Here’s Why SF Homeless Advocates Are Glad Lurie Ditched Push for 1,500 Shelter Beds

Six months into his term, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie is abandoning his headline-making campaign promise to build 1,500 shelter beds in that time, but homelessness experts and nonprofit leaders are optimistic about the shift in priorities.

On the campaign trail, Lurie vowed to help end unsheltered homelessness by significantly expanding the city’s shelter capacity in his first six months, a lofty goal that some homelessness advocates warned at the time was likely both unattainable and unproductive.

After his election, though, Lurie doubled down on the plan in an executive order, and in May, he announced he’d raised nearly $40 million toward the goal.

But at the six-month mark, Lurie has fallen short, with just 400 beds opening during his term so far. Now, the pivot suggests he is coming to terms with advocates’ warnings that the huge investment in short-term housing might not be the best way to address San Francisco’s homelessness and behavioral health crises.

Instead, Lurie’s chief of homelessness policy, Kunal Modi, wrote in an op-ed published by the San Francisco Standard on Monday that the administration will focus on “making our system more effective, not building toward a specific number of beds.”

Modi said that while San Francisco’s unsheltered homeless population needs places to sleep, many also need wraparound services like drug treatment options, mental health care and more permanent housing support.

Advocates expressed optimism about the Lurie administration’s pivot, but they’re also urging the mayor not to bow to constituent pressure and initiatives that are more focused on the public’s perception of homelessness than on systemic improvement.

Without access to resources like those wraparound services, many people who are placed in short-term shelters remain homeless, said Jennifer Friedenbach, the executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness.

Right now, only 13% of people who make use of San Francisco’s different shelter types move into permanent housing, according to Friedenbach.

“Their health outcomes are still diminished. They don’t have the stability. They don’t have that opportunity for the transformation that often takes place once folks leave homelessness behind and have a safe and dignified home,” she told KQED.

“What you really want to do is make sure that folks have housing so that they can move out of shelter and then that bed can be available for someone else,” Friedenbach said. “You want to invest in prevention. That really has been our recommendation all along.”

Friedenbach said that ideally, when the city adds a shelter bed, it should also be adding two to three longer-term housing exits for people to move into next.

In recent years, San Francisco has overinvested in shelter beds compared to other types of supportive housing, she said, which often results in a short-term reprieve from street homelessness, followed by a strong resurgence. Similarly, San Franciscans who go into drug treatment but don’t have a suitable housing option to transition to often end up back on the street, she told KQED.

“The systems that work the best … really concentrate on system flow,” Friedenbach said. “We’ve done massive expansion to shelter over the past few years, and that has not resulted in a dramatic difference, but it’s been quite expensive. You [have] got to have this more balanced approach.”

Modi said Lurie’s office would aim to improve the existing homelessness services system by investing in programs that support people who are within the first 48 hours of getting housed, coordinating street teams and upping the number of shelter, short-term and permanent supportive housing options that offer clinical care.

Both Friedenbach and Homeless Oversight Commission co-chair Christin Evans commended Lurie’s pivot, but they also warned that other policies in the pipeline to reduce visible homelessness could similarly backfire.

Evans pointed to Lurie’s proposed ban on long-term RV parking as an example. The new ordinance would allocate $3 million for enforcement of a two-hour limit on large vehicle parking on all city streets, along with funding for housing subsidies and a vehicle buyback option.

“He’s getting constituent pressure. The visible homelessness signs have clearly been a priority of his,” she said. But of the RV ban, she added, “It’s not as much about actually reducing homelessness, unfortunately.”

The strategy probably won’t significantly decrease the number of unhoused San Franciscans, Evans said, but it could increase the strain on shelters and housing resources. Many people living in vehicles also won’t likely be willing to accept the housing offered.

“That is not really a rational choice for somebody to make to switch out of a vehicle where they have privacy, a private bathroom, and move into a congregate shelter where they’re in a very crowded situation,” Evans said.

“If we don’t have those resources, I don’t know that that should be our priority,” she said.

Both she and Friedenbach also worry about the mayor’s request for the Board of Supervisors to weaken its legislative check on Proposition C spending, which is mostly aimed at homeless family housing.

The measure, which instituted an additional tax on businesses and people who make more than $50 million a year, passed in 2018, creating the Our City, Our Home Fund to help pay for access to permanent housing, with large portions of the revenue funding family and youth housing.

Lurie’s original budget proposal this spring would have used unspent money and interest earned on the Our City, Our Home Fund to fund additional adult shelter beds, but he faced pushback from homelessness advocates who said the focus on young people was important.

“Children, when they experience homelessness, are more likely to become homeless themselves later in life if they experience that homelessness longer than six months,” Evans said.

After negotiations, the revised budget retains much of the family homelessness support, but Lurie has still asked supervisors to remove a requirement that a supermajority of the board approve changes in how he allocates leftover Our City, Our Home funding in future years.

“For the past three years, mayors keep proposing moving money … three years ago, it was $60 million from family and youth housing. This year, $88.5 million being taken away primarily from family youth housing and moving it over primarily to single adult shelter,” Friedenbach said ahead of a rally opposing the policy change, which was scheduled for a vote on Tuesday.

“Families have doubled in San Francisco in homelessness, and this is where we’re failing and we need the most resources,” she said.