FEDERAL CUTS TO mental health and public housing, the emergence of vulnerable populations, rising housing costs, economic shifts to new industries — those were the root causes of San Francisco’s homelessness crisis in the early 1980s, and many of those same circumstances are being echoed today.
According to experts from the city speaking at a public forum last week, the future is not going to be easy.
The restaurant and civic space Manny’s hosted a nightly four-part series called “Understanding Homelessness.” On Tuesday, Kunal Modi, San Francisco chief of health, homelessness, and family services spoke with Sharky Laguana of the city’s Homeless Oversight Commission.
On Wednesday night, the CEO of the nonprofit affordable housing developer Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation spoke about permanent supportive housing, and Thursday’s event focused on the impact of legal services with the executive director of the nonprofit Open Door Legal.
Monday night’s opener discussed the history of homelessness in the city. Bevan Dufty, a two-term former San Francisco supervisor and commissioner on the Homelessness Oversight Commission, was joined by Sherilyn Adams, CEO of Larkin Street Youth Services, which provides housing and services to people under age 24.
The takeaway of the historic perspective was that solutions are continually reshaped in response to current events, and the narrative is continually refashioned by local politicians.
Before Agnos, it was mostly about optics
Dufty’s story about the city’s homelessness services began in 1978, with the election of Mayor Dianne Feinstein.
“For Mayor Feinstein, it was a visual problem versus a human problem,” said Dufty. “There was a hotline call system that seemed to work fairly well, but the most important thing is that much displacement had happened South of Market.”
Dufty said real changes began under Mayor Art Agnos, who was a social worker and opened the first multi-service center in the city. The Loma Prieta earthquake happened in 1989. Agnos was really pushing to get folks housed, he said, and his administration stopped the demolition of housing in the South of Market and Tenderloin neighborhoods.
Adams said youth homelessness started to get national attention in the mid-1970s.”Initially we were doing reform around juvenile justice,” she said, adding that the national focus shifted to transitional living programs. “We shouldn’t be locking teenagers in juvenile hall because they were cutting school, or they had run away, or they missed a curfew, right?”
In San Francisco, Larkin Street Youth Services opened its first drop-in center in 1984. For about two years, young people could come in and get support, get housing, case management, employment support, and there was street outreach, Adams said.
By the 1990s, the AIDS epidemic was hitting young people, she said, and Larkin Street opened its doors to 24-year-olds and started expanding, eventually tripling the number of youth housed.
“Why do young people become homeless in 1984 or in 2005?” said Adams. “Similar issues. For many, it’s family conflict. It’s parental death. It’s a lack of family resources.”
In 2008, Adams saw an uptick in the number of young people who were experiencing homelessness because they couldn’t find a job. She said even now she is still seeing the long tail of COVID-19, because young people did not complete high school.
“Not having your high school diploma is the strongest correlation factor for experiencing homelessness,” she said. “The other link is if you are Black, if you are brown, if you parent unintentionally early, if you are LGBTQ — those are the drivers into homelessness for young people.”
Dufty agreed.
“People don’t like talking about race, and homelessness is overwhelmingly an African American challenge right now,” said Dufty. “In a town like ours that has so few Black people, to have a 4% African American population and to have 40% to 45% of the homeless folks be African American, it needs to be talked about.”
Moderator David Sjostedt, a reporter with the San Francisco Standard, asked about the problems that arise out of prioritizing crisis intervention over investing in more systemic solutions.
“I do have homeless people tell me, ‘I think I’m not getting housing because I shower every day or I look too well-kept or I don’t appear to be as in-need as other people,’” said Sjostedt.
“In a town like ours that has so few Black people, to have a 4% African American population and to have 40% to 45% of the homeless folks be African American, it needs to be talked about.”
Bevan Dufty, Homeless Oversight Commission
Dufty said that was a result of coordinated housing, which came about in 2010, after the 2008 foreclosure crisis. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development began to require communities seeking federal funds for homelessness services to standardize their assessment process and prioritize people based on vulnerability and need, rather than on a first-come, first-served basis.
“We wanted to make sure that it was easier for folks who are experiencing homelessness, especially folks that have experienced it for a long time, to be able to go into one door,” Dufty said. “And not have to go to every single housing provider in San Francisco and get on their list.”
Unintended consequences
Dufty said the unintentional problem it created was that the system had to come up with an algorithm for prioritizing people.
“Sometimes families, sometimes folks who are newly experiencing homelessness don’t get to the top,” he said. “It also ended up moving folks maybe into the housing program that wasn’t the best fit for them.”
Both Adams and Dufty listed successes that don’t get a lot of attention, including a voucher program for veterans, the state Homekey program that helps local governments acquire buildings, and the Coalition on Homelessness, an advocacy collaborative of service providers and homeless people.
They gave different answers when asked about President Donald Trump’s push for cuts to social programs and Medicaid, which were slashed when Congress passed a budget bill earlier this month.
Dufty is enthusiastic about San Francisco’s new director of its Department of Public Health, Daniel Tsai, who ran the Medicaid program under President Barack Obama. He said the city has been an underperformer in terms of accessing Medicaid dollars.
“There’s just a tremendous amount of excitement about this individual,” Dufty said. “I’m really optimistic.” Adams had a more dire outlook and pointed to this year’s large city and state deficits.
“And we have looming horrid cuts coming from the federal government,” she said. “Addressing the acute behavioral health needs of folks, addressing housing and homelessness, taking care of children, youth and families and our seniors is not going to get easier.”
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