Ending Homelessness Isn’t About One Thing. It’s About Everything.
San Francisco doesn’t need new policies and programs. It needs a smarter way to hold them all together.
San Francisco is struggling to end homelessness, and the local media wants you to know about it.
This week, more than 70 news and media outlets in the Bay Area have launched the SF Homeless Project, a coordinated coverage campaign to draw attention to homelessness in the region and explore potential solutions.
This is a significant event. Trailblazing, even. So why has it made me so uneasy over the last month?
I’ve spent more than 30 years working to solve homelessness, first in New York City, and more recently, as a partner to communities across the U.S. I began my career as a shelter worker, before becoming an affordable housing developer, a builder of supportive housing, and finally a public systems redesigner.
The organization I lead, Community Solutions, works on homelessness and other complex problems with cities all over the world. If there’s an idea on the table to address homelessness, in San Francisco or anywhere else, I’ve probably tried it, or seen it tried, somewhere.
What I’ve learned is that the solution to homelessness isn’t a mystery, and it isn’t just one thing. It’s the quality of the glue between things.
San Francisco has already adopted so many of the right housing and social support strategies. The cities that have outpaced it in the fight to end homelessness don’t have better policies or stronger programs. They have better coordinated systems holding those essential elements together.
Think about the difference between passing a disaster preparedness law in Congress and responding to an actual hurricane.
A well written law might consider expert testimony, draw on historical data, and earmark funding for specific agencies and activities — all important things. Still, no one would confuse the law itself with a comprehensive response to a storm.
When a hurricane strikes, you need a nimble disaster response team that can track events in real time, identify the places and people most affected or at risk, and deploy flexible resources on the ground to solve whatever problems those people are facing. Many of those problems can’t be fully predicted in advance.
Homelessness is a disaster in its own right, as former San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos pointed out this week, but we have not typically treated it like one. If we did, we might build our local systems to look more like a high performing command center during a hurricane:
- We would empower a nimble, central organizer, not to set and enforce policies, but rather to support and coordinate among many actors with different strengths
- We would keep our resource pool large and shared, but also flexible, to ensure that resources could be directed wherever, to whomever, and for whatever purpose they were needed most to solve problems quickly
- We would gather, real-time, person-specific data, so that we knew exactly who needed help on any given day and what kind of help they needed, including help to prevent or stave off homelessness
- We would measure the results of our work in real-time and adjust our approach accordingly in order to return as many people as possible back to healthy, stable lives in permanent housing
The biggest barrier to building this kind of response to homelessness in San Francisco, as in most cities, is the fact that no one is actually in charge of ending homelessness. Funding passes from various federal, state and philanthropic sources (each with its own set of rules) to a fragmented array of organizations on the ground.
Everyone wants to solve the problem, but ultimately, each local agency or nonprofit is accountable to somebody different.
Still, there are notable examples of communities that have overcome this challenge. One that comes to mind is a city that has had its fair share of experience with disasters.
After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans saw a 75 percent spike in homelessness. Today, chronic homelessness in that city is down more than 80 percent from 2007, and veteran homelessness is nearly non-existent. The city achieved these results by learning from Katrina and treating homelessness like the ongoing emergency that it is.
In New Orleans, a group called UNITY plays the central organizing role. UNITY controls some federal funding, but not all of it, and it has no legal authority over other local actors. Nonetheless, the group has been remarkably effective at helping various local agencies and organizations, including the VA, set a shared agenda and agree on how to coordinate a local system.
Not long after Katrina, UNITY started surveying street encampments using a simple questionnaire designed to gather valuable, by-name data on every person living on their streets. Over the years, they repeated this activity until eventually, it emerged as a continuous process. Today, outreach workers comb the streets every night, even searching abandoned buildings, to ensure that every person experiencing homelessness is accounted for by name in a shared database.
The coalition UNITY helped to assemble meets regularly to go through that database and match people experiencing homelessness to evidence-based housing options. Flexible funding may buy move-in furniture one week, or fund a security deposit on an apartment the next week. Similarly, when a person no longer needs case management services paired with their rental assistance voucher, they may transition to a standalone voucher, freeing up the more comprehensive resource for someone else.
New Orleans also measures its work in real time. Local leaders can tell you in any given month how many people are experiencing veteran or chronic homelessness in their city, as well as how many people moved into permanent housing the month before. These numbers mean they can step in and take action when the system is getting jammed.
San Francisco is different from New Orleans in key ways.
For one thing, the City needs far more, and far less expensive, rental housing, along with social services funding to accompany a portion of that housing. This supply/demand gap is wider in San Francisco than in most cities. Exhaustive research shows that investments in housing and services, targeted to the most vulnerable residents, save taxpayers money; voters throughout the Bay Area would benefit by supporting housing bond measures on the ballot this year.
But in other ways, San Francisco already has so much of what it needs to end homelessness, and therein lies the risk of this week’s media campaign.
The City has already implemented many of the most effective known programs and policies— it has long been a leader in adopting the successful Housing First approach, for example, and its new navigation centers hold tremendous promise.
San Francisco doesn’t need anyone to tell it what new types of programs and policies it should fund and support. Instead, as newly named Director of the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, Jeff Kositsky, acknowledged earlier this week, it needs a better way to integrate these elements into an effective and well coordinated system on the ground.
As I’ve noted, City Hall lacks the authority to mandate that coordination by itself. Instead, improvements will need to be driven collaboratively on the front lines, where more than 70 groups that already share a common goal of ending homelessness in San Francisco must come together to share data and coordinate resources. The City can incent these groups, but it will ultimately need to support a multi-sector team of public agencies, nonprofits and even the local business community to drive far reaching results.
Whatever that collaboration turns out to look like, its marching orders are clear: develop a centralized mechanism for knowing every homeless San Franciscan by name in real time; adopt a shared protocol for mobilizing the right resources around the most vulnerable people quickly; measure citywide housing performance against homelessness month over month; and adjust strategy iteratively as the data changes.
San Francisco’s technology industry has revolutionized the way we work through the use of real-time data, seamless systems integration and user centered design. To end homelessness, the City’s housing and homeless services community will have to operate the same way.
