Spike in Homelessness Stalled After SF Started These Programs. Lurie Is Slashing Them

Medical debt. Messy divorce. Wage theft.

When hard life moments meet San Francisco’s sky-high housing costs, homelessness can quickly become a reality.

That was the case for Nina, a mother who sought legal aid at the nonprofit Open Door Legal two years ago after facing domestic abuse by her husband.

“If it weren’t for them, realistically, my daughter and I would have probably been evicted, and we would have ended up living on the streets or in a shelter,” said Nina, who lives in the Sunset District.

Nina, who did not use her full name for safety reasons, told KQED she was trying to get child support when her husband refused to pay “even a single penny” after he left her and her daughter, who has a disability. Legal aid helped her navigate restraining orders, threats of eviction, and obtain child support, keeping her and her daughter housed.

But in an effort to direct more dollars toward temporary shelter, Mayor Daniel Lurie is proposing to shift funding away from programs that help lower-income residents fight costly legal cases and other homelessness prevention.

“This will affect residents all over the city. Homeowners who suffer wrongful foreclosures, domestic violence survivors and much more,” said Adrian Tirtanadi, executive director of Open Door Legal, which is slated to lose nearly half of its city-supported funding under Lurie’s budget proposal. He’s since started a hunger strike to stress the urgency of the budget cuts. “It will especially, or maybe most profoundly, make the homeless crisis worse.”

The city is facing a nearly $800 million budget deficit, and Lurie has warned tough cuts lie ahead.

He is now proposing significant cuts across the board to balance the budget, which include eliminating about 1,400 mostly vacant positions and roughly $100 million in grants and contracts. The Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing is slated to be hit hardest with cuts of about $83.5 million.

“A crisis of this magnitude means we cannot avoid painful decisions, and I’m prepared to make them,” Lurie said in his budget announcement. “The budget I’m introducing today faces the $800 million deficit head-on.”

While balancing the budget, Lurie is also trying to fulfill an ambitious campaign promise to build 1,500 shelter beds within his first six months in office — a goal still far from completion even as his first half-year approaches. On any given day, the online waitlist for shelter is hundreds of names long.

Lurie’s budget, which must be finalized by the end of June, underscores an explicit shift toward investing in temporary shelter and transitional beds, rather than permanent supportive housing and prevention.

“The Mayor’s proposed budget includes new investments to expand interim housing capacity to support immediate pathways from streets to stability for our most vulnerable residents,” the budget proposal reads.

The reallocation comes about a year after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that cities can cite and arrest unhoused people who refuse offers of shelter. But San Francisco doesn’t have enough shelter to offer many of the people living on sidewalks or in encampments.

About 8,300 people are experiencing homelessness in San Francisco, according to 2024 federal data. More than half are considered unsheltered, meaning they sleep outside in parks, sidewalks or cars, compared with the city’s inventory of 3,228 shelter beds, which are often full.

To change that, Lurie also wants to tap into roughly $90 million over the next three years in existing dollars in the Our City, Our Home fund, created after voters passed Proposition C in 2018 to tax the city’s wealthiest companies and fund homelessness services.

The measure was quickly challenged in court by groups such as the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, the California Business Properties Association and the California Business Roundtable. In 2020, the California Supreme Court allowed the measure to move forward and revenue was finally released.

Currently, the majority of Proposition C dollars are allocated toward permanent supportive housing. About 25% is set aside for mental health services, 15% for prevention programs like civil legal aid, and around 10% for shelter and hygiene.

“I will seek approval to unlock critical funds we need to build the types of interim housing and treatment that we need right now to get families and young people off the street and on the path to stability,” Lurie said in the budget address.

He’ll need support from the Board of Supervisors to shift funding away from prevention services to shelter, and it’s unclear if he’ll have enough votes.

This week, several supervisors, including progressive and moderate-leaning Democrats — such as Joel Engardio, Chyanne Chen, Bilal Mahmood, Stephen Sherrill and Jackie Fielder — spoke at a rally in support of funding permanent housing and legal aid programs covered by Proposition C.

Homelessness experts at the rally cautioned that cutting prevention services, like legal aid and meal programs, will likely lead to a spike in homelessness, increasing the demand for shelter beds even more.

Just 13% of people staying in San Francisco shelters exited into permanent housing, according to a March 2025 report from the City Controller, which looked at shelter data from July 2022 to December 2023.

“Right now, a very small percentage of people can leave shelter to housing. We really need more housing exits,” said Christin Evans, a small-business owner in San Francisco and vice chair of the city’s Homeless Oversight Commission. “The population of people that are on the waitlist for family shelter has been growing substantially, and it’s outpacing the ability to provide adequate shelter.”

Lurie’s budget invests $91.2 million over three years to open and operate about 630 new shelter beds, plus an additional $31.6 million to maintain the city’s current shelter system.

As for prevention, the mayor’s budget preserves existing funding for right-to-counsel programs aimed at tenants facing eviction and other housing stabilization programs.

San Francisco was one of the first U.S. cities to pioneer a right-to-counsel program in 2019, after voters passed the No Eviction Without Representation Act that gave all residents facing eviction the right to legal defense.

Between 2005 and 2019, San Francisco’s homeless population grew nearly 49%, according to federal data, fueled in part by soaring home prices. But since Proposition C and the right-to-counsel programs have launched, the number of people experiencing homelessness in the city has remained relatively flat, increasing slightly from 8,035 in 2019 to 8,323 in 2024.

Still, Lurie plans to eliminate $4.2 million from other forms of legal aid. Groups like Legal Assistance to the Elderly, for example, are slated to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars from their operating budgets, at a time when seniors are the fastest-growing unhoused population.

“We need a holistic approach to providing legal services. You can’t compartmentalize them,” said Ora Prochovnick, director of litigation and policy at the Eviction Defense Collaborative, which is not losing funding under Lurie’s budget proposal. “Although we’re thrilled that tenant right-to-counsel was not cut, we see the harm in other types of legal services being cut.”

Along with preserving the right-to-counsel programs, advocates are pressing the mayor to allocate $66 million in Proposition C dollars into existing homelessness prevention programs.

“Homelessness is plaguing the mental and physical health of hundreds of children, surmounting the barriers they face into adulthood and often leading to adult homelessness,” said Jennifer Friedenbach, director of the Coalition on Homelessness, in a prepared statement. “It is imperative that we act to preserve funds allocated to homeless families through Prop. C.”

As budget negotiations continue this month, Tirtanadi of Open Door Legal is preparing to lose about 44% of the center’s operating budget. He has started the process of laying off nearly 15 staff members, which he estimates will translate to serving roughly 900 fewer families annually.

He said that could mean turning away clients like Nina.

“What does the city expect us to do? We have ongoing cases, some of them have trials coming up,” Tirtanadi said. “It’s like being in the middle of surgery and putting down the tools and saying, ‘Ah, we ran out of money.’ You know? It’s just not ethical.”