Gavin Newsom’s first term in office will be defined to a great degree by the status of homelessness in San Francisco. Since the Agnos administration, homelessness has consistently been at the top of the issues defining San Francisco’s politics. Newsom was elected mayor largely due to the electoral success of his Care Not Cash initiative and the implicit promise to reduce homelessness. After Care Not Cash, Newsom’s most important policy decisions were marked by his enthusiastic embracement of the Bush administration’s twin initiatives: the focus on a very narrow minority of the homeless population—the so-called “chronically homeless”—and the provision of supportive housing for those so labeled.

Another defining characteristic of this administration, on homelessness as on every other aspect of City policy, has been the unrelenting and overwhelming use of the media to highly publicize even the smallest of the Mayor’s actions or initiatives. At a time when the mainstream media is more interested in preserving their “access” to leading officials than challenging their statements against the facts, it has become increasingly difficult for the public to grasp what is actually going on with homelessness in our city.

With an election in which Mayor Newsom is not being challenged by any big-name adversary (though many contenders deserve our attention—see page 4 of this issue), the Coalition set out to compare the spin to the facts. We compiled Newsom’s speeches and press releases on homelessness to the data available from a variety of City sources. In some cases, the information was readily available, particularly the PR material: All the Mayor’s speeches and statements are readily available on the City’s Website. Getting the data to support or deny those statements was bit more difficult. What follows is a snapshot of homeless policy in San Francisco, as seen through our City’s official documents and data.

The Newsom administration has at best a mixed record on actual achievements. For some, the chances of obtaining housing have improved. For many, they remained the same or have gotten worse. The initiation of his Care Not Cash plan has decreased the number of homeless individuals on welfare rolls, yet questions still remain about this decrease—did people fall off the rolls because they actually received housing? And was this actually a result of Newsom’s policies? In the realm of permanent housing programs, the trend seems to be phasing out transitional housing programs in favor of permanent supportive housing. Newsom has still failed to meet his promise to build more units for homeless senior citizens. On a similar note, access to shelters has decreased under the Newsom administration. The administration has claimed that this is actually a success, because it has focused on transitioning the shelter system to a system of supportive housing, which would be a more permanent solution. However, there is the worry that the administration will cut the shelter system off before there are enough supportive housing units to fulfill need, leaving homeless individuals with nowhere to turn. Other highly publicized Newsom initiatives such as Project Homeless Connect and Homeward Bound have met with mixed results. While Project Homeless Connect has succeeded in bringing homeless people together with services, the city has failed to provide the connection to services on a regular basis. In addition, little to no housing is provided on a permanent basis. Homeward Bound sends people on the bus out of town and little if nothing is known about what happens to them. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, one of the most disturbing legacies Newsom will leave the city is his steep increase on quality of life citations. This law-and-order approach is costly, inhumane, and does nothing to solve homelessness.

The Effects of Care not Cash

One of the Newsom administration’s most promoted homeless policy reforms, Care Not Cash, has failed to secure housing, despite the drop in individuals receiving welfare. Care Not Cash was passed in November of 2002 despite initial concerns that its effectiveness would not be worth its price tag. In his 2005 State of Homelessness address, Mayor Newsom promised that by May, 2006, “There should be no homeless people left on the [welfare] rolls.”¹ By 2006, the welfare rolls had fallen to approximately 300 homeless people, not quite the zero Newsom had promised. At this point, Newsom attempted to recover from this broken promise by guaranteeing the remaining County Adult Assistance Program (CAAP) participants housing by the end of summer 2006.² According to Beyond Chron, many homeless people who dropped from the welfare rolls did so without receiving housing, and are still homeless”.³ In addition, hundreds of homeless people have been displaced from shelters to make room for welfare recipients, and the 1 in 3 that recieved housing are paying 85% of their income for inadequate SRO rooms.

In the aforementioned article, John Weeks, Executive Director of St. Boniface Neighborhood Center, said, “We haven’t had much of a decrease since Care Not Cash went into effect.”

Former Board of Supervisors President and mayoral candidate Matt Gonzales said of the drop, “All of the new housing claimed by Newsom as part of his Care Not Cash initiative in the last year was built using funds obtained during the Brown administration.”⁴

Permanent Housing Programs

Permanent supportive housing is the most effective way to decrease homelessness. While the total number of transitional housing units available has fallen, the number of permanent supportive housing units is on the rise. The Chronicle reported that from 2004 to January, 2007, 5,224 people had found housing: 4,771 through City services; 1,864 through Homeward Bound; and 453 through their own initiative. Leaving aside the chutzpah required to equate permanently housing someone to providing them with a bus ticket out of town, the meaning of these numbers is still muddled. Most of the housing Newsom takes credit for was actually funded in the Brown administration, and the rest is neither affordable, new nor permanent Care not Cash rooms where people are housed in hotels poor people have already been living in for decades.

The biggest failure of the Newsom administration has been in housing senior citizens. In September 2004, Newsom promised a new initiative, one that would, “build partnerships between the philanthropic community and the department of Human Services’ supportive housing program and focuses on moving seniors out of shelters and into permanent supportive housing within a year.”⁵ In 2006, Newsom admitted there were still 93 seniors sleeping in shelters, promising that 166 supportive housing units would be built for seniors.⁶ Newsom has yet to fulfill this promise.

Shelters

The 2003 transition from the Continuum of Care model to the Ten-Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness was designed to transition the city from a system of shelters and emergency drop-in centers to permanent supportive housing, the eventual goal being an end to “chronic” homelessness. Indeed, housing is the better alternative to shelters because shelters are expensive, and do not resolve the homeless problem, but band-aid it. Yet, over 300 beds have been lost prematurely.

According to the San Francisco Plan to Abolish Chronic Homelessness, “[t]he Plan recommends phasing out traditional shelters within four to six years, replacing them with 24-hour crisis clinics and sobering centers. One example of a sobering center, the McMillan Stabilization Pilot Project, has saved the City considerable money by diverting intoxicants from emergency rooms.”⁷ That did not prevent the Newsom administration from trying twice in less than a year to permanently close that same 24-hour drop-in facility, the only such facility in the city.⁸

In the past, the Street Sheet has reported on human rights abuses, including physical, verbal, and sexual abuse, that occur in shelters.⁹ The shelter system is wrought with problems, but is still necessary to meet the needs of unhoused people. The idea of transitioning the homeless plan from being shelter-based to housing-based is a good one, but the administration cannot use building housing as an excuse to cut funds from emergency services prematurely.

Project Homeless Connect and Homeward Bound

Project Homeless Connect is a bi-monthly mobilization aimed at providing essential services to homeless people. The services offered do genuinely help make life easier; however, the effort is costly, and the funds could be diverted to other more effective long-term solutions. The main problem with Project Homeless Connect is that the same resources are not provided to community organizations who do this work daily. For the handful of temporary rooms the City may provide, people are not given tenant rights and must leave soon thereafter. In addition, the City has no data about repeat clients that could be used to analyze trends in homeless people’s needs. Despite the lack of any standard procedure to measure the outcomes of Homeless Connect, the program has earned great reviews from the media and the public, perhaps because it allows common citizens to do something about a problem they sincerely care about.

The Homeward Bound Program provides one-way bus tickets anywhere in the country, under the guise of reconnecting homeless individuals with family or friends. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, 1,864 homeless people have left San Francisco since 2004. One flaw in this system is the skimpy follow-up program: An administrator sometimes makes a phone call a few days after departure to ensure a safe arrival, but the program keeps no further data. According to the Chronicle, San Francisco had to resolve an argument with Humboldt when local officials learned San Francisco had bused 13 people there in one year.

The Law and Order Approach

Perhaps the most disturbing and ineffective of the Newsom administration’s homelessness policies is its move toward increasingly criminalizing homelessness. Jailing homeless people for “quality of life crimes” not only costs the City money that could be used constructively, but it does absolutely nothing to end homelessness. It only serves to make life harder for individuals for whom life is already hard enough.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported that the enforcement of these laws (laws that make crimes of sleeping in the streets and panhandling) have cost $6 million. According to Religious Witness With Homeless People, 31,000 citations have been issued for minor crimes since 2004.

According to court records, the number of tickets issued for sleeping in Golden Gate Park had increased from 436 in 2003 to 1,114 in 2004.¹⁰

Such citations are not only expensive to enforce, but counterproductive to ending homelessness. Furthermore, punishment for economic circumstance is degrading and inhuman—almost a regression to the days of debtors’ prisons.

If the first two years of the Newsom administration were marked by the implementation of Care Not Cash and the stated but never-quite-realized focus on permanent housing, the second half of his administration has veered even more to the many times tried and failed law-and-order approach.

Clear examples of this “new” approach are the recent mobilization of police, social workers, and park staff to displace hundreds of homeless people from Golden Gate Park, without any real plan to actually house or service them beyond existing and already overloaded social and health services, and the failed attempt at creating a new court to persecute homeless people for crimes of poverty. If these are signs of things to come in Newsom’s likely second term, homeless people face a return to the dark days of Mayor Jordan and his Matrix program. This would not be a paradigm shift, as Newsom constantly claims to be his goal, but a poor paradigm shuffle instead.

This is an abstract of a report which will appear in full on the Coalition on Homelessness Website this month.

1 http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=c/a/2005/12/21/BAGOIGBB6I1.DTL

2 http://sfgov.org/site/mayor_page asp?id=39118

3 http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=4368

4 http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2005/Homeless-Disappeared-Gonzales23feb05.htm

5 http://sfgov.org/site/mayor_page.asp?id=27341

6 http://sfgov.org/site/mayor_index.asp?id=51423

7 http://www.ich.gov/slocal/plans/sanfrancisco.pdf

8 http://cohsf.org/streetsheet/2007/06/14/help-keep-after-hours-emergency-drop-in-in-the-central-city/;
http://cohsf.org/streetsheet/2006/10/01/fighting-for-mcmillan/

9 http://www.cohsf.org/reports/2007/ShelterShock.pdf

10 http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2005/Homeless-Disappeared-Gonzales23feb05.htm

Devin

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