Ella Hill Hutch Homeless Shelter
Restored: $0
At a special meeting in the Ella Hill Hutch Community Center on June 10, Joyce Crum of the Human Services Agency (HSA) tried to assure over 20 homeless people that the shelter’s June 30 closing was not the City’s decision.
Before Crum referred them to Homeless Outreach Team members to get them wait-listed at other shelters, the director of HSA’s homeless and housing division told them that City budget cuts played no role in the closing—Ella Hill decided not to renew their contract at the end of the fiscal year.
Crum also said Ella Hill’s board of directors decided in February to get out of the shelter business—and it was solely their call.
Or was it?
Ella Hill Hutch has long been the victim of bad politics. When Mayor Willie Brown left office, he dumped George Smith into the Executive Director position at Ella Hill. Smith had worked before on homeless policy in San Francisco, and was notorious for his incompetence and apathy. Smith was unresponsive to complaints and refused to hold his staff accountable. Human rights abuses went unfettered. However, the board of Ella Hill Hutch recently fired Smith, and replaced him with a community member who held the same surname: Howard Smith.
One month before Smith’s hiring, the board of Ella Hill Hutch voted to close the shelter. Since Howard Smith became director, Ella Hill Hutch has requested funding to keep the center’s shelter open. Unfortunately, the Mayor still wrote the shelter out of the 2008-2009 municipal budget.
Howard Smith would not give a comment for this article.
Charles Pitts was cold for the two nights he spent at Ella Hill five years ago. He hasn’t stayed another night since.
“It felt like they did not want to turn on the heat,” Pitts said. “They gave me a lint-infested blanket with more holes than cloth.”
Pitts also recalled seeing an employee and a client argue about bathroom use. Only two showers were available. At a maximum of 100 clients served each night, two showers and everybody out by 6 a.m., the odds were against many to get themselves cleaned up in time.
The Shelter Monitoring Committee (SMC) noted bathroom conditions in their surprise inspections at Ella Hill. When they visited, the bathrooms had no soap or towels and no sign about keeping proper hygiene. Anybody who had to use either of the bathroom stalls had to ask staff for toiletries.
The SMC reported that only one-third of City-funded shelters met recommendations for hygiene. Ella Hill did not make the cut.
Throughout 2006 and 2007, the SMC continued to receive complaints from clients about Ella Hill. Homeless people found just waiting for a place to sleep to be daunting. According to an SMC quarterly report in April 2007, many who had to use night-time-only shelters complained of waiting in the cold before getting a bed and getting less than seven hours of sleep.
The SMC also recommended that shelters be open for at least 12 hours for their charges to get a good night’s sleep.
Rest is hard to come by when sleeping on a gym mat—Ella Hill was one of three year-round shelters to offer only mats as sleeping places. A senior woman reported in a complaint that she was ordered to carry her own mat to where she slept.
Recent shelter standards legislation would create repercussions for shelters that could not meet basic hygiene or human rights standards, leading to fines, and the potential termination of contracts.
Wake-up calls at Ella Hill were not fond memories for James Leonard. “In the morning, [staff] would stomp their feet to get you up,” he said. Leonard once saw somebody’s head get kicked as a result of this ritual. He also said veterans plagued with PTSD were retraumatized by the employees yelling at them.
Leonard stayed intermittently at Ella Hill for four months in 2007, and he observed hostile and demeaning treatment from the staff. Employees’ barking orders appeared to be the norm, almost like a prison.
“It was shocking,” Leonard said. “The staff was extremely rude and provocative. They obviously didn’t know how to handle mentally ill or difficult people.”
Leonard found exposure to such hostility left residents angry. “[Homeless] people would have good intentions of keeping their appointments, but [the effects of staying at the shelter] just killed it,” Leonard added.
He worked on the Shelter Monitoring Committee to get the standards law passed.
Jonathan Krull arrived in San Francisco from Arizona on April 19. The night Ella Hill hosted their town hall with the HSA representatives, Krull got on a waiting list for Hospitality House. He sometimes volunteers to set the mats out.
Krull said he worries about the strain other shelters would face upon Ella Hill’s closing. When asked what he thought would make his and other homeless people’s lives easier, he replied, “[Have] more available storage space.”
A secure place to store belongings is a requirement under the standards law. Krull said there wasn’t any during his stay at Ella Hill.
But not all former Ella Hill Hutch residents are equally sanguine about the impending closure. Richard Rice, who said he’s grateful to the shelter for putting him up while he started a construction job, asked about the timing of the closure with the new standards of care taxpayer-funded shelters must follow.
“It don’t make no sense,” Price said.
Indeed, the aforementioned shelter standards legislation, designed by the Coalition on Homelessness and Supervisor Tom Ammiano, combined with the recent change in administration at Ella Hill Hutch, could create the necessary conditions for the reform of the shelter—either through the administration, or through the advocacy of the residents. Alternately, as long as the funding remains in the budget, the contract for the shelter could be transferred to another organization.
But if Ella Hill Hutch closes for want of funding, our city’s rapidly dwindling shelter system will lose 100 slots—on top of the more than 300 beds already lost since the beginning of the Newsom administration. Looking at recent history, it’s difficult to get excited about trying to save a shelter with such a track record. However, once emergency shelter beds are lost, there is very little likelihood that they will ever be replaced. That leaves little room for either reform of the existing shelter, or transfer of the contract. For 100 more San Franciscans, there will be nowhere else to go.
Check our guide to the Budget Process here.
Check our guide to the Budget Process here.
T.J.
