SF Families Win Shelter Extension Rights, Still Face Long Waits for Housing

Space is limited in the South of Market kitchen Maritza Salinas shares, so she gets up around 5:30 a.m. to make breakfast for her three kids.

It’s just one way living in a homeless shelter shapes her daily routine. On top of parenting duties, she frequently checks in with a case worker and looks for updates on the availability of a permanent home.

The cycle of moving in and out of shelters weighs heavily on Salinas and is especially hard for her 6-year-old son, who has autism. She dreams of the day she can bring them to a home they can stay in for good.

“I want to say to my kids, ‘We got a key. We’re going to our place,’” Salinas said while pushing a stroller with her two young children on Market Street. Her 4-year-old daughter often asks when they’re going to go home. “That’s one of the hardest things for me as a mom.”

San Francisco has intensified efforts to clear street-level homelessness, a key issue in Mayor Daniel Lurie’s campaign platform. Yet hundreds of families living in shelters still lack stable housing each night, as the city struggles with a shortage of affordable homes and limited subsidies for residents with extremely low income.

Salinas has experienced homelessness since leaving an abusive relationship in 2022. She stayed in cars, on sidewalks and multiple shelters for domestic violence survivors before arriving at her current spot, Harbor House.

She’s on one of the city’s waitlists for housing, but her time at Harbor House is running out. She knows this feeling of stress and worry well. Last year, while at another shelter, she requested an extension to avoid ending up on the streets while her housing application was pending.

The process was confusing and frequently left her panicked about whether she’d have a place to live at the end of the month.

“It sounds so easy, but I was being pushed away,” Salinas said. “What am I supposed to do, you know? Where do I need to go?”

San Francisco is making it easier for families to remain in temporary shelters longer starting this fall, according to a Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing memo sent to the board of supervisors this month. Beginning Oct. 1, people in temporary family shelters can apply for an unlimited number of 90-day extensions, so long as they meet eligibility requirements.

The policy shift came after months of pushback against a rule implemented in December that required families to apply for 30-day extensions after their initial 90-day stay.

“This win would not have happened without homeless families coming to City Hall themselves to tell their stories and organizing the community for months on end,” Supervisor Jackie Fielder, who advocated for the policy change, said in a statement.

It’s a welcome change for those repeatedly filing extension applications while waiting for permanent housing.

“We started receiving eviction notices almost every month,” said Yaneth Perez, who lives in the Oasis shelter, in a press statement. Perez and Salinas have both organized alongside groups such as Faith in Action and the Coalition on Homelessness, advocating for more funding and resources for homeless families. “It created incredible stress and anxiety for us and our kids.” Advocates held press conferences outside schools to protest the evictions and met with Mayor Lurie in February. “We’re glad he’s finally listening,” Perez said.

But extensions don’t resolve the underlying need for more affordable housing.

Just 13% of people in San Francisco shelters exited into permanent housing, according to a March 2025 report from the city controller.

That’s one of the fundamental problems, said Christin Evans, vice chair of the city’s homelessness oversight body. “When people come into shelter, they’re seeking assistance to secure stable housing. They don’t want to remain in the shelter,” she said.

Since taking office, Lurie has set up a public-private fund to build out more transitional beds, passed legislation to speed up contracts for homelessness service providers, and opened up a new drop-in facility for mental health care. The city has also increased citations and arrests for people sleeping outside and is clearing more encampments.

However, Lurie has walked back a key campaign trail promise to build 1,500 shelter beds within his first six months in office. Now, he’s focused on moving people more quickly through the homelessness response system and building more behavioral health and drug treatment beds.

His $16 billion budget aligns with those new priorities. The board of supervisors approved his plan to reallocate funding for permanent supportive housing to improve existing parts of the shelter system. The budget deal restored $30 million for rental subsidies for homeless families, which was previously on the chopping block.

But Lurie’s initial budget proposal did not include any new investments in addressing family homelessness. Advocates and experts were alarmed, pointing out that the number of families experiencing homelessness nearly doubled from 2022 to 2024, according to the city’s 2024 Point in Time count of the homeless population.

“We have limited funds going to rapid rehousing vouchers and permanent supportive housing placements, and there are very long waitlists for people to get those resources,” Evans said.

Still, advocates for unhoused families celebrated the shelter extension policy and additions to the budget. Lurie praised the change, too.

“So many families get stuck in our system, with kids growing up year after year in temporary shelter without a path to stable, permanent housing. Meanwhile, thousands of people sleep on the street every night, and the city has few indoor options to offer because our shelters are full,” Lurie said in a statement. “When government isn’t afraid to try things and listen to feedback, we can craft thoughtful, effective policies, and that’s what we’ve done here.”

But experts say the city still needs far more places for residents with extremely low income to live so shelter stays are brief and new people can move in and out.

Without that, efforts to open more shelter beds and improve flow through the system overall will fall short, said Margot Kushel, an expert on homelessness based at UCSF.

“Time limits are an effort to spread the limited resource of shelters around, but the only way to truly create enough shelter spots is to have reasonable options for people to leave shelter with housing,” Kushel said in an email. “We need to be sure that we create housing that front-line workers can afford, that those on disability can afford. And that is really hard to do, because the numbers don’t always pencil out.”

Mothers like Salinas are meanwhile stuck in line while trying to give their children a reliable routine.

Between check-ins with her case worker, she likes to walk her kids to a park near their shelter. In a stroller so large Salinas struggles to take it on the bus, her daughter looks up while chatting away about robots and “minions,” the yellow one-eyed characters from the movie Despicable Me. Her son sits in the front of the carriage, playing a game on his iPad with headphones on.

Salinas is still on a waitlist for a subsidized three-bedroom unit, and doesn’t know if she’ll need to seek another extension after her 90-day stay at the shelter is up.

“You’re placed on a waiting list and you don’t know how many people are before you,” she said. “I’m just hoping for one of these days to be able to say to my kids, ‘We have a home to go to, and you’re going to have a room, with butterflies on the walls, and we’re going to be happy.’”