While many things have changed during the COVID-19 pandemic and shelter in place, the crisis has further exposed underlying problems already present in our society. The experience of the 8,000 nightly unhoused people in San Francisco was a danger to their lives and a moral stain on our city before the pandemic. COVID-19 has only made these problems worse.
We have a moral imperative to ensure everyone is housed. We know that a lack of housing harms and kills people. Lacking adequate housing threatens physical health, harms mental health, and puts people at risk of substance abuse. Now more than ever, unhoused people need shelter to stay safe from COVID-19. This is not only a moral imperative — if our most vulnerable population is sick, the rest of the city is at risk also. We are all inexorably linked.
We are not providing sufficient services and housing to everyone in need in the short term, and we must do more. This was true before COVID-19 and is even more true now. In San Francisco, there are over 50 applications for every subsidized low-income home. Before shelter in place, our emergency shelters had a waiting list of over 1,000 people. During shelter in place, our shelters have had to reduce capacity dramatically, pushing more people onto our streets.
We recognize the significant impediments to providing short-term shelter, and long-term supportive housing. We need to increase funding and eliminate process in order to get our neighbors into homes.
Funding
In the COVID state of emergency, there has been significant effort put towards housing people in vacant hotels. This is a great solution but we do not CURRENTLY have enough money to pay for the required number of rooms. While the federal and state government through FEMA and CalOES will reimburse some costs to shelter high-risk populations, as much as 90% of homeless individuals may not qualify for reimbursement. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has proven to be fickle and arbitrary in its allocation of additional resources and we cannot assume that even this modest funding will be continued.
San Francisco should be unified in asking Speaker Pelosi, Senator Harris, and Senator Feinstein to do everything they can to secure federal funding for homelessness. The Public Health Emergency Shelter Act of 2020, introduced by Members of Congress Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib, would help.
The only funding that the city controls is the general fund. A report from the City Controller estimated that it may cost $59 million per month to shelter everyone who is homeless. If the state of emergency continues, the city will need to spend $708 million per year. Additionally, the city has constraints on training enough people to staff hotels, legal liability, and challenges setting up a program that’s never been done before. San Francisco is facing an estimated budget deficit of $1.7 billion over the next two years, i.e., about 7% of a $12 billion annual budget. There will be tough battles about what gets cut.
While we fight to secure funding for emergency shelter, we must not lose sight of the long-term solution to homelessness: long-term housing. Low-income housing is expensive due to the cost of land, labor, materials, and process. A single unit of permanent supportive housing for formerly homeless individuals costs more than $700,000 to build. Our state and local governments simply do not have enough money to build a significant number of homes. During an economic recession, we are unlikely to raise significant additional tax revenue, though YIMBY supports any effort to do so.
In the face of these challenges, we must be creative, we must be open-minded, and we must not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
We need to embrace short-term emergency housing, even when it is not ideal. Sanctioned encampments move people off of the streets and into socially distanced spaces with access to facilities and services. We can build more low-income housing by embracing every form of funding: bonds, taxes on office space, and inclusionary requirements on market-rate housing. We cannot allow one solution to be used to oppose any other solution. We need to house as many people as possible. We spend too much time arguing over the perfect project and not enough on the number of people housed this year.
But funding is not the only barrier to solving homelessness.
Process
San Francisco’s planning process requires exorbitant amounts of community input, outreach, and political capital to establish all kinds of housing including even emergency shelters. Wealthy and politically connected neighborhoods have made it clear that new housing and shelter is not welcome in their backyards. Everyone from market rate developers to city health officials know that these neighborhoods will bury any proposal under a mountain of paperwork. It’s no wonder that decision makers don’t even try.
Voters believe they have elected politicians who will make tough decisions and act in the public good. Instead, San Francisco has created a self-defeating process, in which we allow people to say “I support this in general, but not in my backyard.” Opponents of the Embarcadero Navigation Center took to the courts to stop the shelter for meritless “environmental impact” reasons. The owners of Amoeba Records recently teamed up with a Trump-endorsing lawyer to stop a proposed tent encampment site in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood.
The problem with not building in people’s backyards is that everywhere is someone’s backyard. When we allow the powerful to say no, we force development into marginalized communities, and we leave housing on the drawing table when we could be sheltering our neediest.
Sanctioned tent encampments are necessary, especially in the short term to reduce harm. San Francisco is already pursuing this strategy, and we applaud the city’s efforts to shelter our homeless neighbors. Now we need to make implementation faster and easier.
Street encampments are shuffled from one area to the next without solving the problem. Whether you call it “sweeps” or something else: it is a moral failure to harass unhoused people, force them to move around, and confiscate or destroy their belongings.
Wealthy neighborhoods use the police to push the homeless out of sight. A disproportionate number end up in the Tenderloin and other hot-spots which are now overwhelmed. Meanwhile, Supervisors who do the right thing and support sanctioned sites in their districts face an onslaught of opposition. It is the definition of “Not In My Backyard” when people support the concept of emergency sanctioned encampments while opposing them in their own neighborhood.
We call for all of our elected officials to create sanctioned encampments throughout the city
We need all city leaders to decide as a whole that this is a priority and to take the politics out of site placement. It is unproductive to ask one supervisor at a time to face the NIMBY onslaught and then play Russian roulette on who has to go next. Instead, the Board of Supervisors and the Mayor should evaluate all city owned land and identify space for 1000 tents as a first phase. The city has more than enough empty parking lots, closed facilities, and golf courses to make this possible.
The entire Board of Supervisors and the Mayor should jointly announce these locations all at once and instruct all relevant agencies to create these sites as fast as possible. This issue is too important to continue the finger-pointing and recrimination that is already all too common in San Francisco politics.
We must decide as a whole that these sites will move forward. We cannot allow every site to be nitpicked and delayed. A progressive city does not ask for permission from the housed before it helps the unhoused.
Sanctioned tent sites have flaws, but they are a worthy and meaningful improvement over the status quo. While we must stand them up as quickly as possible, we must also make medium and long-term plans for better solutions. We must continue to secure funding and staff to move people into vacant hotels. We must create more permanent supportive housing through hotel acquisitions and building new facilities. We must build more affordable housing. And we must build more market rate housing, which funds supportive and affordable housing and brings down housing costs.
We must pursue all of these solutions. We must change the politics of no into the politics of Yes In My Backyard. Our neighbors depend on it.
Signed by the leadership of San Francisco YIMBY
Theo Gordon, San Francisco YIMBY Chair
Cliff Bargar
Dana Beuschel
Steven Buss
Mike Chen
Bobak Esfandiari
Laura Fingal-Surma
Chris Hallacy
Elizabeth Joyce
Roan Kattouw
Jeremy Linden
Jane Natoli
Truc Nguyen
Steve Marzo
Sara Ogilvie
Tom Poston
Hilary Schiraldi
Ben Shultz
Eddie Siegel
Zack Subin
Jordon Wing
Gabe Zitrin
