As Legal Aid Groups Face Budget Cuts, San Francisco Awards 1 Group Millions

Katie Danielson has been bracing for city budget cuts to reach her organization, the Homeless Advocacy Project at the Bar Association of San Francisco, which helps low-income San Francisco residents sign up for benefits and navigate civil legal issues.

City funding for organizations that provide civil legal aid is plummeting as San Francisco looks to narrow a more than $600 million budget deficit. That’s why Danielson and other groups were shocked to find out the city’s homelessness department awarded a $4.7 million grant without a competitive bidding process to a single nonprofit that also provides civil legal services.

“We completely agree that these types of services help prevent homelessness. That’s why we’ve been doing that work for so long. It’s just that while our funds are being cut, this other grant is being awarded,” Danielson said. “So it was just quite confusing and alarming.”

The Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing issued the grant to Open Door Legal, which wrote in a press release that they also expected to receive a matching investment of $3 million in private funding.

Founder and director of Open Door Legal, Adrian Tirtanadi, said the funds will allow the nonprofit, which has offices in the Excelsior, Sunset, Western Edition and Bayview neighborhoods, to expand its work by partnering with community organizations in other parts of the city, including in the Mission District and the Tenderloin.

But Tirtanadi agrees with attorneys from other organizations that offer legal aid services, who told KQED it doesn’t make sense that one city department is defunding civil legal services while another is adding funds through a one-time, 17-month grant.

“You have one department that is the expert on homelessness and who has determined that civil legal services should be like a core anti-homelessness strategy that the city should employ. And then you have another department that holds most of the [civil legal service] contracts that is trying to wind down those services,” Tirtanadi said.

San Francisco is staring down a $643 million budget deficit over the next two years, and city officials this week began issuing layoff notices to city employees across departments. So far, 127 layoffs have been issued, and the mayor said that at least 500 positions could be cut across the city. Around 2,000 vacant positions have also been frozen.

Last year’s budget also called for tough decisions and cuts. The Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, which historically has funded civil legal services, reduced spending for those programs from around $4.2 million in 2024-25 to about $3 million in 2025-26. It’s slated to drop to nearly $1.2 million in the upcoming fiscal year.

Advocates for civil legal aid say these services can help prevent homelessness by helping people navigate difficult legal systems, whether they are facing domestic violence, habitability issues, maintaining public benefits and other situations that can quickly spiral into an eviction case.

But many said they were unaware that the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing would be backfilling funding for civil legal services that the mayor’s office had planned to cut.

A group of around 10 organizations, including Asian Law Caucus, Bay Area Legal Aid, La Raza Centro Legal, and Legal Assistance to the Elderly, sent a letter to the mayor and other top officials on homelessness with their concerns about how the contract was issued.

“The noncompetitive process failed to consider existing services relied upon by the target communities and the providers with a proven track record who are positioned to quickly scale up services with existing infrastructure,” the letter reads.

Shireen McSpadden, the outgoing director of the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, said at a recent Homeless Oversight Commission meeting that the department was able to circumvent the competitive bidding process due to existing policies that allow the city to more quickly award contracts for homelessness services.

“This funding for civil legal services, combined with financial assistance, is core to HSH’s homelessness prevention strategy. Legal services play an important role in the fight against homelessness and are a tool in the city’s homelessness responses system,” McSpadden wrote in a Medium post co-authored by Tirtanadi.

Other commissioners at the meeting, however, expressed concerns with the contract, which the body previously approved.

Commissioner Bevan Dufty said the concerns raised by other legal aid groups were legitimate and called it “not a good look,” adding a personal apology.

“I should be better, and I’m going to be very careful in reading what comes before us at every turn,” said Bufty, a former supervisor.

Legal aid providers that signed on to the letter have requested a meeting with city officials to discuss funding and the contract.

“Our point is, if you want to get the services out the fastest, which is the point of that provision that they use to circumvent the competitive bidding process, then you need to look where the need is, where the services are being provided, and who has the capacity to upscale quickly,” said Laura Chiera, executive director of Legal Assistance to the Elderly. “You give me funding for another lawyer, I would have a full calendar that day.”

As cuts to their programs loom, Chiera said it’s difficult to keep up with demand for support as evictions and rent prices in the city continue upward. She described a recent client, a woman in her 70s whose rent increased from $1,300 to $8,000 per month. They represented her and brought her case to the rent board, she said, allowing her to reach an affordable rent amount and remain housed.

“For a senior on a fixed income [without legal support], rent going from $1,300 to $8,000, that does mean homelessness,” Chiera said. “All of this funding is disappearing, and there’s so much need.”

Tirtanadi did not comment specifically on concerns raised about the lack of transparency behind the contract, but said different City Hall departments are not on the same page over whether civil legal services should be funded or not.

“I would encourage the city, especially the mayor’s office, to look at this holistically,” Tirtanadi said. “If the goal is to have ODL expand legal services, that will be undermined if contracts are being reduced or cut from other departments.”