Bay Area Cities Expand Homeless Shelters. Winning Over Neighbors Is the Hard Part

Sarah Spillane is a proud native of San Francisco’s Sunset District. “Born and raised, Sunset,” she said while standing outside of her current residence, a modest, tiny cabin near Mid-Market, several miles from the foggy avenues where she grew up.

Spillane has lived in this homeless shelter with 70 private cabins for nearly two years, since being picked up by the city’s Homeless Outreach Team nearly a decade after she lost her housing on the westside.

Before that, “I did primarily stay in the Sunset when I was homeless,” Spillane said.

While her tiny home offers some privacy in the form of her own unit with a lock and key, her goal is to move closer to the Sunset, where her son, who is about to enter high school, still lives. But Spillane can’t afford to live in the neighborhood and the city’s homeless services are primarily concentrated downtown.

“Even though I’m from the city, it can get really ugly down here,” she said.

As Bay Area cities like San Francisco, San José and Oakland look to curb homelessness, many are turning their focus to expanding transitional housing like this tiny home site, in order to move people off the street quicker.

But as community and government leaders push to add shelter space in neighborhoods where it’s traditionally been absent, they are grappling with fresh resistance from residents concerned that placing services for homeless people nearby will upend their community.

The debate comes on the heels of a Supreme Court ruling in 2024, the City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, that now allows cities to force unhoused people to move off sidewalks, regardless of whether shelter is available.

Cities can cite or arrest individuals who refuse offers of shelter, and instances of both have ramped up across the Bay Area since the ruling, particularly in major cities like San Francisco and San José.

San Francisco, San José look to put shelters in new neighborhoods

In San Francisco, as elsewhere, political opposition and constraints on land and transportation have long kept shelters out of many neighborhoods, including single-family home communities like the Sunset. But that dynamic has angered many residents who live in areas like the Tenderloin, Bayview and Mission District, which have a higher concentration of shelters than other parts of the city.

The issue recently spurred some local elected leaders to push for greater geographic equity as more temporary housing is built.

“Neighborhoods like the Tenderloin have more resources than unsheltered residents. Other parts of the city are unable to provide life-saving services to those that need it most,” said San Francisco Supervisor Bilal Mahmood, who represents the Tenderloin and recently sponsored an ordinance that requires the city to build shelter in areas where they are lacking.

A Budget and Legislative Office analysis shows which parts of the city have the greatest discrepancy between services and people who need them. The Sunset, for example, accounted for 3.8% of the total unhoused population according to 2024 federal data, but provides 0% of year-round shelter. That’s compared to the Tenderloin, which has 19.4% of the unsheltered population and 33.8% of the city’s shelters.

San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie signed Mahmood’s legislation this fall. Beginning in January, the city will be prohibited from opening new shelters or transitional housing facilities in neighborhoods where the number of existing beds and services exceeds the number of unhoused residents.

“Why should someone have to move across the city to access help?” said Edie Irons, director of communications at All Home, a nonprofit that works on regional approaches to solving homelessness. “They might turn down shelter for many reasons. One could be they are far away from where they became homeless.”

In San Francisco, proponents of the ordinance hope the legislation will help win over reluctant homeowners, which hasn’t proven easy.

Vera Genkin lives in the Sunset and said she “has a big heart for all these people,” but she worries unhoused people from other places will come to her quiet neighborhood looking for services, despite evidence showing people often live in the neighborhoods and cities where they became homeless.

“Why are we being expected to pick up problems of homelessness that did not start here?” she said. “Why is this county supposed to pay with city municipal funds for some other county’s homelessness? I don’t understand that either, so the same equation applies to me between districts.”

Efforts to expand shelters to new neighborhoods have been fraught across the Bay Area.

At a town hall meeting earlier this summer, San José’s housing director Erik Soliván presented a plan to open the first temporary housing site in the city’s sleepy Cambrian neighborhood: a converted motel that would provide shelter for senior women and mothers with children.

He was met with jeers.

“Put it in your backyard!” one man yelled, in a video recorded by the San Jose Spotlight.

“I live in downtown, and I have three of them,” Soliván replied.

San José Mayor Matt Mahan and the city council have embarked on an aggressive expansion of short-term shelter in recent years — building out a system of tiny home villages, RV parking lots and sanctioned encampments that have amounted to nearly 1,900 placements across 22 locations as of June.

As in San Francisco, most of them remain clustered in the city’s downtown core, or in South San José near Monterey Road. Meanwhile, more upscale neighborhoods such as West San José and Evergreen have no shelter sites.

“These emergency interim housing sites are one part of what is needed in the continuum of housing, and so we need to make sure that we are distributing them equitably throughout the city,” said Councilmember Pamela Campos, whose District 2 seat includes much of South San José. “Every district in San José is affected by homelessness; therefore, every district should be playing their part in addressing our homelessness crisis.”

Earlier this month, the Rue Ferrari interim housing site, in Campos’ district, was expanded from 122 to 266 beds, making it the largest tiny home community in the city. Campos celebrated the move but worried that her sprawling district lacks public transit for residents of Rue Ferrari to easily access jobs and services.

“If there’s a way to ensure that we are not putting more than the fair share of emergency interim housing in one district than others, that’s definitely a policy that is worth exploring,” she said. “It cannot continue to be the same neighborhoods and the same places, especially when we’re going into neighborhoods that are severely lacking in the resources and amenities that are needed to support people who are working hard to stabilize their lives and move forward in an upward trajectory.”

Resistance isn’t the only barrier

Mahan has said he would like to see shelters expand into every council district in the city. But he pointed to barriers beyond community pushback. In District 1, for example, which borders Sunnyvale and Cupertino, Mahan said available land is simply too scarce.

“That is one of the most densely built-out and expensive places in the city, where it is very hard to secure land. We just don’t have a good parcel that is city-owned to build a solution there,” he said. “And it can’t be a tiny parcel because we need enough scale to make it worth taxpayers’ investment in providing services. So there are just many factors.”

And he said any ordinance governing shelter placement, such as the one passed in San Francisco, could limit opportunities to quickly move people off the street. Mahan pointed to another South San José tiny home site that opened earlier this year, on private land owned by developer John Sobrato, who leased it to the city at virtually no cost.

“If we had had a restriction on having a second site within half a mile, we would not have been able to move forward [with] that site,” Mahan said. “So if you create a straitjacket through policy, you start missing opportunities.”

Mahan and the council have instead sought to placate the concerns of residents living near existing shelters by instituting a no-encampment zone around each site, granting first preference for beds to people living in the immediate area, and starting community advisory groups to solicit feedback after a shelter opens.

Still, there’s a danger to this approach of trying to convince residents to “share the burden” of homelessness, said Marlene Bennett, an adjunct professor of health law at Santa Clara University.

“That unfortunately just propels these negative stereotypes and misinformation about the housing crisis and folks who are experiencing homelessness or maybe living with mental illness or using substances or all three,” Bennett said.

There’s also the issue of funding. In San Francisco, Lurie shifted some of the city’s funding for permanent housing toward interim housing in the latest budget cycle, a move that was met with pushback from housing advocates and experts, pointing out that homelessness doesn’t end with shelter.

But supporters say the funding is needed to build out temporary options where people can move off the street.

“The reality is that they both have the same problem, which is there is not enough funding for shelter,” said Elizabeth Funk, CEO of Dignity Moves, which contracts with both San José and San Francisco to build tiny home shelters. “From HUD all the way down, they’ve decided shelter doesn’t work. We’re trying to change that form of shelter, what you think of as a big warehouse of bunk beds, and focus on interim housing. There needs to be funding for that.”

Oakland has not expanded shelter as aggressively because of funding challenges, even as Alameda County is increasing resources for homelessness services.

“We have observed that siting is often the most challenging part of the process of standing up new shelter, due to community pushback,” Irons, with All Home, said, pointing out that many smaller cities are not yet trying to build shelters in neighborhoods where they have historically been absent.

In Alameda County, millions of dollars from Measure W, a 2020 ballot measure that authorized a 10-year sales tax, will soon go to a variety of homeless resources across the county, including for transitional housing and shelter.

“We are really trying to have a county-wide approach and distribute these resources,” Supervisor Nikki Fortunato Bas said. As a councilmember in Oakland, Fortunato Bas oversaw a tiny home project in her district, which has since transformed into an affordable housing project. “We know that it’s largely African-American residents and more and more seniors.”

Oakland is facing cuts to shelter services in the short term before those Measure W funds become available, however.

Homelessness experts there say that the increased policing that stems from the Grants Pass ruling has not significantly decreased the unhoused population.

“We are seeing more and more of an attempt to solve homelessness through the enforcement-forward approach, and a belief that [unhoused] people who are in our community are not from here,” said Sasha Hauswald, interim chief homelessness solutions officer for Oakland. “Those two things actually are positively reinforcing of one another, because the more you have enforcement without real housing options for people to move into, the more people have to move.”

In Oakland, just as in San Francisco and Santa Clara counties, most unhoused residents became homeless in the city where they were living.

“Each person is someone’s child, sister, brother — often whole families who have nowhere to go and could use a helping hand,” Mahmood, the San Francisco supervisor, said.

Spillane, the Sunset native, hopes that as San Francisco expands shelter options across the city, she’ll be able to move to the neighborhood she considers home.

She said having a space like where she’s living now, but closer to her family in the Sunset, “would be an answer to my prayers, big time.”

She goes back to the neighborhood as often as she can. “That’s where my heart is.”