jeannie Nichols, SF Fire Department chief in the NBC Bay Area, previously saying the department is making” about 400 calls a day in the city ” had the last few days “- about 30% more calls than average.

Similarly, SF Zuckerberg General Hospital is seeing a surge in people either looking for a COVID-19 test or coming with mild symptoms. Mind you: Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital currently has around 400 employees who are absent due to COVID-19.

“We see more and more people looking for tests. We see more and more people with mild symptoms. And this is a particular challenge now because of all the circumstances I have just described, ”said Dr. Susan Ehrlich, CEO of Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, the news agency.

If you have mild to moderate COVID-19-like symptoms or want to get an appropriate test, don’t choose SF’s emergency room. Instead, turn your attention to the San Francisco Public Health Department’s digital resource portal on coronavirus.

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Photo: Getty Images / lechatnoir

The post San Francisco Is Overwhelmed by 911 Calls; A whole lot of Metropolis Staff Out Resulting from COVID-19 Causes appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.