The Homeless Outreach Team’s years-long staffing woes and decisions to redirect outreach workers to special projects have left them less time for their core mission: building trust with unhoused people and helping them get case managers, social services, temporary shelter and permanent housing.

In perhaps its highest-profile special project, the team worked to prepare the downtown area for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in November by removing visible evidence of homelessness. This meant prioritizing unhoused people in that zone for the city’s scarce shelter beds. The summit was widely considered an opportunity for Mayor London Breed to redeem San Francisco’s image after years of bad press. Breed is running this year to keep her seat.

The mayoral race is heating up, with candidates sparring over homelessness and making it a key issue in their campaigns. It is a critical issue to San Franciscans, surveys show. Nearly 40% of residents said homelessness was the city’s worst problem, and over 70% said it was among the top three problems, a 2022 survey by the San Francisco Chronicle found. It was also a top issue for more than half of respondents to a February poll by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce.

The Homeless Outreach Team’s field work volume has dropped precipitously from its zenith during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the work entailed many brief interactions to help people weather the citywide shelter-in-place order.

Some service providers and homelessness advocates said they approved of one of the team’s special projects, the Street to Home program, which has placed 58 people in housing.

Even targeting high-priority areas, like downtown during the summit, wasn’t necessarily bad if it included offers of shelter, said Christin Evans, a member of the city’s Homeless Oversight Commission.

But it “needs to be done also in a way that the people with the highest needs are getting the resources that they do need, as opposed to moving them along,” Evans said.  

And when scarce resources are used for political reasons, it can damage trust-building between the team and unhoused people, providers and advocates said.

The Homeless Outreach Team could end up doing even less field work if officials follow through with plans to reduce its budget by $3.5 million over the next two years. The cuts might land on its neighborhood-based teams, further reducing or eliminating outreach outside the city’s downtown core, said Emily Cohen, deputy director of communications and legislative affairs at the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing.

Joe Wilson, executive director of Hospitality House, said it would be a bad idea to cut outreach, especially in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Gloria Johnson. The court ruled that cities may enforce bans against sleeping or camping in public spaces, even if no shelter is available, and issue fines — causing many to worry that governments will prioritize policing over providing housing or services.

“The Grants Pass ruling clearly opens the doors to outright criminalization without any pretense of offering support,” Wilson said. “It’s even more imperative, even more vital, that we invest in outreach and connection and getting people connected to needed resources.”

The San Francisco Public Press asked the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing who, at City Hall, had decided to shift the team’s work priorities.

“HSH, in partnership with other city departments is responsible for deciding priorities and determining special projects,” spokesperson Deborah Bouck wrote in an email.

Waning outreach and possible political motives

The Homeless Outreach Team’s interactions with unhoused people peaked shortly after the pandemic touched down in San Francisco, when Mayor Breed issued a citywide shelter-in-place order to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus. Engagements numbered 14,664 in April 2020 and have been trending down ever since. They fell to their lowest level this April, the most recent month for which the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing provided data, with only 1,808 encounters.

The rate of engagement soared during the pandemic because many interactions were brief, with the team on the streets talking to as many people as possible, distributing masks, educating on basic public health and helping people move into hotel rooms repurposed as homeless shelters.

In recent months, time-intensive special projects have meant less time for other outreach work, reducing the team’s overall interactions with unhoused people.

The team met its contractually required 35,000 engagements last year. Data for 2024 shows that the team’s engagements were about 7,900 through the end of April, the most recent month for which data was provided. If the downward trend continues, the team will likely miss this year’s target.

But the workers have many targets, said Bouck, of the homelessness department — not just those related to outreach. “There are 23 service objectives that HOT is evaluated on, and encounters is one of them,” she said, referring to the Homeless Outreach Team.

In its new prioritized work, the team placed 58 people in housing through the Street to Home program from its inception in June 2023 through this March, during which only one person left the housing, The Frisc reported. The program takes people directly from the streets into permanent supportive housing, where they generally can access case managers and social services. Service providers and homelessness department staff said Street to Home has helped some people who have struggled for years to come indoors.

For the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, aka APEC, about a dozen team members targeted their field work in zones where event activities would take place: near City Hall, the Moscone Center, the Asian Art Museum and the Embarcadero.

That month, the team continued general outreach throughout the city. But some of its other work, sending staffers out in response to phone calls from the public requesting help, stopped almost entirely. Those dispatches numbered 65 in October, then eight the following month, rising again after the summit concluded. In the team’s work notes about how it responded to phone calls, staffers wrote, “Due to APEC assignments not able to dispatch.”

Critics were troubled that the team’s other work might be affected by political motives.

“It just seems like a ridiculous diversion of effort and kind of classic,” said Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness, referring to the Homeless Outreach Team’s work at the November summit. She called it the latest “example of HOT being politically diverted into other jobs instead of focusing on their existing clients.”

For example, she said, the team has often shifted its work toward areas of the city where there were upticks in complaints, to the detriment of unhoused people elsewhere who had already been promised resources. Friedenbach said the Homeless Outreach Team “has a lot of really strong staff” but that when it changes priorities before following through on earlier commitments, it can end up “disintegrating trust with folks.”

When the team is not dispatched or cannot find those who call for assistance — which occurs in most cases — callers are left to fend for themselves or find help elsewhere.

As the Homeless Outreach Team’s engagements have generally declined, encampment clearings, also called sweeps, have increased. Outreach team members help with clearings by offering shelter and other resources to the encampment dwellers whom city personnel displace.

Breed has been a vocal proponent of clearings, saying it’s not healthy or safe to camp on the streets. She submitted an amicus, or friend-of-the-court, brief in support of clearings to the Supreme Court as it deliberated the Grants Pass case.

Unhoused people, their advocates and service providers have long criticized clearings for reducing the visibility of poverty instead of addressing its root causes, and for further destabilizing people experiencing homelessness.

Looming budget cuts and staffing woes

Cohen said past staffing troubles had contributed to the Homeless Outreach Team’s decreasing field work.

Turnover has been high, according to a 2023 city audit. Heluna Health, the nonprofit hired to run the team, has struggled to keep the team at least 90% staffed at all times, as required by its city contract.

The situation improved by this summer. The team was 95% staffed as of July 2, Bouck said.

But looming budget cuts, which Breed has proposed and the Board of Supervisors may approve this month, could slash the team’s ranks, Cohen acknowledged. That would put social services further out of reach for San Francisco’s less visible unhoused people, in particular, those who tend to steer clear of downtown, such as seniors and families living in vehicles.

One of the outreach team’s roles is to help people navigate the city’s complex services system, said Lydia Bransten, executive director of the Gubbio Project, which gives food, medical assistance and places to rest to people experiencing homelessness. If the team’s budget was cut, she wondered, then what would the plan be for providing that type of hand-holding? Police don’t have the time to do it, she said.

Unhoused people “with chaotic behaviors are the ones who need the most help, and it takes skill” to help them, Bransten said.

‘Outreach from what, to what?’

Several service providers said thinning outreach was just one of many structural problems with the city’s homelessness response system.

One of the bigger problems, they said, was that the city doesn’t have adequate services and housing to offer people in the first place.

Amber, an unhoused woman who declined to give her last name, recalled positive experiences with a Homeless Outreach Team member when she was pregnant five years ago, but said that today the team doesn’t have “too much shit to offer us.” She said she was told last week that she wasn’t eligible for single-room-occupancy housing because of her dog.

Vinny Vizgaudis and Max, who didn’t provide a last name, also described difficulties accessing housing that met their needs.

Max said he has been cycling through prison and probation since he was a teenager, because of substance use. He and his girlfriend were trying to get into shelter but he said the outreach team recently told him that there were no available spaces for couples.

Vizgaudis said he could not stay in a congregate shelter due to his post-traumatic stress disorder, but that when he tried to work with the team to find other options, none were available.

“They told me that I have to get lucky, that I have to basically win a lottery,” he said. “They have to have a room open on the day that they come to service my area and maybe I might get it.”

Because of past negative experiences, he doesn’t interact with them much, he said.

In the meantime, Vizgaudis and Max are shuffled from place to place as city workers conduct clearings.

Wilson, of Hospitality House, said the Homeless Outreach Team is the most responsive of the city’s field teams. But “what we need is something on the end of outreach,” he said.

“Outreach from what, to what? That’s the unanswered question,” Wilson said. “We don’t have the resources available for the people who need them, and even for the people who are trying to get them.”

Madison Alvarado reported this story while participating in the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s 2023 Data Fellowship, which provided training, mentoring and funding to support this project.

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A separate, possible $20 million outlay could help unhoused families cover rent for a limited time, the department’s spokesperson also said at the Board of Supervisors Rules Committee hearing. The funds must be approved in budget negotiations this summer.

But these new measures would fall short of serving all the families in need, the spokesperson acknowledged.

“There’s these huge communities of people fleeing violence, persecution, gangs, all these things, trying to survive and we’re basically telling them, ‘Sleep on the streets,’” said Supervisor Hillary Ronen, who chairs the committee and represents District 9, which contains the Mission District.

Migrant families have joined service providers and faith-based advocates in a push for a policy response to the mounting crisis, including increasing access to temporary housing and providing greater transparency about where families are on the waitlist for shelter. Supervisor Ahsha Safaí, who represents the Excelsior, Oceanview and other neighborhoods of District 11, recently took up the issue and wrote a non-binding resolution that called on the city to ensure migrant families would receive immediate shelter, among other services. He then convened Monday’s hearing, in which District 10 supervisor and committee member Shamann Walton was also present, to discuss potential policy solutions with staff from various city departments.

Following the homelessness department’s proposal, Ronen questioned whether the migrant families would be eligible for the rent subsidies that the $20 million infusion would fund. She referenced existing programs that prioritize recipients who have been homeless in San Francisco for many years.

Those programs are “not for the newcomer people that are coming, because they’re going to be really low on the list,” Ronen said.

Families from several countries shared their struggles accessing safe housing and pressed the city to do better.

“I don’t want my kids to end up on streets to relive trauma,” said Luz Mejía, an unhoused migrant from Peru. Her family had gotten a slot in the city’s temporary shelter system, but it had space for only three people so her husband stayed there with their kids while she remained on the streets.  

“We need to respect our kids’ integrity, we need more transparency, more humanitarian effort, and more movement to find permanent housing for families,” said Margarita Solito, a mother of four from El Salvador who works with Faith in Action Bay Area. The organization has helped migrant families pay for short hotel stays, outside of government programs, and raise the alarm about the dire situation.

Supervisors Ronen and Safaí questioned why no one had declared a state of emergency.

Safaí, who is running to unseat Mayor London Breed this November, said Breed had the power to make that declaration, as she had in 2020 to give the government greater flexibility to confront the coronavirus pandemic. Department staff can recommend that she make a declaration.

Immigrant families newly arrived here might struggle to find housing or jobs, experts say.

“The increased number of migrants arriving don’t have the support networks or systems that previous waves might have had,” said Jorge Rivas, executive director of the Office of Civic Engagement and Immigrant Affairs.

The city lacks robust quantitative data on migrant family homelessness, Rivas said. That’s largely because many departments do not ask about immigration status when assessing people for services, in accordance with San Francisco’s “sanctuary city” policies.

But “all the qualitative data affirms that we are experiencing a steady stream of newcomer asylum seekers,” Rivas said.

For example, the number of public school students who are recent immigrants has risen steadily over the past three years, he said, and during this school year it reached its highest level in the last decade, at 1,566 children. Some of those students reported being unhoused, Rivas said. And a waitlist for legal representation by the San Francisco Immigrant Legal Defense Collaborative has ballooned to more than 900 people; typically it hovers at around 100 to 200 people, he said.

The supervisors said community members were raising these issues with them.

“We’re hearing anecdotally that hundreds of people are coming into the Bay Area every day,” Ronen said. She added that one family shelter reported “turning away people every single night. We’re hearing from our outreach workers that they find children sleeping on the streets every day.”

The Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing will issue 35 new hotel vouchers, each giving the recipient household a two-week stay in a hotel. At the end of the period, the department could extend the stay or the voucher could go to another household, said spokesperson Emily Cohen.

The requested $20 million would pay for up to 100 five-year rent subsidies for families. That could still leave many families on the streets, based on figures Cohen presented at the hearing. As of last week, at least 375 families were waiting for rooms in homeless shelters to become available, she said.

Safaí said he would probably hold a follow-up hearing within the next two months to check on whether the homelessness department had issued the new vouchers and waitlist management had improved.

Fixing migrant family homelessness will require long-term solutions, said Hope Kamer, director of public policy and external affairs at Compass Family Services, which serves the unhoused population.

“I really, really hope that money will hit the streets and the safety net will be supported,” she said.

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In a recent Public Press poll to gauge residents’ opinion of the city’s thorniest issues, San Franciscans made their top concerns crystal clear: housing affordability, homelessness and the cleanliness of city streets.  

More than 200 people shared opinions with the Public Press when asked to identify the most pressing concerns in their supervisorial districts. Most participants completed the brief survey online early this fall, with about 15% replying in person to surveyors seeking diverse respondents in supervisorial districts with competitive races. A small number of respondents said they worked in the city but lived elsewhere. 

While concerns varied by district, housing, homelessness and street hygiene emerged as key issues. Aggregated concerns about different kinds of crime came in as a close fourth. City residents were also able to weigh in on these thorny matters in the Nov. 8 general election. 

Results are still rolling in that could decide several close contests. Based on the latest vote tally from the Department of Elections: 

• Neither of two competing efforts to streamline San Francisco’s building permitting process with stated goals of building more affordable housing has secured 50% of the vote. After hanging on for several days by a razor thin margin, over the weekend Proposition D drifted further away from victory, while E has lost.  
• Proposition M, a progressive empty homes tax meant to give owners incentive to rent out vacant units, passed and stands with almost 54% “yes” votes.  
• Proposition C’s proposed increased oversight of the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing was also voted into law.  
• Proposition B, which overturns a decision made by voters in 2020 to create a new Department of Sanitation and Streets, received strong support with about 75% “yes” votes, returning street-cleaning duties to the Department of Public Works.  
• Voters seem to have upheld Mayor London Breed’s choice for District Attorney in a closely-watched race after months of debates on the role of the DA in addressing crime. Brooke Jenkins declared victory in the race Nov. 9, though her closest challenger John Hamasaki has yet to concede.  

With the potential failure of both D and E, survey respondents’ concerns regarding the new construction of affordable housing may not see much progress as a result of this election. Many respondents noted the lack of affordable housing as a major concern, oftentimes linking the housing crisis with high costs of living and homelessness. 

In August, the California Department of Housing and Community Development announced an investigation into housing policies and practices in San Francisco to understand why the city’s permitting process is so lengthy. It is the first investigation of its kind in the state.  

Gov. Gavin Newsom also reported on Nov. 3 that he is pausing the distribution of $1 billion in funds meant to address the homelessness crisis. Money from the Homelessness Housing, Assistance and Prevention grant program was meant to go to jurisdictions across the state, but Newsom said he will hold onto funds until local leaders meet up in mid-November to identify more aggressive strategies to reduce homelessness. 

The confusion of having two similarly worded competing measures may have undermined the ability for either to pass.  

Jason McDaniel, associate professor in the department of political science at San Francisco State University, said he believes the dueling measures are a sign of polarization and dysfunction in the relationship between the Board of Supervisors and Breed. 

“There’s not a lot of trust, there’s not a lot of signs of working together,” he said. “And so, when you see these dueling kinds of ballot measures, what you’re seeing is they don’t feel like they can govern and legislate — board and mayor together — on important decisions on housing policy.” 

More broadly, McDaniel said he sees two competing ideologies in the city, noting their presence in mobilizing around the DA’s race as well as various housing measures. 

“We have two kind of highly organized and competitive political factions in the city,” he said. These two factions are often referred to as progressives and moderate-liberals, though McDaniel “doesn’t love these terms.” As he sees it, the progressive faction is further left and usually positions itself in opposition to policies of political leaders such as Breed and state Sen. Scott Wiener. The moderate-liberal faction “mostly descends from the Willie Brown coalition, inherited by Gavin Newsom and Ed Lee.” 

These two groups are also “really good at making connections with voters — they care about, they listen to voters, they want to represent them.” In this way, McDaniel said, voter concerns are an important driving factor in what issues are central to elections.  

For voters, filling out ballots can already be time consuming even without the complexity of competing ballot measures.  

Survey respondent James Aldrich, who listed bike and pedestrian safety as his main concern, said “I think of myself as politically progressive, and yet, it’s pretty confusing when you try to figure out what is the solution” to some of the city’s biggest issues, such as the housing crisis.  

Transportation Priorities

Another hot issue for survey respondents that appeared on the ballot was the question of closed streets and car access. Much like the contentious split on the two affordable housing measures, voters and survey respondents had strong opinions regarding the potential re-opening of streets such as John F. Kennedy Drive and the Great Highway.  

Proposition J, which affirms the Board of Supervisors’ decision to close a portion of JFK Drive permanently to cars, passed. Its counterpart, Proposition I, which would have overturned a previous Board of Supervisors’ decision and reversed the city’s eventual closure of a portion of the Great Highway, was trailing by close to 30%.  

Richard Rothman, a native San Francisco resident who lives in District 1 and has followed local issues for several years sees the outcome of Propositions I, J, and L as reflective of a division between the eastern and western parts of the city. “I’ve never seen the city so divided,” he said. “Nobody wants to sit down and compromise; it’s either my way or no way.”   

Transportation concerns weren’t limited to closed streets. For survey respondents, concerns around transportation revealed a vast array of perspectives regarding whose transit needs should be centered in city policy — pedestrians, bikers, drivers, seniors, people with disabilities and various combinations of those groups. 

Some respondents called for improved Muni service and better traffic control. After a $400 million Muni bond failed in June, elected officials were hoping a different ballot measure could help tackle some of the city’s public transit woes.  

Proposition L, a proposed extension to San Francisco’s existing 0.5% sales tax, is the only measure on the ballot requiring a two-thirds affirmative vote to pass and currently stands at 71% “yes.” If approved, L would fund programs ranging from basic transit maintenance to large-scale transportation projects, as well as increased paratransit services and pedestrian and bike safety measures.  

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Preliminary results for the Feb. 15 special election show that more than 70% of voters cast ballots to oust school board President Gabriela López and members Alison Collins and Faauuga Moliga.

[For race summaries and candidate interviews, visit our February 2022 nonpartisan election guide.]

The heated recall was initiated over accusations of misplaced priorities — that the board had focused on renaming dozens of schools during the COVID-19 pandemic, showed fiscal incompetence leading to a $125 million deficit, and made a controversial decision to drop merit-based enrollment for the elite Lowell High School to better represent the city’s Black and Latino population. 

Less decisive was the special election’s other race. State Assembly District 17 was vacated after a political reshuffling at City Hall that resulted from an alleged bribery scheme that embroiled several city officials. (Harlan Kelley, who faces federal fraud charges to which he has pleaded not guilty, left his post as executive of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. Dennis Herrera stepped down as city attorney to lead the commission. David Chiu then left his Assembly seat to replace Herrera.)

None of the four candidates to replace Chiu secured 50% of the vote. That means a runoff will be held in April between the top two candidates — Supervisor Matt Haney, who received 37.4% of the vote, and former Supervisor David Campos, who secured 35.5%. Entrepreneur and philanthropist Bilal Mahmood was in third place, with 21.2%. 

The reshuffling also led Mayor London Breed to appoint a new assessor-recorder, Joaquín Torres, who ran for the seat on Tuesday. He took 91% of the votes with only write-in candidates in opposition.

The school board seats will be officially vacated 10 days after the election is certified and approved by the Board of Supervisors. That may happen during the March 1 Board of Supervisors meeting. This leaves at least three to four weeks before the seats are vacated, according to the mayor’s office.

Breed, who backed the recall, will appoint replacements for the school board seats. 

“Moving forward, the School Board must focus on the essentials of delivering a well-run school system above all else,” Breed said in a statement. “My focus in the coming weeks is to identify individuals for these seats that can tackle the many immediate decisions the District faces right now, as well as structural issues the District has faced for years.”

The replacements will complete the term, which ends in January 2023. Voters will decide on the next cohort of school board members in the November 2022 election.

For full results, visit the Department of Elections website.

Update 2/17/22: This version of the story clarifies the City Hall corruption scandal by adding details about the leadership changes.

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The White House touted the $1.75 trillion spending package as having the “single largest and most comprehensive investment in affordable housing in history,” with $150 billion in housing assistance for low-income tenants. Sen. Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat, derailed the bill by refusing to provide the key 50th vote, prompting some Democrats in early January to press for breaking up the package into separate bills that could end up leaving out housing assistance altogether. Manchin did not respond to a request for comment.

The programs included in the legislation would have allowed San Francisco to offer more subsidies to low-income tenants, repair poor living conditions in public housing and encourage the construction of more affordable housing.

“It just feels like a tremendous missed opportunity to really address a real human need and make major investments in housing as infrastructure,” Michael Lane, state policy director at SPUR, the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association, said of Build Back Better. “We’ve been left adrift now by our federal government.”

Securing federal funding to address the housing crisis, both historically and in recent months, has proved difficult. Lane wanted to see housing affordability addressed in the bipartisan infrastructure bill that Biden signed into law in November 2021, but when funding for housing was cut from that bill, advocates shifted their focus to Build Back Better.

“It’s been so hard for so long to build affordable housing, to support low-income people that on numerous occasions, people, myself included, thought that Build Back Better is a pipe dream fantasy,” said Sam Moss, executive director at Mission Housing Development Corporation, an affordable housing nonprofit in San Francisco. “But we’ve gotten so close now that we’ve proven that it could be a reality.”

Advocates for low-income residents, nonprofit housing leaders and policy analysts highlighted three main components of the bill that could have increased the availability of affordable housing in San Francisco and significantly improved the lives of low-income tenants, many of whom are people of color: the infusion of funds into direly needed rental assistance programs, tax credits to ramp up construction of affordable housing and funding to address dilapidated conditions in government-subsidized public housing.

Housing as a health strategy

Amie Fishman, executive director of the Non-Profit Housing Association of Northern California, emphasized the need to redress historically unjust housing policies and alleviate suffering from the coronavirus pandemic.

“The housing investments from the Build Back Better package are absolutely critical for our most vulnerable communities,” Fishman wrote in an email before Manchin announced his opposition to the bill. “Especially here, in the most expensive rental market in the nation, we must honor the foundational role of housing not just in COVID prevention, but also for recovery and rebuilding.”

Advocates cited mold and lead paint in living quarters among their top priorities. They also point to unstable access to housing, a burden that falls disproportionately on Black and indigenous people and other people of color, as a health problem.

“There’s a level of stress when housing is insecure, that is its own health risk,” said Melissa Jones, executive director of the Bay Area Regional Health Inequities Initiative, a coalition of Bay Area county public health departments. “We don’t spend enough time thinking about housing as a health strategy, because I think if we did, we would think of housing as a human right.”

In 2019, 43 percent of Black, 40 percent of Hispanic and 32 percent of Asian households spent more than 30 percent of their incomes on housing, according to a report on the state of the nation’s housing in 2020 from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. Just a quarter of white households faced the same cost burden.

The shortage of affordable housing and homeownership leads to a lack of family stability and educational attainment, especially in the midst of the pandemic, said Maureen Sedonaen, chief executive officer at Habitat for Humanity Greater San Francisco.

“It’s such a cascading negative impact if we don’t prioritize this,” said Sedonaen, who previously called the bill “very historic.”

Rental assistance expansion

Key solutions to the housing crisis are federally subsidized rental assistance programs and housing choice vouchers, Moss said. Under these programs, collectively called Section 8, local public housing authorities augment the rent for tenants with very low incomes, those with disabilities and the elderly.

Build Back Better would have invested $26 billion into subsidized rental assistance, and could have assisted as many as 107,200 people in California, estimated the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a policy think tank.

“The subsidy itself is just so valuable,” Moss said. “It’s a direct rent deposit from the federal government every month.” Rent subsidies could be used to pay off the city’s financial stake in new projects much faster, allowing it to reinvest those funds into new construction, Moss said.

Housing assistance today is “vastly underfunded” and three out of four very-low-income households are unable to obtain subsidies, the Harvard report found. Jones noted that waitlists for Section 8 vouchers are years long.

The San Francisco Housing Authority is in charge of managing federal rental assistance locally.

“The Authority continues to closely monitor Build Back Better with excitement and hope that San Francisco will be a recipient of the needed resources,” Zachary Keenan, a legal clerk at the Housing Authority, wrote in a December email. Linda Mason, general counsel for the Housing Authority, did not respond to questions regarding how additional federal funds might be used and equitably distributed.

More tax credits

The Build Back Better legislation would have also expanded the availability of tax-exempt bonds to subsidize the construction of affordable rentals.

Lane of SPUR described the bill as “perfectly aligned” with California’s policies on financing new affordable developments.

 Increasing the amount and value of low-income housing tax credits would allow them to “be leveraged with those billions of dollars at the state and local level to really ramp up production in a tremendous way,” he said.

Without federal aid, California can still try to tackle homelessness and affordable housing on its own, though Lane said these efforts will likely be less effective.

“We need more resources and not to have the federal government as a key partner really undermines our efforts and will increase human suffering as a result,” he said.

Another Build Back Better policy change would have allowed bond funding to extend across more projects, creating or preserving more than 170,000 affordable homes in California over 10 years, according to a letter from Gov. Gavin Newsom to Congressional leaders.

“Provisions in the BBB plan will double the amount of bond authority available to California projects,” Audrey Abadilla, a spokesperson for the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, wrote in an email before the bill stalled.

Pushback regarding public housing

Build Back Better also included $65 billion to repair, renovate and in some cases replace the nation’s existing public housing stock to address the system’s decades-old maintenance backlog. Estimates for the funding shortfall  were as high as $70 billion in 2019, the National Low Income Housing Coalition calculated.

However, not everyone agreed that Build Back Better would bring improvement.

Public housing tenants and anti-displacement activists protested outside House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco office in December against the replacement of some public housing units with affordable units in mixed-income developments — a process that could have been accelerated with increased funding from the federal spending package. They want to see more money funneled into the preservation of public housing.

Though it is not clear if the federal government will allocate any funding for public or affordable housing in the coming months, what is clear is that advocates are not giving up hope.

“We really want to continue to insist that there’s an important role for the federal government to play and whatever that looks like — whether it’s a series of bills or there’s a housing package that we can come together around,” said Lane.

“The need is so urgent right now and many people are in desperate straits,” he added. “We’re not going to give up.”

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A segment from our radio show and podcast, “Civic.” Listen at 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays at 102.5 FM in San Francisco, or online at ksfp.fm, and subscribe on Apple, Google, Spotify or Stitcher. 

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“All of the technical systems that we build are things to support, or I guess — I hate to use this word — to disrupt the ways that people do live their lives,” Alkhatib said. “That’s not to say that technology is a bad thing or anything like that, but that it exists in society, and that it acts on society in these ways.”

The riot at the Capitol made it painfully evident that online discourse can and does have real-life consequences. But that has always been true, Alkhatib said, and pretending otherwise is a luxury only the privileged can afford to indulge in.

“The view that things that happen on the internet are all sandboxed and sort of like games, or sort of playful, inconsequential things, is the sort of thing that one says when they are insulated from the reality of consequences,” he said.

Alkhatib said the technology, rules and algorithms that govern online platforms — including safeguards against abuse or violence — are not neutral. 

“What ends up happening is that the groups of people who already have power end up using those bureaucratic institutions and those structures to perpetuate violence,” he said, likening platform rule enforcement to real-life law enforcement, with the same racial and social biases.

“Unless you are building this specifically with the marginalized and vulnerable groups, it’s hard to build any system like this that does anything but further oppress people who are already under the thumb of various other structures and various other bureaucracies and powers,” he said.

He also said he hopes users of these platforms will get more comfortable demanding the changes that they want to see and advocating for improvements, like residents might petition a city to fix a pothole or other quality of life problem.

“We don’t need computer science degrees or philosophy degrees or any of that stuff to be able to say, you know, ‘Twitter shouldn’t run this way,’” Alkhatib said. “‘This is not working for us and it’s causing harm for us. And the fact that I am a human being is enough to entitle me to have a say in how my life is mediated and run.’”

The post Social Media Content Moderation Is Not Neutral, USF Researcher Says appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Last May, not long after a scandal at the Department of Public Works rocked San Francisco City Hall, Supervisor Gordon Mar revisited an idea first floated here in 2016: Create a local anti-corruption agency modeled on high-profile efforts such as one New York City launched decades ago.

Mar’s proposal would have amended San Francisco’s City Charter to create an independent, elected watchdog. The office of the public advocate could issue subpoenas, conduct investigations and propose legislation.

His plan needed the approval of the Board of Supervisors to be added to the November 2020 ballot. It fell short by one vote, depriving voters of the chance to weigh in.

Over the past decade, city officials have racked up an impressive rap sheet. FBI probes have uncovered activities leading to charges of fraud, money laundering, pay-to-play contracting schemes and campaign finance violations.

In the latest installment of criminal allegations — just weeks after the local election that might have legislated the watchdog into being — Harlan Kelly, the head of the city’s Public Utilities Commission, was arrested. Prosecutors on Nov. 30 charged him with accepting bribes, including paid vacations, in exchange for providing inside information on city contracts to permit expediter Walter Wong. Two days later, Kelly’s wife, City Administrator Naomi Kelly, who has not been charged with wrongdoing, took a six-week leave of absence under suspicion about her part in the scheme. The San Francisco Chronicle reported Tuesday that she planned to resign.

[See previous coverage: “With Corruption on the Ballot, San Francisco Could Learn Oversight From Other Scandal-Plagued Cities”]

Mar’s hope last spring was that a wave of urgency around good-government reforms would lead colleagues to back a public advocate as one way to help restore trust in city government. But it was far from a new idea. It benefitted from precedents set in cities across the country that were similarly wracked by graft and mismanagement, including Detroit, Chicago and New York.

Why did Mar’s proposal fall short in July? Months after the coronavirus pandemic converted in-person meetings of the Board of Supervisors to virtual hearings, it was harder for him to connect with peers. That week he was counting votes, and by the night of the meeting, he knew he’d lose by one supervisor. The mayor also declined to endorse it.

“It was a lost opportunity,” said David Campos, former supervisor and current chief of staff for District Attorney Chesa Boudin. “If San Franciscans had been given the chance to vote on it, I think they would have supported it.” Campos was the author of a similar ballot measure, Measure H, in 2016. Voters rejected it, with 52% voting no.

But a lot can happen in four years, as evidenced by the Department of Public Works scandal, which broke in January 2020. An FBI probe led to charges against Mohammed Nuru, the department’s director, and three city staffers accused of various illegal schemes, including giving associates preferential treatment in contracting in exchange for lavish gifts like expensive Swiss watches and holidays abroad.

Among other charges, Nuru and associates were alleged to have tipped off restaurateur Nick Bovis, owner of Lefty O’Doul’s and the Gold Dust Lounge, with inside information about city contracts.

Nuru and Bovis were charged with wire fraud and bribery for allegedly conspiring to pay off a San Francisco airport commissioner with $5,000 and free travel for help getting Bovis a contract to run a restaurant at San Francisco International Airport. The bribe was never paid, but such an attempt would violate city competitive bidding rules.

Moneyed opposition

Campos said opponents campaigned hard to defeat the public advocate idea in 2016.

“Millions of dollars were spent against it,” he said. “We predicted that unless something was done that there would be more malfeasance that would take place. And I’m sorry to say that in the end, we were proven right.”

Other supporters said having an elected position, one not appointed by either the mayor or the supervisors, would lend credibility to an independent investigator’s office.

“A public advocate position that is similar to New York’s could be very valuable in other cities like San Francisco,” said Dan Schnur, who teaches politics at the University of Southern California and the University of California, Berkeley. “There’s clearly a need for some type of official oversight function in local government and giving that responsibility to an elected official could have significant benefits.”

One reform did make it to the ballot on Election Day 2020: Proposition B. The measure, which was approved with 61% of the vote, will break up the Department of Public Works and create new oversight mechanisms in the wake of the scandal.

Opponents of the failed 2020 public advocate measure said it would have created a redundant agency. The City Controller’s Office, Ethics Commission, District Attorney’s Office and City Attorney’s Office all have a role in investigating corruption. They also said such an office could attract undedicated candidates looking merely to launch political careers, as has happened in other cities.

“If the Ethics Commission is broken, then let’s fix it,” Supervisor Aaron Peskin told the Examiner in July when supervisors voted down the public advocate proposal. “But creating a new department when we have a $1.7 billion deficit and we are trying to take care of people who need to eat just seems nuts to me.”

Other cities have demonstrated the power and the limitations of independent watchdog positions. When those offices have the authority to investigate elected officials, along with subpoena power and a large enough budget to support an independent staff, they have often aggressively pursued corruption allegations. But departments without enforcement authority can become little more than bully pulpits serving as a springboard to higher office for ambitious politicians.

Detroit: Giving watchdogs teeth

In 2011, federal prosecutors indicted Detroit’s two-term mayor Kwame Kilpatrick on charges of setting up a pay-to-play scheme in City Hall. He was the latest in a string of Motor City leaders accused of malfeasance. Kilpatrick was sentenced to 28 years in prison after a federal investigation showed he had taken bribes, rigged bids and awarded $127 million in deals to a construction contractor friend.

Since the 1970s, Detroit has had an ombudsman’s office, whose role was to investigate complaints of inefficiency and charges of incompetence by public officials. But its powers have been limited.

While Kilpatrick was in office, “I don’t know anything that the ombudsman did,” Wayne State University law professor John Mogk told Bloomberg News CityLab in September 2019.

A year after Kilpatrick’s indictment, Detroit voters passed sweeping reforms to the City Charter, including the creation of an office of inspector general to investigate wrongdoing by public officials. The reforms also required contractors to reveal all campaign contributions to any election going back at least four yearsand adopting district elections for City Council.

The inspector general has greater investigatory powers than the ombudsman did. In 2019, the appointedinspector general, Ellen Ha, found that mayor Mike Duggan had given preferential treatment to Make Your Date, a prenatal health organization partnering with the city to fight infant mortality. The probe found that Duggan helped direct more than $350,000 to the group without a competitive selection process, and that he ordered city staffers to raise money for the organization, the leader of which he had romantic ties.

Chicago: more eyes on corrupt contracting

In 1989, Chicago also created an office of inspector general, appointed by the mayor and approved by the City Council. The nonpartisan office has the power to conduct investigations, call hearings and issue subpoenas. All bids and proposals for city contracts are subject to inspector general approval.

The office recently gained more responsibility. Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who came to office in 2019 following a slew of corruption scandals, issued an executive order granting the inspector general the power to audit City Council committees. In Chicago, aldermen (the local word for council members) traditionally had final say over development and zoning decisions in their districts. That created fertile ground for some aldermen to direct contracts to those willing to pay bribes. Lightfoot undid that prerogative soon after taking office.

New York: a launching pad for higher office

New York City offers an example of the limitations that can come with creating an office tasked with investigating wrongdoing.

The City Council there created the office of public advocate in 1993 to serve as a citywide ombudsman. But the office has no enforcement authority.

“A public advocate is a great idea, if they have power,” said Carmen Balber, executive director of Consumer Watchdog, a Los Angeles-based consumer and taxpayer rights organization. “The strength of the public advocate in New York City is the bully pulpit.”

She added: “It’s an excellent way to create someone who is solely answerable to the voters.”

But Balber echoed other critics of New York’s experience, noting that ambitious politicians have treated the public advocate’s perch as a steppingstone in their quests for higher office. Mayor Bill de Blasio and New York State Attorney General Letitia James have both held the office.

“To create a truly effective public advocate, it would need an independent budget, things like subpoena power and a staff that allows it to accomplish the goals it sets for itself,” Balber said.

Mar’s San Francisco 2020 proposal, like Proposition H in 2016, included investigatory and subpoena power. But as in 2016, concerns over the cost of setting up and running such a specialized oversight office worked against the idea last year, especially after the COVID-19 lockdown hit the city’s finances hard. The proposal would have created four new positions, costing the city between $3 million and $4 million.

In 2016 SPUR, a San Francisco planning and urban research think tank, opposed Proposition H, citing cost. “This measure would provide no new services for San Franciscans,” said SPUR’s ballot guide that year. “The $600,000 to $3.5 million in immediate staffing costs to create the office could be much better spent on other activities.”

Importance of independence

San Francisco has several boards and commissions performing oversight work, such as the city services auditor. They are mostly limited to producing reports and performance evaluations. Proponents of a public advocate say that because many of these offices fall under the mayor or city administrator, they lack independence. A degree of autonomy is important to the success of watchdog agencies, Balber said.

It may be impossible to completely root out corruption in big cities, she said, but that is no reason not to try. “There’s no way to get around the fact that Public Works is a large entity in a city the size of San Francisco,” she said. “It’s important to provide a check and balance — someone who is looking over the shoulder of that entity to say, ‘this is kosher, this is not.’”

Good government organizations contend that elected officials have to do a better job representing the interests of the people who elect them. Nuru and other city officials caught up in corruption scandals answer to the city administrator who hires them and to the mayor who appoints the city administrator — as well as to the Board of Supervisors, which controls the agencies’ budgets.

“They don’t operate in a vacuum,” said Eli Zigas of SPUR. “There are higher levels of authority, including some that are responsible to voters.”

“Another way voters could indicate that they don’t like what’s going on is to have that influence in how they vote for mayor,” Zigas added. “Similarly, the supervisors could threaten to withhold funding from the department. They could hold hearings and they could pass legislation setting targets and otherwise.”

Without reform, the type of alleged self-dealing on display in the Department of Public Works’ bribery scandal has become entrenched in San Francisco, said Supervisor Matt Haney, who argued that it will take revisiting proposals, like a public advocate’s office, and measures like 2020’s Proposition B, to undo a corrupt political culture.

“It’s going to keep on coming back, and coming back, and coming back because of how brazen those at the highest levels of San Francisco politics and government have been with this sort of behavior,” he said. “It has been taking place for a long time.”

Haney added: “People look around San Francisco and wonder why, in a city so wealthy, we can’t seem to get some of the basics right. It’s connected to the fact that people who should be doing their jobs are actually more looking out for themselves.”

The post Elected Watchdogs in Scandal-Plagued Cities Show How SF Might Avert Future Corruption appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

“But the key is, it’s not just about having a bunch of voices, it’s about listening to the voices,” said CEO Kyra Kyles. “People don’t need to be empowered, they just need other people to quiet down a little bit, so that they can be heard and not dominate the conversation, whether it’s because you’re an older person, or you know, a person who’s white, or whatever you are that’s allowing you that microphone. Sometimes you just need to pass that to the left or to the right, so that other people can speak.”

Sometimes, as contributor Erianna Jiles found, people are unwilling to listen when the topics at hand are difficult for them. Jiles, a creative writing student at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul, Minn., has written about her experiences as a Black student on a campus where the majority of students are white.

“On one side of things, it’s important that I have a voice and I’m encouraged to have a voice. But then the moment I speak up, it feels like people are so shocked, or they don’t understand where I’m coming from,” Jiles said.

In one of her essays, Jiles wrote that during a time when demonstrators in cities nationwide took to the street to protest the police killing of George Floyd, her four white roommates made signs and posters but never once spoke with her about police brutality or systemic racism.

“We never talked about it. I never got checked up on about it. And it was just, like, a very weird reality to be in,” Jiles said. “How can we say Black lives matter and support all that, but then like, the one Black person that’s closest to you, in your space, you don’t even check up on them or have a conversation about it?”

Many journalistic institutions confronted their own histories of racism and a lack of diversity in media this year. Kyles said that problem is decades old, and discussions about it can feel cyclical as the years go by and little changes. 

“I think what’s important is that as we see an evolution and a change in the newsroom and a change in the media, we’ll see a change in the messages and we’ll get a more nuanced story,” Kyles said. “Until we materially change the way these newsrooms look, we’re just, you know, having a conversation again, and it’s a conversation that was had 20 years ago, 20 years before that, and I think we just need to move beyond it and really get into the action of making change.”

A segment from our radio show and podcast, “Civic.” Listen at 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays at 102.5 FM in San Francisco, or online at ksfp.fm, and subscribe on Apple, Google, Spotify or Stitcher. 

The post In 2020, Youth Media Engaged With Election, Pandemic, Racial Reckoning appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

McDaniel also reflected on the year in local politics, where newly elected supervisors will join the city’s main legislative body and a corruption probe that has already resulted in the exit of three city department heads continues to unfold while a budget crisis looms. He said he sees conflict brewing over homelessness and how the city should provide shelter during the pandemic.

“This issue is going to become really, I think, a major conflict. I do think policy has moved towards the left, so to speak, on this issue, even compared to the Willie Brown and Gavin Newsom days on similar kinds of politics. And so I’m curious where we’ll see this go in the future.”

— Jason McDaniel

A segment from our radio show and podcast, “Civic.” Listen at 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays at 102.5 FM in San Francisco, or online at ksfp.fm, and subscribe on Apple, Google, Spotify or Stitcher. 

The post After a Political Year Defined by a Pandemic and Presidential Appointments, What’s Next? appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.