Proposition G would reduce rents for hundreds of housing units in San Francisco so that extremely low-income seniors, families and people with disabilities could afford them.

Today, even San Francisco’s so-called affordable housing is often out of reach for those tenants. Proposition G would subsidize rents on certain affordable housing units so owners could offer them at a discount to extremely low-income tenants.

Listen to a summary of what this ballot measure would do.

Support

Proposition G aims to help households inadequately served by state and federal government housing assistance programs, according to the measure’s proponents. They call it a key step toward making the city more affordable and keeping its most vulnerable residents off the streets. 

The proposition’s architects are local groups Faith in Action Bay Area, the Community Tenants Association and Senior and Disability Action. Aaron Peskin, president of the Board of Supervisors and a mayoral candidate, sponsored Proposition G’s placement on the ballot, a move that the full board then supported. Incumbent Mayor London Breed, who is running to keep her seat, also supports it, as do groups representing racially diverse communities throughout the city.

Opposition

Proposition G would leave it up to city officials to decide how to pay for the new rent subsidies. The measure’s authors designed it to encourage use of certain tax revenues already earmarked to fund that type of assistance, said “Yes on G” campaign spokesperson Meg Heisler. It’s also possible that officials would draw money from elsewhere in the city’s budget, she said. 

If that were to happen, the measure could end up “draining critical resources from essential services like public safety, infrastructure, and education,” said Larry Marso, who wrote the argument against the measure. Marso, Proposition G’s sole official opponent, also wrote arguments against several other measures on the local ballot. 

The measure’s opponents include GrowSF and TogetherSF Action, groups funded by tech and venture capital. The “right way to fund these programs is through the regular budgeting process,” reads a statement in the GrowSF voter guide. 

But Heisler disagreed, saying that the annual budget process is too unpredictable and outlays can change from year to year. In order for affordable housing landlords to offer units to extremely low-income households on an ongoing basis, they need certainty that the money will keep flowing without interruption. 

What it would do

Market-rate housing in San Francisco is far too expensive for many people, and so demand is high for the city’s meager supply of affordable housing, which receives government subsidies so that rents can remain artificially low. 

Affordable housing owners and landlords must still charge rents high enough to cover expenses for initial construction and, later, their buildings’ operations and maintenance. They typically set rents at levels recommended for households earning up to 60% of the local area median income, which is $71,950 annually for two people. But that might be four times what extremely low-income tenants could pay. 

Proposition G would create an Affordable Housing Opportunity Fund that would pay affordable housing owners the difference between their typical rents and what would be within reach for certain extremely low-income people:

• Seniors or people with disabilities, with household annual incomes less than or equal to 25% of the local area median income, or $30,000 for two people. 
• Families with household annual incomes less than or equal to 35% of the local area median income, or $52,450 for four people. 

The fund would subsidize about 550 to 600 housing units, Heisler said, and at least 80% of the money would go to units in buildings that have yet to be built.

The state has mandated that San Francisco make a plan to build nearly 14,000 housing units for extremely low-income people by 2031. The Affordable Housing Opportunity Fund would not be big enough to achieve that goal, Heisler said, but officials could expand it in the future. 

Cost

San Francisco would begin paying into the fund in 2026. That year, it would dedicate at least $4 million to the fund, and after that it would inject at least $8.25 million annually through 2046. Each year, the mayor and Board of Supervisors would decide whether to allocate the minimum amount or a figure that was, at most, 3% higher than the preceding year’s contribution, depending on the financial health of the city. Over 20 years, the fund would receive between $161 million and $222 million, City Controller Greg Wagner wrote in an analysis of Proposition G’s estimated financial impact.

For some local taxes, City Hall requires that the revenue be spent on certain purposes. Tax revenues earmarked for rent subsidies, a common form of government assistance, could power the Affordable Housing Opportunity Fund, Heisler said. That includes the Homelessness Gross Receipts Tax, which voters approved in 2018; a tax on homes held vacant for at least half the year, passed by voters in 2022; and Proposition M, a new tax on the ballot for this election.

Campaign finance

As of Oct. 7, the campaign committee backing the measure had received $94,777 in donations, according to data from the San Francisco Ethics Commission, with over $50,000 from San Francisco Communities Against Displacement and $25,000 from the Housing Accelerator Fund.

No group opposing Proposition G had reported fundraising activity to the city.

History and context

The city has roughly 66,000 extremely low-income households, more than 75% of which include people of color, according to a Planning Department report. Adults 60 and older, often with fixed incomes, also live in many of those households, and their numbers are growing. Over 30% of San Franciscans will be in that age group by 2030. 

San Francisco has not built enough housing for people with lower incomes. From 2015 to 2023, the city failed to hit state targets for affordable housing construction permits while it exceeded goals for housing priced at the market rate.

Without adequate housing options, many of San Francisco’s poorer residents have found themselves in homeless shelters or single-room-occupancy buildings, which are often run down, with cramped quarters. Hai Ling Li, a member of the SRO Families United Collaborative, a group of nonprofits that fights for tenants’ rights and access to safe affordable housing, lives in such a building with her husband and their two young daughters. 

Their unit, a single room smaller than 100 square feet, is “not a good environment for children to grow up in,” Li said.

The family has tried to move, but their income is too low to afford other rents. Li’s husband earns less than $1,000 a month working “a tiring and low-paying, part-time job.” Li, who has struggled to find suitable work, stays home and takes care of their kids. 

“The Housing Opportunity Fund will finally give families like mine the chance to move out of an SRO and into truly affordable housing,” Li said at a July 8 committee meeting of the Board of Supervisors. She spoke in Mandarin, with the help of an English interpreter. 

Votes needed to pass

Proposition G requires a simple majority of “yes” votes to pass.

Click here to return to our full voter guide.

The post Proposition G — Fund Housing for Extremely Low-Income Tenants appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

The constant dust upset him. It also triggered his asthma, which he has had since he was a kid. 

“It’s hard to breathe,” he said. “But I haven’t really been feeling like that for the last month, basically since I got the air purifier.”

Britt was one of 50 low-income tenants to receive free air purifiers through a government-funded pilot program in July and August, the result of efforts by local organizations to cut red tape and make it easier to distribute the devices. Most recipients have respiratory conditions and live in single-room occupancy hotels, commonly called SROs. The initiative aims to ameliorate and help prevent health problems — early results are promising — and if enough people benefit then the government could keep funding the work, putting more devices in the hands of tenants who need them.

For Britt, the purifier is welcome relief in his home at the Clementina Towers, a building run by the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation for low-income and disabled seniors. 

“TNDC is pleased that Mr. Britt has been able to take advantage of the air purifier distribution program and that its use has helped ease his asthma,” said Edmund Campos, senior communications manager for the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation, in an emailed statement. He added that Britt had never reported excessive dust to the property manager, which Britt confirmed.

Structural causes of bad air

Britt’s portable air purifier cost about $100, which is out of reach for many SRO tenants. A 2021 Brightline Defense survey found that only about 18% of SRO residents could afford one. 

But they might be the San Franciscans who most need the devices. Adults living in SROs face asthma hospitalization rates that are twice the citywide average, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease rates that are three times higher, according to a 2017 Department of Public Health report. 

That’s due in large part to the aging structures they live in. SRO buildings tend to be old, poorly maintained and lack modern heating and air conditioning systems, as well as effective ventilation. When tenants shower, humidity can build up and cause toxic black mold to grow. If unaddressed, the mold penetrates the surrounding wood and becomes a long-term problem.

Airborne pollutants from cat litter, candles and gas stoves can all accumulate indoors. Some tenants smoke methamphetamine and fentanyl in their rooms, and the exhaled, harmful chemicals linger in the air, said Sheyenne White, a community organizer with the Central City SRO Collaborative. 

SRO buildings are concentrated in the Tenderloin and other downtown areas that are dense with vehicles, which give off exhaust. Often, an SRO unit has a single window that opens to the street or is right above a ground-floor restaurant’s kitchen, which can produce smoke from cooking. Tenants face a difficult choice: Keep the window closed and let the indoor air fester, or open it and let other pollutants in. 

In a way, the choice is easier during hotter seasons — though the health consequences remain. SRO tenants throughout the Tenderloin have to open their windows to find relief, and their sills gradually blacken with soot, said Stephen Tennis, another organizer with the collaborative.

“Otherwise they would roast,” Tennis said.

Red tape hampered aid

Tennis and other members of the collaborative, as well as staff at local nonprofit La Voz Latina, are working with environmental justice organization Brightline Defense to carry out the pilot program.

The groups have spent years trying to put air filtration devices in tenants’ hands. At first, the work suffered from bureaucratic hurdles, said Carolina Correa, air quality program manager at Brightline Defense. 

Government funding paid for the purifiers but, to be eligible, recipients needed to attend two video interviews and obtain notes from doctors attesting to their respiratory conditions. Many people were too poor to seek regular medical care, so they didn’t have diagnoses. Others had limited physical mobility or no access to a car, so they couldn’t easily visit their doctors in person.

“It was a major barrier to get the paperwork in order,” said Peter Rauch, a tenant organizer at the collaborative. “It discouraged a lot of people and they didn’t follow through.” 

In 2021, roughly half the residents Brightline Defense helped apply for air purifiers ultimately did not receive one because they couldn’t meet the requirements, Correa said.

Members of the collaborative pushed to cut the red tape. In July 2023, a half-dozen tenant organizers made their case at the headquarters of the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, the regional government agency responsible for regulating air pollution and the funder of the air purifiers. The organizers persuaded the agency to test what would happen if it loosened requirements. 

For that pilot project, which began in October 2023, the organizers personally scoured the government-subsidized housing community to identify the best potential recipients. In their outreach, they prioritized people who said they had respiratory conditions, even if they lacked documentation. And to make things even easier, organizers had participants fill out just one survey about the purifiers’ impacts on air quality, rather than the two previously required. 

“It just made it much easier to get purifiers to people who need it, and that to me is the most important thing,” Tennis said.

Finding relief

Early surveys show that the purifiers are working. When asked to rate their homes’ air quality on a scale of one to 10, people who rated it “3-4” before receiving the devices are now rating it “8-10,” Rauch said. Residents report that they are coughing less, sleeping better and are less winded when walking up and down stairs, White said. People have noticed less soot in their rooms and that their allergies have subsided, added Correa of Brightline Defense. 

Once all surveys are completed, the results will inform the Bay Area Air Quality Management District’s decision on whether to continue funding the pilot program next year. 

The air purifiers are a crucial mitigation tool, but they don’t address the underlying causes of air pollution. To do that, big policy changes are needed, including widespread retrofits of San Francisco buildings, said Jacob Linde, Brightline Defense’s air quality organizer. The renovations, which local groups are trying in multi-unit apartment buildings, would help ventilate SRO buildings while reducing their carbon footprints, he said. 

Back in his SoMa studio, Britt no longer has to wage war against the dust in his apartment. He runs his air purifier 24 hours a day. His asthma symptoms feel milder. He only has to dust once a week now. 

Those small wins are deeply gratifying to Rauch, who wants his neighbors to be able to breathe safely in their homes. 

“Air is as precious as water. It’s what we humans rely on,” Rauch said.

The post Local Groups Cut Red Tape to Give Low-Income Tenants Clean Air appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

“They used to be tolerable, but now it’s unbearable,” said Vigil, who lives in the four-unit building with her family and is the landlord, renting two units to tenants. 

Her father bought the Bryant Street house decades ago, and it has no cooling system and little insulation. When a heat wave hits, she and her tenants fight it together. They share ice, folding the cubes into bandanas to make cold compresses, and she makes big batches of iced jamaica to share. When it gets too hot to be inside, they sit in the yard, take a walk or go for a drive because the car has air conditioning. Two years ago, she bought fans for the bedrooms, but they just blew the hot air around.

Soon they may all get relief. Vigil is participating in a pilot project run by environmental justice organization PODER to decarbonize her home, a process that will add a new heating and cooling system and insulation, among other retrofits. The setup should allow Vigil and her tenants to stay inside comfortably.

The renovation, finally underway after years of planning, will test what it takes to make San Francisco’s multi-unit apartment buildings more eco-friendly. Scaled up, the retrofits would shrink the city’s carbon footprint and reduce indoor pollutants, improving the health of residents. But many tenants and their advocates fear that the work could end up displacing renters if landlords hiked rents to recoup retrofit costs and evicted people who couldn’t pay.

“Low-income tenants are in a precarious position, and we don’t want upgrades to lead to ‘reno-victions,’” said Antonio Díaz, PODER’s organizational director. 

PODER is leading the initiative with funding from the San Francisco Department of the Environment. In this early stage of construction, the organization is soliciting contracting bids from local companies owned by women of color. Decarbonizing Vigil’s building will entail installing solar panels, new electric stoves and windows to rein in energy consumption. 

Díaz estimated that construction would begin in a month and a half and last up to six months. A similar pilot project is in motion on Sycamore Street, managed by Emerald Cities Collaborative, a nonprofit that creates green jobs for women and people of color. Each organization received $100,000 from the city, with $50,000 earmarked for the retrofits. 

Fear of ‘reno-victions’

San Francisco has pledged to reach net-zero emissions by 2040, and decarbonizing its buildings will be a key step. In 2022, 44% of the city’s emissions came from buildings, according to the Department of the Environment. 

Low-income renters and people of color disproportionately suffer from indoor air pollution from gas stoves, and stand to benefit from electrification. 

But the retrofit work will also put them at risk, tenant advocates warn, because landlords have a financial incentive to use renovations to push out longtime residents. 

City Hall allows only meager annual rent increases for pre-existing tenants of rent-controlled buildings — in the most recent year, landlords could raise rents up to 3.6% — enabling people with modest incomes to afford living in San Francisco by staying in the same apartments for many years. But landlords can reset apartment rents to the market rate for new tenants, potentially making much more money. 

Advocates point to a recent mass reno-viction — a retrofit that would also evict tenants — in West Los Angeles as an example of how bad things could get in San Francisco. Following a fire that killed one person in their massive apartment building, corporate landlord Douglas Emmett Inc. issued eviction notices in May 2023 to their property’s 577 occupied rent-controlled units, arguing that it would be easier to comply with the city’s mandate to upgrade the sprinkler system if the building were vacant — the Los Angeles government denied the sprinklers were mandated. Renters organized to file wrongful eviction cases, and this June a judge ruled that the nearly 100 tenants still living in the complex could stay. An estimated 480 people had already accepted relocation fees and left. 

Risk of pricing out tenants 

But there are other, subtler ways that retrofits could hurt and possibly displace tenants.

In San Francisco, rent-control landlords can legally hike rents to help them cover the costs of renovations that benefit their tenants and raise the property value — including decarbonization upgrades like replacing windows or improving insulation. 

Landlords regularly bump up rents through these so-called capital improvement pass-throughs, said Lupe Arreola, executive director of Tenants Together, a statewide coalition of tenant-rights groups. 

The risk of retrofit-driven rent increases “is real, because it’s already happening for basic repairs,” she said, even those that should not qualify for pass-throughs. Arreola added that she has also seen landlords illegally use tenants’ safety deposits to pay for such repairs. 

Tenants might move out if the renovations increased their rents beyond what they could afford. 

They might also move out to avoid the commotion of the retrofits, or their landlords could ask them to leave temporarily in exchange for stipends to cover moving and living expenses while away. But stipends seldom make up the difference between rent-control tenants’ low housing costs and those of nearby market-rate units, Arreola said, so those people often leave the neighborhood or the city. 

Renters displaced by renovations have a legal right to return when the work is done. But retrofits can drag on; Arreola said she had seen one project take 10 years. The more time that passes, the less likely tenants will come back, she said. 

Extensive, potentially invasive repairs may be necessary in many of the city’s older buildings, where lower-income residents tend to live, before decarbonization upgrades could begin, Arreola said. A whopping 70% of multi-unit housing was built before 1950, and all rent-controlled housing was built before 1979. 

That’s why “we need to put in safeguards. It’s going to require legislators doubling down,” Arreola said. She would like to see evictions outlawed in buildings during decarbonization upgrades, and for a limited time after the work finished. 

Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, a Los Angeles-based tenant advocacy nonprofit, made policy recommendations in its 2023 report, Decarbonizing California Equitably: Pass-throughs should be banned for retrofits, with minimal annual rent increases regulated by the government for between five and 15 years after construction wraps up. 

San Francisco’s Department of the Environment is aware of the risks that low-income renters face. It is in ongoing conversations with the Rent Board, which enforces the city’s rent-control laws, and community-based organizations in an effort to make sure decarbonization does not drive displacement. 

“We need more education about rental protections,” said Cyndy Comerford, planning director of the Department of the Environment’s Climate and Health Program. She said she does not believe rental protections need to change to mitigate risks to tenants. 

State pares back retrofit funding

Decarbonization is expensive, and for many building owners it’s only doable with government subsidies. 

But in May, Gov. Gavin Newsom slashed funding for the Equitable Building Decarbonization Program, from $922 million to $525 million. The cuts dismayed policy advocates and local officials. 

“It’s going to mean less money going to low-income San Franciscans,” Comerford said. 

State funds can come with strings attached for recipient building owners and protect against renter displacement. California’s Low Income Weatherization Program, which funds energy-efficiency measures and solar installation, mandates that property owners sign contracts promising to keep rents affordable for low-income tenants for at least 10 years following retrofits. The state also provides the subsidies up front — that better encourages retrofits than federal funds, which are often paid as rebates following the work and best serve building owners who already have the money for a retrofit in hand. 

Back on Bryant Street, Vigil said she looks forward to improving the comfort and health of her family and tenants with the coming retrofits. Just as much, she wants the pilot to be useful to the Mission District, providing a template that others can follow to decarbonize. 

“I see this as a small project starting here with me, but then growing out into the community,” Vigil said. “I want to use the resources I have, and this building is one of them.”

The post Green Retrofits Might Displace Tenants — One Landlord’s Pilot Project Aims to Protect Them appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

From a single blade of eelgrass, life overflows. Amphipods build tiny hollow tube-homes on it, while marine snails eat it, and nudibranchs travel its length in search of prey. Small eelgrass sea hares graze epiphytes attached to the blades and lay their yellow eggs inside transparent jelly-like blobs on the thick green of the grass. Amid the meadows, pipefish hide and graceful rock crabs scavenge, and in the fall and spring, giant schools of silvery Pacific herring enter the San Francisco Bay, the end point of their weeks-long annual migration. On the eelgrass, they deposit clumpy beads of yellow roe on the order of hundreds of millions, like underwater honey drops. Or the eggs must taste that way to the thousands of birds that join the melee of feasting. Cormorants and loons dive after flashes of fish. Gulls circle above. Rafts of scaups, buffleheads, and more stretch across the water feeding on roe. During a spawn event, which can last for a few hours or several days, herring milt turns Bay waters a lighter hue.

Even when the herring aren’t running, the eelgrass beds teem with food. Paige Fernandez remembers kayaking just off the shore of Sausalito. She was paddling over an eelgrass bed, likely brimming with slugs and tiny crustaceans—which were, from the surface, invisible to her. But she could see the harbor seals. And one in particular kept bobbing its head up over the waves, closer and closer. Now a program manager at Richardson Bay Audubon Center, Fernandez says it was “definitely one of the coolest encounters I’ve had in the Bay.” The surfacing seal’s forwardness surprised her, but in retrospect it made sense: she was above a bed of eelgrass. “That’s where they can find little snacks to munch on.” They go where the eelgrass goes—and so does a host of other marine life. 

To give shelter and food to the species that rely on it, eelgrass needs to thrive. And in Richardson Bay, which lies between Sausalito and Tiburon in Marin County, dozens of acres of eelgrass are tangled in with the anchor chains of dozens of boats that often float just five feet above the meadows. When tides shift, the ground tackle—that is, any equipment used to anchor the boat, usually a long and heavy chain—is yanked by the pull of the vessel. In circular, sweeping motions, the chain slices the eelgrass rhizomes, the lateral tubes from which the shoots and roots grow. The chains and ground tackle erode the sediment, creating a depression in the substrate. After years of scraping, a dead zone forms, cleared of eelgrass, where shoots don’t take root. From above, boats hover over what look like ghostly crop circles, some half an acre in size, called mooring scars. There are almost 80 acres of scarring in Richardson Bay.

In the spring and early summer of 2024, researchers from San Francisco State University’s Estuary and Ocean Science Center, restoration workers with environmental consulting firm Merkel & Associates, and Audubon volunteers and staff—including Fernandez—began replanting eelgrass in the Richardson Bay mooring scars thanks to a $2.8 million grant from the Environmental Protection Agency’s San Francisco Bay Water Quality Improvement Fund; the grant is part of an EPA program funded by the federal Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Over the course of four years, the project aims to restore 15 acres of eelgrass, each acre allowing more life to bloom. But for workers to restore eelgrass in these scars, the anchors causing them must also be removed. “It is well demonstrated that eelgrass and anchoring are incompatible throughout the world,” says Rebecca Schwartz Lesberg, president of Coastal Policy Solutions and a contract project manager for the agency awarded the EPA grant. “Richardson Bay was really behind the times in terms of how to manage this natural resource conflict.”

In Richardson Bay, these long, heavy anchor chains are often attached to boats with people living on them—the so-called “anchor-outs,” people who have spent decades building their lives on the water, on their boats, and on the premise of free anchorage. Born of the ’60s counterculture, the community began with artists and young people who were drawn to the scrap left by World War II’s Marinship shipyard, material they salvaged for boats and homes. It quickly grew into an on-the-shoreline, and on the margins, way of life that has included famous artists, like Shel Silverstein and Allen Ginsberg, but mostly those who are unknown, like Lisa McCracken, once a silk-mache artist, and her friend Peter, who she says snaps daily portraits of the Bay fog and cloudscape. 

The lifestyle has been called many names: anchoring out, being a live-aboard, or, in  McCracken’s younger days, living “on hook.” It comes with a degree of precarity, where a single storm or a faulty anchor might sink a vessel. Many anchor-outs drown, or their boats come loose and crash into shore or other boats. McCracken says about her life on the Bay for 30-plus years, surrounded by water, marine creatures, and in community with artists, “It’s a privilege and a blessing.” And for many who took to the Bay’s waters, then and now, the alternative to life on their boats is homelessness. 

But after six decades, the anchor-out era is coming to an end, in part to protect eelgrass habitat from mooring scars. The number of anchor-out vessels in Richardson Bay has dropped from over 200 in 2018 to about 32 today. The authorities that regulate Richardson Bay and the entirety of the San Francisco Bay began in 2019 to focus on upholding ordinances that have long been on the books but were rarely enforced. As a result, anchor-outs have been evicted and left homeless and unoccupied boats crushed. The last of them have been ordered to leave the zone where eelgrass grows by this October and the water entirely by 2026. Authorities are offering housing to some as an incentive to meet the deadline.  

To McCracken, and other anchor-outs, eelgrass restoration is the latest excuse employed by authorities in their long-standing campaign to rid the water of her community. And her opinion is partly well-founded. There are examples and studies of eelgrass thriving when the mooring scar-causing chains are replaced with “conservation moorings.” These moorings, used around the world, are affixed to the seafloor, eliminating the dragging chain that creates mooring scars. Despite a 2019 feasibility study recommending eelgrass-friendly moorings in Richardson Bay, environmental groups, regulatory agencies, and cities pursued a more stringent option: remove all anchored-out vessels from Richardson Bay eelgrass beds, in perpetuity.

But during public meetings in the years following the feasibility study, local residents voiced concerns—they felt environmental restoration was clashing with the needs of the region’s most vulnerable. “This will have huge effects,” reads a public comment by “Elias” in 2020. “What about the young children who will learn of this and not feel comfortable working with nature organizations because of their relationship with poor people?” He equated it with “forced migration perpetuated by environmentalism.” David Schonbrunn, a Sausalito resident, commented in a 2021 meeting that opting to remove anchoring instead of choosing mooring systems that would let the anchor-out community and eelgrass coexist was “a question of policy, not science.” 

Restoring eelgrass

It’s a bright windy day in March, and Jordan Volker is steering a motorboat into Richardson Bay. He’s a field operations manager for Merkel & Associates, which has published articles and field reports on eelgrass for 30 years and run eelgrass surveys in the area for decades.

The company’s 2014 survey found a massive die-off in Bay eelgrass caused by a marine heat wave. To repair the loss, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) funded a 75-acre eelgrass restoration project that’s ongoing and aligns with the Bay Area’s Subtidal Habitat Goals. The 2010 goals, in an ambitious 208-page document, lay out a vision to study, protect, and restore an array of subtidal habitats, including eelgrass and oyster reefs. The regional effort brought together the California State Coastal Conservancy, the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC), San Francisco Estuary Partnership, the California Ocean Protection Council, and NOAA, giving them a common framework to achieve a healthier Bay. 

Collectively, the agencies set a goal of restoring up to 8,000 acres of eelgrass by 2060—latest counts say there’s a maximum of 5,000 acres in the Bay. Any added acres would mean more habitat for herring and birds, at a time when waterbird data has grown grim. Scoters, for one, saw a 50 percent decline around the second half of the 20th century, according to a Sea Duck Joint Venture report. And that’s for their populations across the whole Pacific Flyway—local numbers are worse. Both greater and lesser scaup have declined by a similar amount, and horned grebes and buffleheads, two beloved Bay Area visitors, have also suffered. “It’s all part of one big food web,” says Casey Skinner, program director at Richardson Bay Audubon. “And if we lose eelgrass, we lose everything.” 

Eelgrass’s benefits go beyond ecology. The beds act as sentinels of the Bay, trapping sediment, storing greenhouse gases, and protecting against wave action. Threats to eelgrass, too, are multifold. In 2005, for example, sediment that broke loose smothered nearby eelgrass beds, causing a die-off in subsequent years. Built-out marinas, ports, and wharves are potential stressors, too. They can shade out the eelgrass underneath, preventing meadows from growing. And, in addition to mooring scars, anchor-out vessels can damage the water quality if occupants mismanage waste—although 2018 reports show water quality has been improving overall in Richardson Bay. “Submerged habitats truly need ongoing championing because it is so easy to ignore. They’re out of sight out of mind,” says Marilyn Latta, a project manager at the California State Coastal Conservancy, who helped develop the goals for eelgrass restoration.

Keith Merkel, the principal consultant of Merkel & Associates, has been (often literally) knee-deep in eelgrass since restoration efforts began in the Bay Area, conducting Bay-wide surveys of eelgrass on three separate occasions. And the one thing he’s learned? Richardson Bay is vital for eelgrass. It contains the second-largest eelgrass bed in San Francisco Bay and is the single most important spawning area for Pacific herring in the estuary. “Richardson Bay is protected against many of the things that fluctuate quite a bit,” Merkel says. 

In the South Bay and Oakland, that factor is turbidity—too-dark waters, without enough sunlight. In the North Bay, too much fresh water discharges from the Delta. And around the Pacific Coast, the wind blows east, so eelgrass seeds fail to disperse. Yet Richardson Bay has “so much eelgrass that we never lose 100 percent of the eelgrass in [it],” he adds. The “core eelgrass bed”—areas that lie at the ideal depths for the plant to thrive and should support close to 100 percent eelgrass cover—include the mooring scars. If restored, Merkel says, this area will consistently flourish. It’s the kind of priority restoration area that the Subtidal Habitat Goals have highlighted.

It took research to prove restoration in the anchor scars was even possible. NOAA funded the first small-scale project to test the potential in 2021. Even this 2.5-acre effort, Merkel says, got off the ground only after many anchored-out vessels had been removed. NOAA won’t fund more restoration, he says, unless authorities can demonstrate there’s little risk of anchors being dropped again. 

Back inside the motorboat’s cabin, where Jordan Volker works, things are dark, and he has both hands on the wheel to navigate the churning, unruly water. On the monitors above, he shoots glances at two screens that give readings from the Bay underneath. The boat pumps a sonic signal into the waves below—and returns a spiky, pulsing graph. Because eelgrass blades store oxygen in their cells, they are less dense than the surrounding water, so they return a telltale “bump” to Volker’s machine, locating the meadows. 

Volker has been restoring eelgrass in Richardson Bay for Merkel for so long that he can recognize some of the beds he’s planted just from the dots on the graph. “It always brings a big smile on my face when I drive over and go, ‘Ho! Look at all that grass.’” Now he is dropping markers on a digital map, locating anchored-out boats and mooring scars, data that will inform where to plant next. 

Once they choose a spot, Volker and others plant during low tides—restoration crews up to their hips in Bay water, the boats of the anchor-outs looming behind. Volker says folks on the water and those from the land used to meet at some kind of a shore-y middle ground. An anchor-out near a cluster of volunteers might say hello from their deck and play music. “While we’re planting a mooring scar, people that are nearby say, ‘What radio station do you want to listen to?’ and [start] cranking their radio up,” he says. Often, they’d be smiling, waving, and curious about the restoration effort going on in their backyard waters. “Some of the anchor-outs understand, ‘oh yeah, eelgrass is an important thing. I don’t want to harm eelgrass. I just want to live,’” Volker says. 

But things are different now that people know their lifestyle is under threat. There are fewer friendly faces when he cruises the water. “Some of the anchor-outs, I think, see a survey vessel, or see a bunch of college kids coming in with grass in their hands, as a threat.” As if on cue, our tiny survey vehicle weaves in close to an anchored-out boat, with a gray-haired man on his deck. Outside, Scott Borsum, Volker’s assistant for the day, greets the stranger. He returns our “hi” with a “hello,” but, when asked for a picture, tosses his hands to the air, turns away, and shakes his head no.

Borsum’s new to restoration work—this project is his first field job since getting his PhD. Already, though, he feels like he’s watching a “microcosm” of the housing crisis in the San Francisco Bay Area unfold, wherein people are pushed out into alternate lifestyles by the cost of living or decades’ worth of other factors, then become the object of long and drawn-out political debate over who can use public spaces and for what. “It becomes a user-rights issue,” he says. “Who gets the right to the Bay?” 

Volker says he’s glad he’s not the one deciding. Unlike the “policy side of things,” he says, the eelgrass restoration is a peaceful, straightforward task. And the housing and what comes after is for other, more policy-savvy folks to decide. “It’s the side of the issue that I would not want to deal with,” Volker says. Borsum agrees: “Our job doesn’t constitute us solving that problem. It just constitutes us understanding the grass.”

Similar sentiments are echoed by project managers at Audubon, another of the EPA grant beneficiaries, who say their “area of expertise” is the eelgrass, though noting that they favor fair housing. The researchers at SFSU involved in the long-term monitoring of the grass also declined to comment on the anchor-outs. On the water, the restoration crew’s survey boat and the anchor-outs are two ships that, both metaphorically and practically, pass each other by—leaving an uneasy silence rippling in their wake. 

Living on the water

It’s an unusually calm day—no wind, great sun—when we set out in a kayak. We paddle across a boating channel, the thick on-the-water “highway” used by cargo vessels and traveling houseboats alike, to the waters where the last anchor-outs hold on.

We weave in between vessels, passing signs of life everywhere: on one boat, scuba gear hangs out to dry on a clothesline on deck; on another, smoke escapes a moka pot visible through a cabin window. Names like Irish Misty and Levity are hand-painted on the sides of boats big and small. Some are 15-foot sailboats with little to nothing in the way of rain shelter for their occupants. Others, like the mighty Evolution, a 50-foot powerboat, tower above our kayak.

But the captain on its deck is Lisa McCracken, who is anything but forbidding. Her sand-brown hair is turning white against the sun, and she wears mismatched work gloves and a friendly, if squinting, smile. She greets us, but is too busy to chat long—there are always chores to be done on the anchorage, whether it’s changing oil in a generator or fixing a solar panel. When we come back another day, it’s 4 p.m. and McCracken’s still working—her friends are visiting, their presence evident by the skiffs tied to the back of her own. They’re trying to get a motor up and running, when she welcomes us aboard.

A flimsy white ladder is the only way up. And landing zones are scarce in between the piles of decommissioned engines, old anchors, empty diesel cans, dusty life vests, tubes and piping, et  cetera. McCracken, though, steps on and over them with ease—at times nimbly jumping up and sitting on railings to let us pass. “I tend to this place,” she says. Many of the objects aren’t hers—they’re things she’s rescued from the Bay. She points to an anchor, coiled up in its own chain, that sits in a corner. “That tends to disturb the bottom—these are anchors. These we have pulled up.”

McCracken, now 61, says she’d want to learn more about the eelgrass, if she could, and had a mind to send in samples to someone. “If you notice it, it’s getting gray,” she explains. “I want to understand the characteristics of it, the features.” She says she sees, studies, and notices things—like the pigeons and gulls that have made a nest on the boat’s roof. Or, occasionally, a dying bird adrift, which she’ll try to call in to local authorities. She doesn’t believe her boat does harm to eelgrass (and, given that it’s on a six-point mooring and not a block-and-chain anchor, it likely does less damage than others), or that the harm she does is greater than the waste generated by the city or the propellants of high-speed yachts and other boats that dock in Sausalito Yacht Harbor or any of the dozens of other harbors nearby. “To say that we are a problem, then every boat here is a problem.”

As we talk, the boat turns gently with the wind, a planet spinning, the sun hitting the inside from each angle in turn. Maybe, McCracken admits, she’s selfish for not wanting to give it up—a panoramic view of the Bay, who would? But more than the view, it’s the community she can’t bear to part with. It was fellow anchor-outs who taught her how to live on the water. She recalls, laughing, when her first boat lost footing and slammed into a barge, and how the owner taught her the ropes of being a mariner. By now, she’s more than returned the favor: jumping in to help friends pull someone who was having health problems out of a boat. Or standing by the hospital bed of Craig, a longtime friend who, in gratitude and in passing, gifted her and her friend Steve Evolution.

These days, she wakes up and takes off in her skiff—looking for others on the anchorage who might need a hand, or a battery, or something she can offer. “I’ve held fast to anchor. I can’t even imagine being condemned to a room,” she says. “I don’t know what I would make of my day.” Besides, she doesn’t qualify for the housing and cash deal offered by local authorities, since she doesn’t own Evolution. Steve owns it, and according to reporting by the Pacific Sun, the program provides one housing voucher per boat.

“I don’t want the money,” she says, of the cash offer: $150 per foot of the boat. “I want to be left alone—you can build your paradise around me, okay?” Her voice rises as she speaks. “I’ll figure out some way to put a mirror up, so you don’t have to look at me if you don’t want to.”

In five months, however, she’ll have to leave the anchorage. Evolution doesn’t qualify for the Safe and Seaworthy program that would have allowed the boat to stay two years longer. McCracken says a caseworker is advocating for both her and Steve to be housed, but she isn’t sure where she’ll be five months from now, or if she’ll even want to go.

The policy fight

Before 1985, no single agency existed to guide the use and conservation of Richardson Bay’s waters, so cities on its shores created and adopted a “special area plan” that stated, among many things, that “all anchor-outs should be removed from Richardson Bay.” Even then, nearby authorities felt the number of boats anchored offshore was growing.

To execute the plan, the Richardson Bay Regional Agency (RBRA) was formed, via a Joint Powers Agreement among Marin County and the cities of Mill Valley, Tiburon, Belvedere—and, formerly, Sausalito. The agency quickly passed an ordinance allowing transient vessels, such as cruisers from outside the Bay, to drop their anchors in designated areas for less than 72 hours. One section hugged the Sausalito shoreline; the other spanned the anchor-out area. It also states that permanently “living aboard” any vessel in the water is illegal—permits could be granted for 30 days, and potentially longer, if the harbormaster “determined that no permanent residential use is intended.” 

But enforcement proved difficult. The harbormaster at the time, Bill Price, spent 24 years trying to manage the growing number of anchor-out boats, says Tim Henry, a longtime sailor and Sausalito local. “He had no budget. He had to use volunteers. He had to fill out all the grants. They just never wanted to spend the money to deal with it.” 

And then, in the wake of 2008’s Great Recession, things changed. The number of transient boats dropping anchor and largely staying put swelled to about 230 boats by 2015. In an interview with the Sausalito Historical Society, Price said he wondered if Richardson Bay’s free anchorage, which he loved, would have to shut down due to the sheer density of boats. Soon after, the City of Sausalito, fed up with the lack of enforcement, left the RBRA. 

Finally, in 2019, the State of California audited the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC), and its  “failure to perform key responsibilities” was laid bare. Mooring scars in Richardson Bay were a central issue, according to the audit, which referenced details from an Audubon report. The state, concerned with how “violators,” like anchor-outs, were damaging the Bay, ordered BCDC to fix the problem. The audit discussed possible amnesty for those violators and ways to better enforce the law to prevent new damages.

BCDC, in turn, put pressure on RBRA, triggering a flurry of actions: the agency commissioned Merkel & Associates to conduct the mooring feasibility study; commissioned Coastal Policy Solutions, Rebecca Schwartz Lesberg’s restoration company, to draft an eelgrass protection plan; and started negotiating an agreement to satisfy the enforcement needs of the BCDC.

But the RBRA had already been pursuing stricter enforcement. Before the audit, it had hired a new harbormaster, Curtis Havel. He reduced the total number of boats to about 71 in just two months. “It was terrorist tactics to start with,” says Drew Warner, an ex-anchor-out of 23 years, about Havel. Authorities would find an unoccupied boat, board it, tug it, and deliver it to the shipyard to be crushed. The harbormaster or the sheriff’s department would wait patiently for anchor-outs to leave their homes, Warner says, so that going ashore on grocery runs or for medicine might mean the destruction of an anchor-out’s property. The anchor-outs fought back, sometimes by filing restraining orders, sometimes throwing eggs at officers who got too close. “I was notorious for doing that,” Warner says.

At the same time, a homeless encampment formed on the waterfront in Sausalito; called Camp Cormorant, it became a rallying point for the anchor-out community and their supporters. McCracken’s friends sought shelter on Evolution after their boats were seized, and the belongings of evicted anchor-outs, like generators and power tools, began to pile up on the vessel. 

Hostilities increased on the water. And while people’s boats were being seized and crushed at a nearby Army Corp yard—frequent spectacles that sometimes came down to clashes between police and anchor-outs—RBRA bimonthly meetings continued. In virtual Zoom rooms, amid a growing pandemic, RBRA board members, concerned citizens, and environmental activists deliberated over what to do next.

Initially, RBRA suggested removing anchor-outs over a span of 10 or 20 years, but Audubon California, Marin Audubon Society, and BCDC pushed back. They wanted the anchor-outs gone by a set deadline—Marin Audubon, in particular, argued for five years.

Merkel & Associates’ 2019 mooring feasibility study greenlit the idea that conservation moorings, in clusters called mooring fields, could coexist with eelgrass. Because they are drilled into the seafloor and have a buoy attached to a floating cord, thus reducing their damage to marine life, conservation moorings (sometimes called eco-moorings) have been deployed worldwide, in waters from Tasmania to Massachusetts, with the aim of protecting marine habitat. In Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts, such moorings were installed in areas with scars just like Richardson Bay’s. Though it was in a smaller restoration project, eelgrass was successfully replanted on 0.2 acres. In Moreton Bay, Australia, 16 acres were restored. Merkel & Associates suggested several locations—away from thicker eelgrass beds and with shelter from storms—for conservation moorings, one boat per mooring.  

At public meetings, Marin Audubon Society opposed the idea, rejecting any mooring field, temporary or permanent, and regardless of the type of moorings. It also objected to any boat occupying space for too long. “It is obvious that anchor-outs are covering open water habitat,” reads a letter written by Barbara Salzman, then co-chair of the conservation committee of Marin Audubon. “Such use is considered fill by BCDC”—meaning boats confer an adverse impact on the public and wildlife by occupying space on the Bay, much the way development that extends the shoreline into the Bay is often considered fill. 

For Marin Audubon, the safety of diving birds was paramount. Birds would contend with boats while foraging, risking injury and losing access to food, Audubon said. The Merkel study pointed to anecdotal videos of herring runs, showing birds foraging successfully in between the boats. The study conceded, however, that bird behavior with regard to moorings and boats was complicated: it would all depend on the size of herring spawns, the species at hand, the wave patterns, wind conditions, and more. Still, the survey authors believed the effects on birds would be minimal—after all, the report noted, Audubon’s sanctuary waters, a section of Richardson Bay closed to all boats during migration season, were right next to the proposed moorings.  

It wasn’t enough. Marin Audubon solicited a study by Point Blue Conservation Science, an organization based in Marin, to survey the proposed mooring areas for birds, and wrote in a public letter presented at an April 2021 meeting that “the recommendation of Point Blue is that mooring not occur in any of the survey areas.” While Point Blue researchers documented 23 different species in the waters, the study did not investigate the potential impact of boats on the birds’ ability to forage. “We purposefully didn’t weigh in on the policy,” says Julian Wood, the lead researcher. “Supporting one policy or scenario over another was beyond the scope of that study.” Yet the study does make such a recommendation.

At the same time, Schwartz Lesberg was developing an eelgrass protection and management plan that eventually proposed a “protection zone” that would encompass 90 percent of all eelgrass beds and not allow moorings. This reduced the potential mooring space to just one-third of Richardson Bay’s historic anchorage acreage. 

Finally, in August 2021, the BCDC and RBRA arrived at an agreement: all anchor-outs would be removed from Richardson Bay by 2026, an ambitious, five-year goal. Those with “safe and seaworthy vessel” status—boats that were up to code—could stay until then, but others, like Evolution, would need to leave earlier, by October 2024. BCDC still wanted a mooring field, as long as it was temporary and for moving boats away from the eelgrass sooner. 

But when Sausalito residents concluded the hypothetical mooring field put boats too close to their businesses, they argued to nix the entire idea in the interest of public safety. “The attitude from the start was always just to kick the can down the road,” says Henry. No one wanted to deal with the problem, he says. It would require a lot of planning and willingness to embrace the anchor-out population. “My experience with cities is that they tend to be reactive instead of proactive.”

Henry’s also a longtime staff writer at Latitude 38, a Bay Area publication by and for sailors. The magazine’s founders dreamed of a 100-boat mooring field in Richardson Bay. “They looked at other places in California and they said, ‘Well, they have mooring fields. Why can’t we have one?’” The idea has circulated for the past 40 years, but never went anywhere. It was always difficult to answer the questions: who would fund it, who would oversee it, who would be liable.

After three years of discussion, on July 27, 2022, RBRA formally requested that BCDC drop the mooring field requirement—the cost, about $30,000 per mooring, was cited as a main reason, along with the claim that only a few of the anchor-outs’ boats had the required equipment to moor on such facilities in the first place. BCDC granted the request, and money meant for moorings went to pay anchor-outs to give up their vessels, among other goals. 

A bit before then, harbormaster Curtis Havel retired. In 2022, the City of Sausalito paid a $540,000 settlement to 30 homeless people in the anchor-outs’ waterfront camp—about $18,000 each—to get them to disperse. 

After the mooring plan was dropped, and years of boat seizures, RBRA introduced its housing voucher program for the several dozen remaining anchor-outs in 2023. To date they’ve housed 11 people, with several more in the pipeline.

The housing deal

The housing offer is generous. RBRA received $3 million in state funds, secured by state senator Mike McGuire, whose district includes Marin County. For anchor-outs who own and give up their vessels, RBRA will “buy back” their boats at $150 per foot and help them navigate a housing process that grants them one year of housing on land. Eventually, the goal is to transition them to Section 8, a federal housing voucher program.

But it’s hard to pin down who qualifies. A service agreement between RBRA and Marin County states that only anchor-outs who were counted during a June 2022 survey (and an April 2023 follow-up) will get housing. The Pacific Sun reported that only the owner of the boat gets a voucher, and co-occupants need to be married to receive joint housing, leaving some, like McCracken, to fall through the cracks. 

Brad Gross, the executive director of RBRA, sees the removal of anchor-outs as inevitable: it’s up to either him or BCDC. The anchor-outs who participate in the housing program now, he says, will “get out with some dignity”—but if the RBRA’s offered deal doesn’t clear the Bay, the state will likely step in to finish the job. “And the state’s got much bigger pockets, [a] much bigger group of attorneys,” Gross says. “And they’re up in Sacramento—they’re not going to have the same concerns and the same compassion and consideration.”

Drew Warner took Gross up on the deal, becoming one of the first anchor-outs to be housed. He remembers contacting the RBRA month after month and going through yearlong paperwork, finally deciding—“It’s time to get off the water, man,” Warner says. The anchor-out era, for him, was over. Winter storms were getting worse, and he wanted to be safe.

For Schwartz Lesberg, the combination of housing and restoration is a historic feat, especially for a small agency like RBRA. “This is a really thoughtful approach. And it looks like it’s working—people are getting housed and the environment is improving. And nobody else has done this.” The EPA grant application requests applicants provide matching funds. In RBRA’s application for eelgrass restoration money, the lion’s share of its match came from the state for housing and vessel removal.

Now, Warner lives in the Marin Headlands, in a loft-style one-bedroom apartment, with tons of natural light and in-unit washing and drying. “I sat on the stairwell for three days,” he says. “In just awe, with my cat.” When he tries to show me photos of his new place, though, his callused hands make swiping on the screen of the smartphone difficult. Thick white layers pile over his knuckles and fingertips, scars from the lifestyle he left behind—his hands remind me of McCracken’s. His convictions, though, differ: he believes he made the right choice. He’s even been encouraging his friends on the anchorage to take the deal.

McCracken, who doesn’t qualify, mourns the slow loss of the anchor-outs. “We were a community,” she says. “And now I notice the stress of being forced to go somewhere else, to break those bonds.”

Sitting in front of the visitor center in Sausalito and staring out at the anchorage that used to be his home, even Warner feels bittersweet. Eelgrass is far from his mind. Instead, he’s focused on what’s above the water: a wooden marker poking its head above the waves. “I stayed just beyond that,” he says. “For 23 years.” There are two boats to either side—the unused space in the middle now looks like a picture of an empty lot where an old house used to be. Soon enough, blades of eelgrass and life—the kind we have allowed there—will blossom underneath.

The post In the Name of Eelgrass appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

The friend, a mother of two in her 40s, had suffered from longstanding intimate partner abuse, later to lose her home in the 2018 fire that destroyed most of the small mountain town of Paradise, Calif.

Now living in government-funded transitional housing, the woman has been looking — in vain, so far — for a long-term residence. Her federally subsidized housing voucher is to expire in June.

Victims’ advocates worry that domestic violence survivors can end up homeless, and sometimes shun emergency the shelter system and instead brave days and nights outdoors. “Many women survivors prefer to stay in their car rather than in a shelter,” Giannola said. “They feel safer.”

But many survivors will be helped by a recent California reform prohibiting landlords of apartments that accept government rent subsidies from using credit history in the application process, so long as prospective tenants can offer alternative evidence of their ability to pay. While the change does not focus on domestic violence victims, abused women could be among the greatest beneficiaries.

[ Read also: Our series on coercive control and family abuse ]

As of last January, California landlords accepting Section 8 vouchers or other housing subsidies may not use credit reports when screening tenant applications. A law authored by state Sen. Susan Talamantes Eggman, a Democrat from Stockton, allows applicants instead to provide pay stubs or bank records as evidence that they can pay their portion of the monthly rent.

In proposing her bill, SB 267, before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Eggman said research shows that credit scores are unreliable tests of whether tenants can pay rent in time and in full. A couple of outstanding medical bills, for instance, can lower credit scores.

Supporters say the reform is a lifeline for those who leave partners while having poor credit or no money because of financial abuse. That financial instability can cascade on all parts of their lives and makes it hard to get back on their feet.

Giannola shared her own history as a domestic violence survivor at two webinars this year, organized by leaders of a UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative statewide study.

The researchers surveyed more than 3,200 adults experiencing homelessness across California, and did in-depth interviews with 365 people for one year, concluding in November 2022.

The study, co-funded by the Blue Shield of California Foundation and the California Health Care Foundation, found that nearly two-thirds of respondents struggled to find housing because of poor credit or eviction history, problems often directly resulting from violence in the home.

It found that one in five unhoused women fled home to escape violence and escalating abuse by an intimate partner.  More than 40% of them said they continued to experience violence after leaving their homes.

The shortage of domestic violence shelters leaves women exposed to additional violence in homeless encampments, the study found.

“That system is completely overwhelmed and people are winding up in encampments,” said Dr. Margot Kushel, the initiative’s director and co-author of the report. “There are only so many places you can hide when you are vulnerable.”

Outside and at risk

Angela Garcia, 32, said that since she and her drug-addicted ex-husband separated, she has been couch surfing with friends in the East Bay. For a while, she pitched a tent along the railway tracks near the Hayward Public Library, surrounded by other unhoused people and vulnerable to theft. “I would sometimes get back to my tent after a bathroom break only to find my clothes gone,” she said.

Chris Richardson is chief program officer of Downtown Streets Team, a 15-year-old statewide nonprofit organization many of whose workers are themselves unhoused or at risk of homelessness. The organization provides supportive services and resources to people living outdoors or in temporary shelter. Many team members are low-income people who have experienced intimate partner violence.

Team members who have experienced such violence are reticent to come forward. “They will talk about getting arrested, about prison time,” Richardson said, “but not about their domestic abuse because there is a lot of stigma and shame around it.”

Dr. Anita Hargave, an assistant professor of medicine at UCSF, who contributed to the report, said intimate partner violence could affect people across many economic strata, but especially the poor. In the study, 73% of participants said relatively modest amounts of financial support — even monthly subsidies as low as $300 to $500 — would have kept them housed for at least two years. Even more respondents, 83%, said a lump sum of $5,000 to $10,000 would have saved them.

Some survivors attest to the security that would come with a little financial independence.

“I was terrified to survive on my own,” said Susan Lenzi, 61, a San Anselmo resident, who recalled having struggled with drug addiction and several abusive men.

Without a place of her own, Lenzi’s life spiraled downward until Marin County officials threatened to take away her 6-year-old daughter, Natasha, who was raped by one of Lenzi’s boyfriends.

Lenzi, then 23, decided to leave the girl with her own parents in Mill Valley, checked herself into a rehab facility and then into a domestic violence shelter. The shelter staff helped her find transitional housing, a key to her recovery from addiction.

Supportive services gap

The UCSF report made several policy recommendations including more domestic violence shelters, better coordination of shelter and social service intake systems and access to permanent housing.

But women’s and children’s rights advocates worry that California might not make much progress toward those goals anytime soon. The state is likely to face a huge budget shortfall in the coming fiscal year, estimated at $38 billion by Gov. Gavin Newsom, and $72 billion by the Legislative Analyst’s Office.

The state also faces a 45% reduction of federal support through the Victims of Crime Act, which funds service providers that work with domestic violence, sexual assault and child abuse cases. In California, the Office of Emergency Services distributes the money to about 400 programs.

The California State Association of Counties says it expects Congress to cap the grant program nationally at $1.2 billion in the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, a reduction of about 37% from current-year funding. The federal grant is the primary funding source for crime victim services in all 50 states and six U.S. territories. It is drawn from fines and penalties levied on people and corporations convicted of federal crimes. No taxpayer dollars are used.

According to a March 12 statement from the National District Attorneys Association, without immediate congressional intervention, critical service providers face severe cuts, or even closure.

For California, the reduction is nearly $154 million, said Grace Glaser, policy manager in the Sacramento office at ValorUS, a nonprofit organization that offers support services for crime victims nationwide. “We need $262 million to sustain current programs,” she said.

Marissa Seko, family violence intervention unit manager at the Oakland-based Family Violence Law Center said her organization uses “some of those federal funds to stabilize the situation of domestic violence survivors to help them relocate to a safe place.” She added: “That money can be critical to prevent a survivor from becoming unhoused.”

ValorUS, the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence and seven other women’s and children’s rights groups are placing their hopes for continued funding in the Crime Victim Service Stabilization Act, a bill co-authored by Assembly members Eloise Gómez Reyes, D-Colton, and Jesse Gabriel, D-Encino. Last month, the Assembly Public Safety Committee passed the bill, AB 1956, unanimously.

The bill is the state’s equivalent of the federal Victims of Crime Act. It would require the state to fill funding gaps in essential crime victim services when federal funding decreases more than 10% in any year. The support groups are asking the state for $200 million.

“California stands by victims of crimes,” Reyes said in a statement, “and we are committed to ensuring the safety and well-being of these survivors who deserve consistent and reliable access to healing services.”

Other reforms

In addition to Eggman’s bill banning landlords from using a person’s credit history as part of the application process for housing, at least two other state laws passed last year could provide reprieve for domestic violence survivors in accessing affordable housing.

The Safe and Inclusive Housing Act, Assembly Bill 1418,authored by Tina McKinnor, D-Inglewood, made California the first state to ban so-called crime-free housing ordinances and nuisance laws that some municipalities adopted in the 1990s, allowing landlords to exclude or evict tenants with criminal histories. Because even a 911 call could be considered an indicator of criminal activity, “the ordinances made it more difficult for victims of domestic violence to call law officials,” said Max Griswold, a researcher at RAND, a policy think tank.

Another new measure that favors domestic violence survivors is Assembly Bill 12, authored by Matt Haney, a Democrat from San Francisco. It caps security deposits at one month’s rent, regardless of whether a unit is furnished. In the past, landlords were allowed to charge up to three months’ rent. The law kicks in July 1.

Local reforms also could help. San Francisco voters in March approved a $300 million bond measure to increase the supply of affordable housing. Of that, $30 million is targeted to domestic violence survivors.

Deciding to give back

East Bay resident Ariana Severs, 30, fled her ex-husband after he “beat me to a pulp” within a year after their marriage. He then threatened to buy a gun to shoot her.

Remarried and with two children, Severs works as a direct-service lead with the Downtown Streets Team. The job, she says, is helping her to heal.

Natasha, Lenzi’s daughter, is now a stay-at-home mom looking for ways to help others. She said she might go back to counseling at women’s shelters once her children are grown. She briefly worked at the one in San Rafael to which she had fled in her late 20s.

“The two years I worked at the shelter were so empowering,” she said. “I want to tell my story to help other women.”

When Giannola left her abuser and took her two young children, then ages 1 and 4, with her, her credit history was messed up. She was forced to file for bankruptcy. She knew what it was like to be unhoused, having lived most of her childhood and early teens in trailers, cars and tents with her parents and four siblings. “That’s all we could afford,” she said.

She is remarried and has two more children, one adopted. Until recently, she worked as a case manager for a nonprofit organization in Chico that helps Paradise fire refugees get housing. She sees her advocacy for the homeless and domestic violence survivors as intimately connected.

“Providing survivors with safe housing,” she said, “breaks the cycle of violence.”

This article was produced with the support of the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s 2023 Domestic Violence Impact Fund.

The post Recent Policy Reforms May Help California Domestic Violence Survivors Stay Housed appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Read this story in English.

Cuando Karen Rodríguez llegó a San Francisco tras huir de su país natal, Colombia, con su marido y su hijo de 6 años, Juan, la familia se alojó con la madrina de su hijo. Sin embargo, cuando tuvieron que marcharse dos meses después porque el contrato de alquiler no permitía alojar a más personas en la vivienda, recurrieron a dormir en el auto que tenían.

Como la familia era recién llegada, Rodríguez y su marido carecían de permiso de trabajo, lo que les dificultaba en gran medida encontrar empleo y poder pagar el alquiler.

Desde entonces, han estado alternando estancias en su coche y en hoteles pagados por el ayuntamiento y Fe en Acción del Área de la Bahía, una red de organizadores comunitarios de varias congregaciones religiosas. Juan tiene necesidades especiales, por lo que un refugio de emergencia sería traumático para él, dijo Rodríguez.

La familia Rodríguez es una de muchas familias de migrantes recientes que buscan refugio y una nueva vida en San Francisco, y que se encuentran en situación de calle sin tener una solución sencilla.

Los proveedores de vivienda en San Francisco, los defensores legales, los grupos religiosos y los propios migrantes advierten que no hay suficientes viviendas temporales como para dar cabida a la creciente necesidad, y que el sistema de respuesta de la ciudad no está equipado para manejar las complicaciones que surgen en la intersección entre la falta de vivienda y la migración. Los proveedores de vivienda afirman también que la ciudad subestima y subrepresenta intencionadamente la necesidad que existe.

Aunque los representantes de la ciudad dijeron que el Departamento de Personas sin Hogar y Vivienda de Apoyo está tomando medidas para reasignar fondos para abrir un refugio para familias y acelerar el ritmo al que las familias salen del refugio y acceden a una vivienda de más largo plazo, no fueron capaces de proporcionar un periodo de tiempo o instrucciones sobre qué deben hacer las familias que duermen en la calle mientras tanto.

Una necesidad profunda y pocos datos

La idea de que no hay suficiente vivienda temporal para estas familias entra en conflicto con el inventario de albergues de la ciudad, el cual es una plataforma en línea que tiende a mostrar un 7% u 8% de las vacantes que hay en los albergues para familias. No obstante, Hope Kamer, directora de política pública y asuntos externos en Compass Family Services, una organización sin fines de lucro que se ocupa de las familias en situación de calle, afirma que esta cifra no es un fiel reflejo de la necesidad que hay.
“Las familias vienen a nuestro punto de acceso a las 4:30 de un viernes y dicen: ‘No tengo dónde ir el fin de semana con mis dos bebés'”, dijo, calificando la necesidad como “profunda”.

A menudo, se rechaza a las familias porque no hay lugares disponibles en los albergues.

Eso fue lo que le ocurrió a Álvaro Tovar, su mujer y sus dos hijos pequeños cuando se presentaron recientemente a un punto de acceso a albergues, donde se evalúa si las familias reúnen los requisitos para recibir servicios, explicó Tovar. El personal le dijo que tardarían dos semanas en inscribirlos en la lista de espera, y más tiempo en conseguir camas. Le aconsejaron que comprara una tienda de campaña para su familia mientras esperaban.

“Eso me rompió el corazón porque, en primer lugar, no teníamos dinero, no conocíamos la ciudad. Perdí toda esperanza”, dijo Tovar en un evento de la comunidad el 7 de marzo que realizó Fe en Acción del Área de la Bahía para llamar la atención sobre la necesidad de refugio para las familias.

Kamer explicó que el refugio en Buena Vista Horace Mann, un gimnasio escolar que funciona como albergue nocturno para familias, recibe hasta 10 llamadas al día de organizaciones comunitarias que buscan camas para familias que no tienen dónde alojarse, muchas de las cuales el albergue no ha podido aceptar.

Laura Valdez, directora ejecutiva de Dolores Street Community Services, la organización sin fines de lucro que gestiona el centro de albergue para familias en Buena Vista Horace Mann, declaró al San Francisco Standard en diciembre pasado que la ciudad instruye a la organización para que no contabilice la cantidad de familias que rechaza.

Emily Cohen, subdirectora de comunicaciones y asuntos legislativos del Departamento de Personas sin Hogar y Vivienda de Apoyo, dijo que no tenía conocimiento de esa instrucción. Más bien, dijo, el departamento quiere que la gente vaya a los puntos de entrada al sistema de respuesta para personas en situación de calle para crear una lista de espera centralizada del albergue.

En los últimos seis meses, esa lista de espera ha tenido constantemente unas 200 familias, dijo Kamer. Explicó que en Buena Vista Horace Mann, el departamento evalúa la ocupación del albergue a las 5 de la tarde, antes de que los papás y mamás hayan regresado de trabajar y, por tanto, subrepresenta la necesidad.

“Esta falta de voluntad para captar la magnitud completa del problema significa que no hay rendición de cuentas ante estas familias y que, a su vez, no hay presión pública para construir la cantidad de albergues que necesitamos”, dijo.

Las mismas familias inmigrantes se han unido para ejercer esa presión. En colaboración con Fe en Acción del Área de la Bahía, las familias han exigido al Departamento de Personas sin Hogar y Vivienda de Apoyo que garantice alojamiento en el mismo día o que se proporcione un vale de hotel a cualquier familia que acuda a un punto de acceso; que acelere la transición del alojamiento de un albergue a una vivienda de largo plazo; y que haga un control en línea que le permita a las familias comprobar qué posición ocupan en la lista de espera de un albergue.

El grupo se reunió frente al ayuntamiento el 12 de marzo, el día en que el supervisor y candidato a alcalde Ahsha Safaí presentó una resolución no vinculante en la que pedía a la alcaldesa London Breed y al Departamento de Personas sin Hogar y Vivienda de Apoyo que respondieran a las necesidades de vivienda de las familias migrantes. La Junta de Supervisores celebrará una audiencia sobre la resolución el 22 de abril, según el personal de Fe en Acción del Área de la Bahía.

Otras barreras para encontrar vivienda segura

Además de la falta de camas en albergues, las familias migrantes se enfrentan a otros problemas cuando intentan navegar el sistema.

“Para muchas familias, el sistema de respuesta para personas en situación de calle en San Francisco es el primer punto de contacto con servicios sociales en Estados Unidos; es más, el sistema carece fundamentalmente de los recursos necesarios para proporcionar la atención informada sobre trauma y la navegación legal que necesita una familia que acaba inmigrar a San Francisco”, dijo Kamer.

Vanessa Bohm es la directora de los programas de Bienestar Familiar y Promoción de la Salud del Centro de Recursos Centroamericano, una organización sin fines de lucro que ayuda a inmigrantes latinx y a las familias con menos recursos del Área de la Bahía de San Francisco. Bohm explicó que hace 15 o 20 años era más fácil que la gente consiguiera hospedaje o trabajo a través de la economía informal o a través de conexiones con personas que conocían en el área. Hoy en día, no está tan segura de que sea así.

Silvia Ramos, gestora de casos y facilitadora de grupos de apoyo para el programa de bienestar familiar del Centro de Recursos Centroamericano, dijo que muchas familias llegan a San Francisco con trauma del viaje que emprendieron y que se sienten desplazadas al entrar en un sistema al que les es difícil adaptarse. Cuando las familias llegan sin ningún lugar donde alojarse y la ciudad no tiene camas disponibles, Ramos busca en albergues en Oakland o en otras ciudades cercanas y le enseña a la gente a utilizar el sistema de transporte rápido del Área de la Bahía (BART).

Muchos proveedores explicaron que navegar estos sistemas puede ser aún más difícil para las personas que no hablan inglés o que proceden de entornos culturales diferentes.

El papel del sistema judicial de migración

A la vez que buscan tener acceso a una vivienda, las familias también deben preocuparse por el proceso de asilo y el tribunal de inmigración. Sin embargo, los proveedores se han dado cuenta que hay una falta de conexión entre los sistemas de respuesta legal y para personas en situación de calle, y los grupos que ofrecen otros recursos como atención médica o alimentos.

“No hay ayuda gubernamental para conectar el sistema de respuesta legal y el sistema de respuesta para personas en situación de calle”, dijo Kamer. “Los proveedores de atención directa están averiguando cómo hacerlo”.

Milli Atkinson, directora del Programa de Defensa Legal para Inmigrantes en el Centro de Justicia y Diversidad del Colegio de Abogados de San Francisco, dijo que los casos de asilo de la mayoría de las personas no se deciden hasta dentro de años y que a menudo se preocupan más por cubrir necesidades inmediatas como la vivienda o la comida.

“Muchas personas se pierden en el sistema, simplemente porque no tienen la capacidad mental de resolver todas estas cosas a la vez, y primero atienden a sus necesidades básicas”, dijo.

Sin embargo, tener representación legal durante el proceso de asilo ayuda a los migrantes a obtener un permiso laboral, lo que les permite ser más autosuficientes.

La inestabilidad de vivienda puede afectar los casos de inmigración de otras maneras. Uno de los mayores obstáculos para las personas en situación de calle, según Atkinson, es que el sistema judicial se basa en gran medida en tener todo por escrito y en papel por lo que la comunicación se realiza principalmente por correo tradicional. La expectativa es que las personas mantengan al tribunal al corriente del cambio de domicilio.

“Si el tribunal te envía por correo información sobre tu caso y no la recibes, es culpa tuya”, explica.

La llegada de migrantes

Los proveedores de vivienda, los defensores legales y el Departamento de Personas sin Hogar y Vivienda de Apoyo contaron como anécdota un aumento en el número de personas que buscan servicios y que huyen de Latinoamérica debido a los disturbios políticos, la pobreza y otros tipos de violencia.

Atkinson dijo que en los últimos años, su organización ha visto un mayor número de migrantes procedentes de países como Nicaragua, Colombia, Perú y Cuba. Como la cantidad de países que viven inestabilidad política en los últimos años ha aumentado, la cantidad de personas que llegan a la frontera también ha incrementado, dijo.

Dado que San Francisco es una ciudad santuario, las preguntas sobre el estatus del migrante o refugiado durante el proceso de entrada coordinada (un sistema que se utiliza para determinar qué recursos se pueden solicitar) son limitadas. Esto dificulta decir qué porcentaje de la reciente oleada de familias que buscan refugio son inmigrantes, dijo Cohen, aunque señaló a forma de anécdota que ha habido más personas de Centro y Sudamérica que llegan en busca de ayuda.

Los datos de la ciudad muestran que la cantidad de hispanohablantes y personas latinx en situación de calle está en aumento. El porcentaje de hispanohablantes en el sistema ONE de la ciudad, que monitorea a las personas que reciben asistencia del Departamento de Personas sin Hogar y Vivienda de Apoyo, aumentó a más de una cuarta parte de la población de personas que reciben apoyo del departamento en 2024. Además, de 2019 a 2022, hubo un aumento del 55% en la cantidad de personas latinx que carecen de un techo, según los datos recopilados en ese momento determinado en 2022, que es un recuento bianual de la cantidad de personas que se encuentran en situación de calle.

La historia de Leslie

Una vivienda segura y estable les permite a las familias migrantes prosperar.

Leslie, que pidió mantener su apellido en privado, huyó de Nicaragua en noviembre de 2019 con su hija y su pareja cuando el país se enfrentó a un aumento en la violencia política lo que provocó que tanto ella como su pareja perdieran sus empleos.

“Había una guerra y mataron a mucha gente. Había mucho caos por todas partes y la economía ya estaba en mal estado”, dijo al señalar que no tenían qué comer. “Así que nos fuimos en busca de un futuro mejor”.

Cuando llegaron, Leslie se enfrentó al maltrato de los familiares con los que se alojaba y se vio obligada a mantener a su hija, que tiene autismo, en su habitación para protegerla del acoso.

“Sentí mucha frustración, mucha desesperación; no sabía qué hacer”, dijo.

Al final, Leslie, su pareja y su hija se marcharon. Cambiaron de domicilio al menos tres veces; pasaron de un albergue a la casa de una amistad, y luego a un hotel financiado por la ciudad. Fue allí, donde dejó de dormir en el suelo y donde empezó a sentirse más cómoda. Leslie empezó a ver a un terapeuta y a recibir atención médica, y aprendió cómo inscribir a su hija en la escuela.

Sin embargo, Leslie no sabía cuánto tiempo iban a poder quedarse, lo que le causaba ansiedad; además, había otros problemas.

La terapia “me abrió los ojos al maltrato que estaba sufriendo a manos de mi pareja, así que decidí dejarlo”, dijo. “Aquí no tenía familia ni amigos. Solo tenía a mi hija”.

Con la ayuda de Compass Family Services y servicios prenatales para personas en situación de calle, Leslie pudo finalmente solicitar una vivienda permanente para ella y su hija de 7 años de edad. Se mudaron en septiembre de 2023.

“Ahora que hemos encontrado una vivienda estable, ella se siente segura, las dos nos sentimos seguras”, dijo al señalar que la estabilidad es buena para su hija.

La seguridad le ha permitido a Leslie hacer prácticas profesionales en un preescolar y formar parte del Consejo Asesor de Familias de Compass Family Services para compartir sus experiencias sobre cómo ha navegado la vida sin un hogar en San Francisco. Haber vuelto a la escuela le ha hecho sentirse útil.

“Me hace sentir que tengo un futuro mejor aquí”, dijo y señaló que no estaba segura de si tendría que dedicarse a limpiar inodoros de por vida en Estados Unidos. “Realmente me llena de vida y me encanta estar con los niños. Me encanta aprender”.

Madison Alvarado realizó este reportaje a través de la Beca de Datos 2023 del Centro Annenberg sobre la Salud de USC, el cual proporcionó formación, tutoría y financiamiento para la realización de este proyecto.

Traducido al español por Andrea Valencia a través de Linguaficient, una empresa local que ofrece servicios lingüísticos profesionales. Valencia interpretó nuestra entrevista con Leslie, una hispanohablante monolingüe. Yesica Prado, periodista de San Francisco Public Press, interpretó nuestra entrevista con Karen Rodríguez.

The post Proveedores de ervicios opinan que SF subestima la necesidad que hay a pesar de que cada vez más familias migrantes buscan acceder albergues appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Lee esta historia en español.

When Karen Rodriguez arrived in San Francisco after fleeing her home country, Colombia, with her husband and her 6-year-old son, Juan, the family stayed with her son’s godmother. But when they had to leave two months later because the lease didn’t allow for extra people in the unit, they resorted to sleeping in their car.

Because the family was newly arrived, Rodriguez and her husband did not have work authorization, making securing jobs and paying rent extremely difficult.

They have since been bouncing between stays in their car and stays in hotels paid for by the city and Faith in Action Bay Area, a network of community organizers from various faith congregations. Juan has special needs, so an emergency shelter would be traumatic for him, Rodriguez said. 

The Rodriguez family is among many recent migrants seeking shelter and a new life in San Francisco, who are falling into homelessness with no easy way to climb out.

San Francisco housing providers, legal advocates, faith groups and migrants themselves warn that there is not enough temporary housing to accommodate the increased need, and that the city’s response system is not equipped to handle the complications that arise at the intersection of homelessness and immigration. Housing providers say also that the city is intentionally under-counting and under-representing the need.

While city representatives said the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing is taking steps to reallocate funds to open a family shelter and quicken the rate at which families move out of shelter and into longer term housing, they were unable to provide a timeline or instructions as to what families sleeping on the street should do in the meantime.

‘Profound’ need and poor data

The notion that there isn’t enough temporary housing for these families conflicts with the city’s shelter inventory, an online dashboard that tends to show family shelter vacancies around 7% or 8%. But Hope Kamer, director of public policy and external affairs at Compass Family Services, a nonprofit focusing on family homelessness, said this is not a true reflection of the need.

“Families are coming to our access point at 4:30 on a Friday and saying, ‘I have nowhere to go for the weekend with my two infants,’” she said, calling the need “profound.”

Often, families are turned away for lack of shelter slots.

That happened to Álvaro Tovar and his wife and two young children when they recently showed up at a shelter access point, where families are assessed for service eligibility, he said. Staff told him that it would take two weeks before he could put their names on the waitlist, and longer to get beds. They advised him to buy a tent for his family to stay in while they waited.

“That broke my heart because first of all, we didn’t have any money, we didn’t know the city. I lost all hope,” Tovar said at a March 7 community event that Faith in Action Bay Area hosted to bring attention to the need for family shelter.

Kamer said the Buena Vista Horace Mann Shelter, a school gym that functions as a family shelter at night, gets as many as 10 calls a day from community-based organizations searching for beds for families who have nowhere to stay, many of whom the shelter can’t take in.

Laura Valdéz, executive director of Dolores Street Community Services, the nonprofit that runs the Buena Vista Horace Mann family shelter, told the San Francisco Standard in December that the city instructs the organization to not count the number of families it turns away.

Emily Cohen, deputy director for communications and legislative affairs at the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, said she wasn’t aware of that instruction. Rather, she said, the department wants people to go to entry points for the homeless response system to create one centralized shelter waitlist.

Over the past six months, that waitlist has consistently contained some 200 families, Kamer said. At Buena Vista Horace Mann, the department counts the shelter occupancy at 5 p.m., before parents have returned from their jobs and thus under-representing the need, she said.

“This unwillingness to capture the full scale of the problem means that there is not accountability to these families and there is, in turn, not public pressure to build the amount of shelter stock we need,” she said.

Migrant families themselves have been banding together to create that pressure. Partnering with Faith in Action Bay Area, the families have issued demands to the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing: guarantee same-day shelter or a hotel voucher for any family who goes to an access point; expedite the transition from shelter to long-term housing; and create an online dashboard that lets families check their position on a shelter waitlist.

The group held a rally outside City Hall on March 12, the day supervisor and declared mayoral candidate Ahsha Safaí introduced a non-binding resolution calling on Mayor London Breed and the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing to respond to migrant families’ housing needs. The full Board of Supervisors will hold a hearing on the resolution on April 22, according to staff from Faith in Action Bay Area.

Other barriers to safe housing

Besides lack of shelter beds, migrant families face other issues as they try to navigate the system.

“For many families, the homeless response system in San Francisco is their first touch point for social services in the United States, and the system is fundamentally not resourced to do the legal navigation and trauma-informed care that a family that has just made an immigration journey to San Francisco needs,” Kamer said. 

Vanessa Bohm is the director of the Family Wellness and Health Promotion programs at the Central American Resource Center, a nonprofit that helps Latinx migrants and under-resourced families in the San Francisco Bay Area. She said that 15 or 20 years ago, it was easier for people to get rooms or jobs through the informal economy or through connections to people they knew here. Today, she’s not sure that is the case, she said.

Silvia Ramos, a senior case manager and support group facilitator for the family wellness program at the Central American Resource Center, said many families arrive in San Francisco with trauma from their journey and feel displaced as they enter a system that is difficult to adapt to. When families show up with nowhere to stay and the city has no beds, she will look for beds in Oakland or other nearby cities and teach people how to use Bay Area Rapid Transit.

Navigating these systems can be even more difficult for people who don’t speak English, or who come from different cultural backgrounds, many providers said.

Role of immigration court

While trying to access housing, families must also worry about the asylum process and immigration court system. However, providers noted disconnects among the legal and homeless response systems, and groups that offer other resources like medical care or food.

“There is no government help coming to connect the legal response system and the homeless response system,” Kamer said. “The direct care providers are figuring out how to do that.”

Milli Atkinson, director of the Immigrant Legal Defense Program at the Justice and Diversity Center of the Bar Association of San Francisco, said most people’s asylum cases aren’t decided for years and they often worry more about immediate needs like housing or food.

“A lot of people get lost in the system, just because they don’t have the capacity mentally to figure all of these things out at once, and they’re going for their basic needs first,” she said.

But having legal representation during the asylum process helps migrants get work authorization, enabling them to become more self-sufficient.

Housing instability can affect immigration cases in other ways. One of the biggest hurdles for people experiencing homelessness, Atkinson said, is that the court system relies heavily on paper and communication is primarily done through the mail. People are expected to keep the court updated on their addresses.

“If the court mails you things about your case, and you don’t get them, it’s your fault,” she said. 

Influx of migrants

Housing providers, legal advocates, and the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing anecdotally noted an increase in the number of people seeking services who are fleeing Latin America due to political unrest, poverty and other violence.

Atkinson said that in recent years her organization has seen a greater number of migrants from countries like Nicaragua, Colombia, Peru and Cuba. As the number of countries experiencing political instability in recent years has risen, the number of people seen coming in at the border has also gone up, she said.

Because San Francisco is a sanctuary city, questions about immigration or refugee status during the coordinated entry process, a system used to determine what type of resources people qualify for, are limited. This makes it difficult to say what percent of the recent surge of families seeking shelter are migrants, Cohen said, though she anecdotally noted that there have been more people from Central and South America asking for assistance.

City data shows that the share of Spanish-speakers and Latinx people experiencing homelessness is increasing. The share of Spanish-speakers in the city’s ONE System, which tracks people receiving assistance from the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, increased to over one-quarter of the department’s client population in 2024. Additionally, from 2019 to 2022, there was a 55% increase in the number of Latinx people experiencing homelessness, according to data collected during the 2022 point in-time count, a biennial count of the number of people experiencing homelessness.

Leslie’s story

Safe, stable housing enables migrant families to thrive.

Leslie, who asked to keep her last name private, fled Nicaragua in November 2019 with her daughter and her partner as the country faced increased political violence and she and her partner lost their jobs.

“There was a war and a lot of people were killed. There was chaos everywhere and the economy was already in bad shape,” she said, noting they had no food. “So we left it looking for a better future.”

When they arrived, Leslie faced abuse from relatives she was staying with and was forced to keep her daughter, who is autistic, in her room to shield her from harassment.

“I felt a lot of frustration, a lot of desperation, not knowing what to do,” she said.

Eventually, Leslie, along with her partner and daughter, left. They changed addresses at least three times, moving from a shelter to a friend’s house to a city-funded hotel. It was there, where she was no longer sleeping on the floor, that she began to feel some comfort. She started seeing a therapist and getting medical care, and learned how to get her daughter into school.

But she didn’t know how long they would be able to stay, which caused her anxiety, and there were other problems. 

Therapy “opened up my eyes to the abuse that I was suffering at the hands of my partner, so I decided to leave him,” she said. “I didn’t have any family here and I didn’t have any friends. I just had my daughter.”

With the help of Compass Family Services and prenatal homelessness services, Leslie was eventually able to apply for permanent housing for her and her 7-year-old daughter. They moved in in September 2023.

“Now that we have found stable housing, she feels safe, we feel safe,” she said, noting the stability is good for her daughter.

The security has allowed Leslie to pursue an internship teaching preschoolers and sit on Compass Family Services’ Family Advisory Council to share her experiences about navigating homelessness in San Francisco. Going back to school has made her feel useful.

“It makes me feel like I have a better future here,” she said, noting that she wasn’t sure if she would be cleaning toilets for the rest of her life in the United States. “It really fills me up with life and I love to be with the children, and I love to learn.”

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.

Andrea Valencia of Linguaficient, a company that provides professional language services, interpreted our interview with Leslie, a monolingual Spanish speaker. Yesica Prado, a journalist at the San Francisco Public Press, interpreted our interview with Karen Rodriguez.

The post More Migrant Families Are Trying to Access Shelter While SF Underestimates Need, Service Providers Say appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Proposition A would allow San Francisco to borrow up to $300 million by issuing general obligation bonds. The city would use up to $240 million to build, buy or rehabilitate rental housing, including senior housing and workforce housing for low-income households.

“Housing affordability is one of the most pressing challenges in San Francisco today,” wrote Mayor London Breed in an official statement supporting the measure. “Wages have not kept up with the cost of housing and we are at risk of losing the diverse community of firefighters, teachers, nurses, veterans, families, and seniors who make San Francisco a special place to live.”

The city would also use up to $30 million to buy or rehabilitate existing units for use as affordable housing for low- and moderate-income households, and up to $30 million to buy, build or rehabilitate housing for people experiencing street violence, domestic violence, sexual abuse and assault, human trafficking or other trauma relating to homelessness.

San Francisco’s policy is to control the amount of money it borrows by issuing new bonds only when existing ones are paid off. The city could increase property taxes to help pay off the new bonds, and landlords would be allowed to pass through to tenants up to 50% of the cost of any increase in taxes related to the bonds.

The controller’s office estimates that it would cost San Francisco $544.5 million to cover the principal and interest that the city would owe on $300 million in bonds. The office estimates that, on the high side, the cost to a homeowner with a residence assessed at $700,000 would be an additional $55 in property taxes annually.

All 11 members of the Board of Supervisors sponsored the measure and voted to place it on the ballot.

Proposition A proponents say the city needs money to meet state requirements and local goals for producing and preserving more affordable housing.

In 2022, median monthly rent for a two-bedroom apartment in San Francisco was $3,800, requiring an annual household income of $137,000 — which fewer than 40% of households took in that year — to be considered affordable, according to research compiled for the San Francisco Housing Element, which the city uses to guide housing strategy.

California set a requirement for San Francisco to add 46,598 units for households ranging from very low to moderate income by 2031. The city can build the housing or facilitate development by other entities, including private developers and nonprofit organizations.

The city expects to use up funds from housing bonds issued in 2015 and 2019 by 2028. The text of Proposition A notes the city’s difficulty in securing funding to meet its housing goals: “The economic environment for affordable housing has changed significantly in recent years, with state affordable housing funding programs becoming more competitive and severely oversubscribed, including the state’s allocation of volume cap for tax-exempt housing revenue bonds.”

A broad coalition joined Breed in signing the official statement supporting Proposition A, including Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee, the San Francisco Labor Council, the Council of Community Housing Organizations, the San Francisco Council of District Merchants Associations, the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association, Senior and Disability Action, United Educators of San Francisco, the San Francisco Women’s Political Committee and Mission Housing Development Corp.

Additional organizations submitted paid arguments in favor of the measure, including the Council of Community Housing Organizations, the Bill Sorro Housing Program, the Chinatown Community Development Center, the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council, Mercy Housing California, Mission Housing Development Corp., the Non-Profit Housing Association of Northern California, the Richmond District Democratic Club, the San Francisco Housing Accelerator Fund, the San Francisco Housing Development Corp., the San Francisco Human Services Network and the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corp.

Larry Marso submitted the official statement opposing the measure: “The Mayor and Board of Supervisors have embraced insane state mandates to build 82,000 new San Francisco homes over 5 years. Their plan changes the character of every neighborhood, buldozes [sic] the West Side, and brings poverty, drugs, crime and homelessness to a street corner near you.”

In his rebuttal to the proponents’ supporting statement, Marso, a Nob Hill resident, technology executive, attorney and mergers and acquisitions advisor, added that San Francisco should fight state affordable housing construction mandates.

The Citizens’ General Obligation Bond Oversight Committee would oversee and audit spending of the bond funds to ensure that they are used as intended.

This measure requires at least two-thirds affirmative votes to pass.

A “yes” vote means you want the city to issue $300 million in general obligation bonds to construct, develop, acquire or rehabilitate affordable housing in San Francisco.

A “no” vote means you do not want the city to issue $300 million in general obligation bonds to fund affordable housing.

The post Proposition A — Affordable Housing Bonds appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Proposition C would change San Francisco’s tax policy to allow a one-time transfer tax exemption for owners of properties converted from commercial to residential use the first time they are sold following conversion, as long as the change of use is approved before Jan. 1, 2030.

San Francisco currently requires a transfer tax of 6% on properties that sell for more than $25 million. The proposed exemption could be applied to up to 5 million square feet of converted properties. The measure would allow the Board of Supervisors to amend, reduce, suspend or repeal the transfer tax without voter approval, although voters would have to approve increases. It would also let the city increase the amount of commercial development allowed in a given year by adding to that tally the square footage of property that has been converted or demolished.

Under this measure, the transfer tax exemption could be applied to portions of buildings converted from commercial to residential if other parts of the properties continue to host business operations.

The opportunity to use Proposition C transfer tax exemptions would expire at the end of 2054.

The controller’s office estimates that the city could lose between $34 million and $150 million over 30 years if it allows transfer tax exemptions on 5 million square feet converted from commercial to residential use. By removing space occupied by businesses, the city could lose additional revenue currently provided by commercial operations, including gross receipt and other taxes that would not apply to residential properties. However, the city could see an increase in property taxes because the assessed value of residential property is often higher than it is for commercial property of the same size.

The calculations are complicated and are based on guessing what will happen: “If the transfer tax exemption makes residential conversion of an office building financially feasible, but that building would have been eventually occupied by future office tenants, the exemption would most likely lead to a net negative revenue impact for the City,” wrote Controller Ben Rosenfield in his analysis of Proposition C.

Mayor London Breed submitted this measure for inclusion on the ballot. It is also supported by Supervisors Matt Dorsey, Joel Engardio, Rafael Mandelman and Catherine Stefani, who together signed the official rebuttal to the opposition statement.

“San Francisco’s Downtown is undergoing a period of change — and there is a tremendous opportunity to attract investment and excitement in the future of what Downtown can be: a thriving, 24-hour neighborhood filled with residents, workers, arts and culture, and successful small businesses,” Breed wrote in her official statement supporting Proposition C.

More than a dozen business associations and organizations and nearly 50 individuals signed onto paid arguments submitted in support of the measure, including state Sen. Scott Wiener, along with groups including Housing Action Coalition, GrowSF, San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research, and SF Yimby.

Proposition C is opposed by organizations including the Council of Community Housing Organizations, the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee, Affordable Housing Alliance, the San Francisco Tenants Union, Senior and Disability Action, the Harvey Milk LGBTQ Democratic Club and Small Business Forward. In their statement against Proposition C, they called it “a deceptive ballot measure that takes power away from voters and allows City Hall politicians to hand out corporate tax breaks to billionaires and huge property owners.”

They noted in their rebuttal that current law allows tax exemptions for converting office buildings to affordable housing, and that the measure would extend that benefit to developers of luxury housing.

This measure requires more than 50% affirmative votes to pass.

A “yes” vote means you support changing San Francisco’s transfer tax policy to allow a one-time transfer tax exemption for the owners of properties converted from commercial to residential use the first time they are sold following conversion.

A “no” vote means you do not want the proposed changes to the city’s transfer tax policies.

The post Proposition C — Real Estate Transfer Tax Exemption and Office Space Allocation appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

The agency has taken a multifaceted approach to determine which neighborhoods will be disproportionately affected by conducting heat and flood vulnerability assessments, creating community resiliency scoring systems and collaborating with local nonprofits to gather temperature and humidity data.

Those investigations have revealed that Chinatown could be particularly vulnerable during periods of extreme weather due to a range of socio-economic factors as well as the built environment. Within the neighborhood, older adults living in single-room occupancy buildings are among populations at heightened risk. Reasons for this include physiological changes related to aging and financial barriers associated with making climate-resiliency adaptations to older buildings.

The San Francisco Public Press this summer interviewed residents in single-room occupancy buildings in Chinatown about their experiences during extreme weather events in recent years. The residents, who spoke Taishanese and Cantonese, which have been translated below, described hardships they experienced and steps they took to protect themselves, and offered ideas for support that could be beneficial for them and their neighbors in the future.

As droughts, wildfires, storms, floods and other catastrophes become more frequent and aggressive, each neighborhood, city and state will face its own set of adversities and health inequities. The story of how these challenges are unfolding in Chinatown offers a glimpse into how they could play out for older residents in other climate-vulnerable places.  

[Read more: “Protecting Chinatown’s Older Adults from Climate Disasters Requires More Funding, Nonprofits Say”]

Since the founding of San Francisco’s Chinatown, the oldest and largest in North America, its residents have experienced natural disasters that have threatened their lives and well-being. In the early years, the deadly 1906 earthquake caused widespread devastation. More recently, extreme weather conditions have caused suffering for some residents, especially those who are older and living in buildings that aren’t equipped to protect them from these hazards.

Shao Ao Situ, 81, has been living in a single-room occupancy building in Chinatown for about 30 years. He has experienced several extreme weather events, including the wildfires in the western parts of the U.S. that engulfed San Francisco in smoke in 2020. “The wildfires and resulting haze have a significant impact, especially on us as elderly people, because they affect our respiratory system,” Situ says. He says he had eye irritation, cough and fatigue due to the toxic air.

The building where Situ lives has individual rooms for each tenant. Residents on each floor share bathrooms, laundry facilities, a kitchen and a living room. Situ often watches television with his wife in the living room. He says one strategy that city officials and community groups could adopt to educate residents about climate disasters would be to reach out to multicultural media outlets that residents typically watch, such as KTSF. “We often get information through TV,” he says. “I hope more people can share this type of knowledge there. I tend to remember information better after seeing that on TV.”

When San Francisco was blanketed in wildfire smoke in the summer and fall of 2020, Situ says he mostly stayed indoors. He says he did not receive any support during that time or during other crises. “Where can we go for help?” he says. “We had absolutely no such advice made available to us.”

Units in Situ’s building measure about 8 by 10 feet, which is typical for single-room occupancy buildings. Inside Situ’s room are a bunk bed, a table, a dresser and shelves holding his belongings. There is a single window where he hangs his clothes.

When smoke and toxic particles from wildfires in neighboring regions drifted into San Francisco in 2020, Situ says he kept his window mostly closed, leaving a small opening for ventilation. He says he put up a piece of cardboard to cover the gap, demonstrating how he does that even today.

Situ keeps a stock of surgical masks and sanitizer. During the wildfires, he says he bought N-95 masks. “I heard on TV that N-95 masks are the best at preventing dust and pollution particles, so we bought two boxes at that time,” he says. “Not with government money. We paid out of pocket. The N-95 masks were very effective.”

Situ’s neighbors are also older. He says they would benefit from more education from community groups and government agencies on how to protect themselves during wildfires. “I think governments can do a better job,” Situ says. “One is publicity and guidance, such as holding lectures to introduce smoke and haze prevention matters and methods. I believe it will be of great help to residents, especially the elderly.”

Bifang Kuang is one of Situ’s neighbors. Kuang, 84, says she has been living in the single-room occupancy building for about 10 years.

During the severe rainstorms in the Bay Area this past winter, Kuang says she did not go out to get medications or groceries until the downpour lessened. When asked what support she had during the rain, she holds up an umbrella.  

For older residents in Chinatown, especially those who have trouble with mobility, walking up the hills in their neighborhood to get food, medications and other supplies could be dangerous during heavy rains. One single-room occupancy tenant told the Public Press that arranging grocery deliveries for older neighbors during those times would be helpful. Community organizations and city agencies report that scaling up support services and creating climate-resiliency infrastructure continues to be difficult due to funding constraints.

Yesica Prado edited the photos for this piece. Zhe Wu translated the interviews with residents in single-room occupancy housing in Chinatown who spoke Taishanese and Cantonese.

About the Project

Older adults are among those most at risk during climate change-driven weather disasters. This series examines the physical and mental health effects of these events on older people and explores how these challenges are unfolding in San Francisco’s Chinatown, a neighborhood considered by the city as particularly vulnerable to the hazards of climate change.

• Q&A with Dr. Andrew Chang on the physical toll of climate change on older adults
• Q&A with Dr. Robin Cooper on the emotional toll of climate change on older adults
• Q&A with Eddie Ahn on how Brightline Defense takes on air pollution and environmental justice concerns
• Long-form story: Protecting Chinatown’s Older Adults From Climate Change Disasters Requires More Funding, Nonprofits Say
• Photo essay: For Chinatown’s Older Residents in Single-Room Occupancy Buildings, Climate Disasters Pose Greater Risks

This project was produced with the support of a journalism fellowship from the Gerontological Society of America, the Journalists Network on Generations and the Archstone Foundation.

The post For Chinatown’s Older Residents in SROs, Climate Disasters Pose Greater Risks appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.