Some providers are cutting back services even as more people queue up for free meals and bags of groceries.

“We’ve seen that line just grow and grow and grow,” said Humberto Pinon, senior health educator and communications coordinator for Curry Senior Center.

The pandemic spurred governments to pour money into nutrition programs that offered free meals and groceries, in large part to protect seniors — they no longer had to risk infection at crowded stores or fully contend with soaring grocery prices. But as emergency measures wound down, the subsidies dwindled, and recent local budget cuts to San Francisco service providers have further threatened food programs.

Nonprofits are scrambling to fill their budget holes and preserve their services in an environment where private funders are also pulling back.

“We’re just left holding the bag, to have to make up the difference through more and more fundraising,” said Winnie Yu, chief programs and compliance officer for Self-Help for the Elderly, which offers free meals and many other services like housing, case management and hospice.

“And it’s not just us. All of the nutrition providers throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and nationally have the same challenges,” Yu said.

Deficits in the millions

Local, state and federal funding cuts have forced the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank to significantly reduce services, according to an October press release. The organization faces estimated deficits of $2.1 million for last year and $6.6 million this year, said Keely Hopkins, associate director of marketing and communications.

The bank had expanded its Home-Delivered Groceries program during the pandemic to serve older adults who were more susceptible to the coronavirus, as well as other groups such as pregnant people and families with children who had disabilities. It served 13,000 households weekly at its height, but today that number is down to just under 8,000 households, said Seth Harris, the program’s associate director. By June 2025, the organization is also slated to close multiple food-distribution sites that opened in response to COVID-19, Harris said. The sites serve 18,000 households, Mission Local reported.

Budget cuts from City Hall last year forced local organization Bayview Senior Services to stop providing meals on weekends. This year it faces $500,000 in additional cuts, said Executive Director Cathy Davis, compelling it to stop offering take-out meals, though it will continue to offer home deliveries. Davis said she wishes she could scale up meal deliveries to meet demand, but the organization is “really not financially equipped to do much more unless we can increase our support.”

And the money the city gave the Curry Senior Center this year for one of its food programs, providing free weekly groceries, was about half what it gave last year, said Ruben Chavez, the organization’s deputy director. Facing a growing waitlist, staff have begun giving walk-ups groceries that are registered to people who are unable to pick them up, Pinon said.

‘Like squeezing water from a turnip’

Organizations are receiving less funding from private sources too.

With emergency pandemic measures phased out, the public perception is that nutrition programs are less essential, so organizations are receiving fewer donations from generous individuals, said Jim Oswald, director of marketing and communications at Meals on Wheels San Francisco, which delivers free meals to people with disabilities and adults aged 60 and over.

Self-Help for the Elderly is getting fewer voluntary contributions from the people who receive food through its dine-in and home-delivery programs. Before the pandemic, the nonprofit received 80% of the contributions that it budgeted for, but after the pandemic that fell to “10% on a good day,” Yu said, leading to $1 million in losses for the organization.

“Folks don’t have the capacity to give because everything is so expensive,” Yu said. “It’s like squeezing water from a turnip.”

Food insecurity for older adults — when they don’t have enough to eat and are uncertain how they will get their next meal — is not a “hot topic” for larger funders, Yu added. 

Corporate sponsors have helped fund the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank’s Home-Delivered Groceries program. When the organization lost sponsorship, it was a major factor forcing the bank to scale back the program.

Waning government contributions

In interviews with the San Francisco Public Press, many providers stopped short of criticizing City Hall for its cuts.

“The city’s done the best they can but we also understand they don’t have as much money as they used to,” Davis said.

City Hall is still struggling to financially recover from the pandemic, which created remote-work norms that emptied downtown offices and depressed commercial real estate values and tax revenue. Mayor London Breed signed a $15.9 billion budget on July 27 that closed a projected two-year deficit of nearly $800 million. 

That included shrinking the budget of the Department of Disability and Aging Services, which funds food programs for older adults and people with disabilities, said spokesperson Joe Molica. To maintain services at current levels, plans to expand certain programs were postponed. The department will invest nearly $30.5 million in food programs over the next year.

Food providers and recipients are still reeling from the loss of other public funding as the threat of COVID-19 has receded.

As the novel coronavirus threatened lives and incomes, the federal government increased funds to CalFresh, the state program formerly known as “food stamps,” giving people more money each month to buy groceries. When that emergency funding ended in April 2023, the monthly allotments decreased — for some people, by hundreds of dollars. A spike in food insecurity across the state followed, according to data from the California Association of Food Banks.

The federal government also pumped tens of millions of dollars into food programs serving San Francisco’s older adults and residents with disabilities, but most of that money stopped flowing in 2022. The main funding target had been the Great Plates Delivered program, which brought restaurant meals to homebound seniors and other adults who were especially vulnerable to COVID-19.

Disproportionate impacts of food insecurity

In the coming years, nutrition programs for older adults will only become more needed.

For decades, food insecurity in the United States has been on the rise for households with adults age 65 and older, according to a 2023 study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It is most common among seniors who live alone, at about 11% of those households, up from about 6% in 2001 — the percentage rose sharply amid the pandemic.

Adults 60 and older are the fastest-growing age group in San Francisco and will comprise over 30% of residents by 2030, according to the California Department of Finance. They can face barriers to obtaining healthy food that other groups might not, often related to their physical and financial limitations.

Mobility issues make cooking and shopping for groceries difficult for people who cannot drive or easily handle heavy bags on public transit.

Many older adults also rely on social security as their sole source of income, and those dollars don’t go as far as they used to. Grocery costs over the past four years have risen 25% even as chain supermarkets raked in enormous profits.

“When you’re living on less than $1,300 a month, you have to make some hard choices of what bills you’re going to pay,” said Oswald, of Meals on Wheels San Francisco. Nearly two-thirds of the people the organization serves live on less than that.

People with disabilities, another growing population in San Francisco, can face similar financial challenges when their sole source of income is disability insurance payments from the government. The average monthly payment is about $1,538.

Food insecurity disproportionately affects people of color. In California, mixed-race adults are the most food-insecure racial group, with 50% possessing that status, followed byAfrican Americans, at about 49%, according to a 2023 report by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.

People of color also suffer from diet-sensitive diseases at elevated levels. In San Francisco, Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders are hospitalized for diabetes, hypertension or heart disease at rates nine times higher than the citywide average, according to a 2023 report by the Department of Public Health. African Americans are hospitalized about four times above the average. These are also the city’s racial groups with the shortest life expectancies.

‘We pick up the slack’

On a recent Wednesday morning at the Dr. George W. Davis Senior Center, several older adults stood outside, waiting for the doors to open so they could choose free produce at the organization’s pilot food program, which resembled a farmers’ market. They had lined up early because they were worried they might not get all the items they needed, said LaTonya Young, a case manager for residents living on site. She added that there was enough food for everyone that morning.

The free groceries were “a big help” to Rogelio Balbin, 60, and his wife, who recently immigrated to the United States and were still looking for jobs. Balbin had been coming to the food pantry for three months, he said. The grapes and apples were two of his favorite items.

The program is funded through June 2025, and it’s unclear whether it will continue beyond that. As other organizations pare back or shutter their own food programs, it’s likely that this line will fill with more people like Balbin.

For now, “we pick up that slack,” said Young, who takes joy in her work.

“What motivates me every day,” Young said, “is the seniors and seeing their stories. Some come from being homeless but still use the vegetables, and we provide hot meals as well. It’s a wonderful thing to see what we’re doing.”

The post Budget Cuts Threaten SF Food Programs for Seniors and Adults With Disabilities appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Osbaldo Varilla-Aguilar rarely worried about his health. As a construction worker, he had enough gigs to earn more than $500 a week under the table, allowing him to rent a studio for $600 a month with two other Latinx construction workers in San Francisco’s Mission District. Despite working nearly full-time, he was barely able to make ends meet. So, when the pandemic hit, Varilla-Aguilar continued working. He got critically sick in December 2020. To this day, Varilla-Aguilar still wonders whether he got COVID on the job, or at the grocery store.

Either way, it landed him in a coma — for more than three months.

“It was such a difficult time,” said his sister Araceli Aguilar-Perez. “To see him like that, it affected me a lot.” Aguilar-Perez said the doctors recommended disconnecting Varilla-Aguilar from the ventilator after two months. The family refused. Hoping for a miracle, Aguilar-Perez talked to her unconscious brother through a hospital monitor via Zoom calls every week. Then, in March 2021, Varilla-Aguilar woke up. “When I opened my eyes, it felt like a few days [had passed],” said Varilla-Aguilar. “But they told me it had been three months … It was a shock.”

Today, more than three years after he was discharged from the hospital, Varilla-Aguilar still depends on the oxygen respirator next to his bed. He has since moved out from his shared Mission District studio, and lives in Sunnydale in a shared home with other Latinx workers.

He and his housemates are among the community that was hardest hit by COVID in San Francisco: immigrants, especially those working unprotected essential jobs. As the devastating impact of COVID in Latinx communities in the Mission District and Bayview is increasingly documented, the lingering, and sometimes extreme, symptoms of infection are much less understood.

Weeks after being discharged from the hospital, Varilla-Aguilar noticed his vision was going blurry while waiting at a bus stop. Within four hours, his left eye went permanently blind.

“[COVID] can cause many things, one of them being thrombosis,” said Dr. Hector Bonilla, a clinical infectious disease expert and associate professor at Stanford University. According to medical research, critically ill COVID patients like Varilla-Aguilar are especially at risk for severe health outcomes like thrombosis, or blood clots. “It can happen any place [in the body],” said Bonilla. “Maybe this can explain what happened in the eye.”

Combined with his deteriorated eyesight, Varilla-Aguilar also endures fatigue, brain fog and depression, which are among the more common symptoms cited by people who experience long COVID. He said he also never fully recovered the strength he lost during his months-long coma, despite a year in physical therapy.

“I don’t have the strength that I used to, and I run out of breath when I try,” said Varilla-Aguilar. “So it’s hard finding steady work.” Despite his physical weaknesses, he continues to take on physically demanding jobs like landscaping, and on occasion, roofing gigs. “I have no choice, I need to pay the rent. If I don’t do it, who else is going to help me?”

According to the 46-year-old, doctors have not been able to determine why COVID took an extreme toll on his health. Instead, doctors have prescribed him several prescription pills to help reduce some of his ongoing symptoms. Still, he believes this hasn’t been enough, and that the cost of medication is expensive. His experience is one faced by millions of long COVID patients across the country as researchers continue to look for the underlying causes of the mysterious symptoms.

Amid medical uncertainty, Varilla-Aguilar, like other sufferers of long COVID, has turned elsewhere for solutions. Previously skeptical of alternative medicine, Varilla-Aguilar agreed to his sister’s “baño de pies” after months of coping with numbness in his feet. The foot bath was infused with herbs like Santa Maria, rue, rose buds and eucalyptus, which his sister blended into a bucket of hot water. The effort was meant to reduce stress and inflammation. After a few treatments, he said he was shocked to have gained back sensations in his feet.

Since then, Varilla-Aguilar uses and advocates for natural remedies rooted in Indigenous practice, including the consumption of teas, herbs, and whole foods. He is also a member of “Somos Remedios,” a Mission-based grassroots research group that documents Latinx solutions to treating long COVID.

Though Varilla-Aguilar now makes his health a priority, he admits that he will never be the same again. “Everyday there is an effort to live, to work, and to have enough money to eat,” said Varilla-Aguilar. “I found [strength] within myself, [when] there was nowhere else to find it.”

The post After Months-Long Coma, This Latino Immigrant Worker Is Still Fighting Mysterious Symptoms appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

It’s becoming commonplace in open-intake shelters and rescue facilities across the Bay Area: The number of unadopted pets is growing; animal caretakers and staff are stretched thin; and efforts by local municipalities to provide care and comfort to every animal surrendered is becoming increasingly difficult.

California animal shelters and rescue organizations – even those across the country – are experiencing an overflow crisis. The number of stray dogs taken into shelters rose 6% from 2022 statistics and 22% from 2021, according to Shelter Animals Count. 

“I just can’t remember so many dogs coming in every single day,” said Sue James, board president of the Tri-Valley Animal Rescue. The Dublin-based volunteer organization provides medical care and fostering services to animals from the East County Animal Shelter. James said many shelters around the country “are overflowing, and it’s a tough time.”

The Solano County shelter – located just north of the Bay Area in Fairfield – currently has a two-year waiting list to surrender an animal due to capacity restrictions. Shelters have to take into account the health of the animals they keep in their facilities. When they create capacity restrictions, they must make sure every animal has its own dedicated space. 

Alexandra Kay, board president of the Bay Area Alliance for Animals in San Carlos, said another cause of shelter overflow is the lack of awareness on how much maintenance and expense is involved in taking care of a small animal. 

“It takes a little bit of time for these things to add up, to know that care is very expensive,” Kay said. “Pet food is very expensive. Flea treatment is very expensive, and that’s also saying that nothing goes wrong with your animal, like needing surgery for chronic conditions.”

James mentioned that people buying from breeders raises a problem, as well. 

“If people would learn more about the joys of adopting shelter animals and saving their lives perhaps more people would adopt versus buy,” James said. 

Euthanasia on the rise

As the number of animals in shelters increases, so do euthanasia rates. About 920,000 shelter dogs and cats are euthanized annually, according to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. 

Traditionally, rescue organizations such as the Tri-Valley Animal Rescue take on the overflow from open-intake shelters, which possess a legal obligation to take in any stray animal from their jurisdiction brought or surrendered to their facility by Animal Control or the public. This is creating a challenge for volunteers who foster in their homes animals on the euthanasia list.

Another challenge is the cost of spaying and neutering animals, said Amanda Lee of the Underdog Animal Rescue in Lafayette.

“Pretty much nowhere, in the Bay Area specifically, do we have what we call no-cost, or low-cost spay and neuter clinics,” Lee said. “We used to before COVID, and most shelters had some sort of option, but now because everything’s running just differently in general, there’s very few options.”

According to Lee, spay and neuter services at the average veterinarian clinic start at around $700. 

“The only reason that overpopulation is a problem is because there is not enough spay and neuter happening,” Lee said, adding that there is “not enough education behind it, not enough resources.”

Fostering a positive environment

Currently, the Tri-Valley Animal Rescue offers incentives for fosters until the animal gets adopted, as well as a program where volunteers can pick up animals from the East County Animal Shelter and take them for walks and socializing, and give them love. 

James said the goal is to “keep them as happy as they can be in the shelter environment while they wait to get adopted from the shelter,” James said. 

She added that her group shares with Underdog Animal Rescue the goal of removing animals from negative shelter environments and moving them to positive foster environments. 

Underdog’s Lee said that an animal shelter environment can feel “highly stressful. Just a person going in there, it’s loud, it’s cold, there’s no emotion.”

The Bay Area Alliance neuters animals for free to prevent pet overpopulation and provides care for animals on the euthanasia list. 

“There is no room for those animals to be born into the system,” said Kay of the Bay Area Alliance. “And if they were born into the system, their life would be difficult, they would just end up euthanized at the shelter in the long run.”

The pandemic ripple effect 

The COVID-19 pandemic served as a contributing factor to the overflow, with backyard breeding increasing during quarantine. However, this is not the only factor that shelters and rescue organizations are seeing.  

Dogs require a higher amount of human-animal interaction. When owners worked from home during quarantine, a dog would get used to being with the owner at all times. When the owner returned to in-person work, they weren’t able to give their dog the same amount of attention as before. At times, this resulted in owners not being able to take care of the pet. 

“What we didn’t want was to have the animals get adopted during the pandemic and then once the pandemic was done, to have them come back into the shelter,” James said. “They might have loved the animal – particularly when they’re home and [when] they needed the companionship. They learned that it can be difficult with the dog if you’re gone long, long hours.”

James pointed out that it is slightly different with cats, who are fine being on their own during the day. The problem with cats is the high feral cat population. During kitten season (from spring to summer months), when cat reproduction is at its peak, feral cats are most likely not spayed or neutered. 

One way rescue organizations are fighting to eliminate the overflow crisis is via fostering. Lee pointed out that by fostering, one could save two lives: The life of the animal they foster, as well as the one that takes the foster pet’s spot in the kennel. 

Fostering is “very similar to babysitting your friend’s dog,” Lee said. “You’re providing shelter, love, care and boundaries. If you save multiple per year, that number just keeps multiplying.” 

Additional resources:

• ASPCA – Pet Shelter Statistics
• Tri-Valley Animal Rescue
• Bay Area Alliance for Animals
• Underdog Animal Rescue 
• Shelter Animals Count

Keerthi Eraniyan is a 9th grader at California High School in San Ramon.

The post State Animal Shelters, Rescue Groups Battling Overflow Crisis appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

As I recently waited to get the latest COVID-19 booster and flu shots at my local pharmacy, I found myself thinking about how much has happened in the four years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

There was the lockdown in March 2020, the endless Zoom calls, then-President Donald Trump rambling about somehow injecting bleach or bringing sunlight inside the body to fight the virus, online conspiracy theories, political battles over masking mandates and many other jarring events.

I remembered my first COVID shot in a very quiet and solemn setting — then catching the virus months later but being down for only a couple of days as my vaccine-prepped immune system fought it off. 

“Are you Mel Baker?” a voice asked.

I snapped back to the present, in the Walgreens aisle next to the cough drops. The pharmacy technician escorted me quickly into a little side room, I rolled up my sleeve and he gave me the shots. Then he was done and gone, without even signing my vaccination card — such a vital document during the pandemic and now it was not even an afterthought. 

The card might be an apt symbol for how San Francisco, and possibly most of American society, is now treating COVID-19. It seems that we’ve pushed the pandemic into the collective “memory hole” — a place where those thoughts, feelings and traumas can be dropped, comfortably out of sight. We want to move on. That may help explain why only 69% of people in the United States finished their primary vaccine series, and just 17% got all of the boosters, according to 2023 figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

I think it’s important to look back and reflect. We have to reckon with the loss of life and the loss of trust in public institutions in order to prepare for the next pandemic. 

“Civic” and the San Francisco Public Press are working on stories about people living with long COVID.

Do you have a story to tell? Please contact us at radio@sfpublicpress.org.

It should not be so easy to forget that nearly 1.2 million people in the nation have died from COVID-19. Almost 7 million required hospitalization. Millions more live with the symptoms of long COVID. 

But this also wouldn’t be the first time that society has responded to great loss by putting something down the memory hole.

Survivors of the 1918 Great Influenza were quick to put it behind them, some historians say, and it is all but forgotten today. Only a tiny memorial in the Hope Cemetery, in Barre, Vt., marks the loss of at least 675,000 people living in the United States, when this country had about one-third of today’s population. Then, as well, there were fights over mask mandates and social distancing, though no vaccines to slow the flu’s spread. 

Many people also wanted to forget about the HIV/AIDS pandemic after new drugs made it possible for them to live with the virus. But some survivors want to remember, in order to heal from the trauma. 

In 2014, more than three decades after HIV and AIDS ripped through the country, Greg Cason started the program “Honoring Our Experience.” It brought together people who had lived through the pandemic so they could process the experience. 

“There was something powerful about creating a space for that community of people,” Cason told me. They realized the AIDS pandemic had given them “a unique and profound experience that only they would understand.”

Kristin Urquiza co-founded the group “Marked by COVID,” which helps people memorialize those who died so that society does not forget. The group is trying to have a permanent monument to the pandemic placed in Washington, D.C. 

Urquiza was inspired by activists who used the AIDS Memorial Quilt to personalize the dead and force a better government response. 

For her father, the desire to move on had deadly consequences. 

“He got sick early on in the pandemic, in the summer of 2020, right after the state of Arizona re-opened,” she said, referring to his COVID-19 infection. “The governor at the time was basically spreading misinformation that it was safe to resume normal activities.” 

“I think that the need to commemorate and memorialize allows us to move past the divisiveness and the politicization of COVID,” Urquiza said. She added that doing so is necessary to prepare for whatever comes next. 

Dr. Monica Gandhi agrees. She is the author of the book “Endemic: A Post Pandemic Playbook.” The term “endemic” applies when a disease becomes ever-present in a population. 

Today, the greatest threat to public health is the lack of trust in government institutions, she said. That’s in part a consequence of the shifting, confusing guidance that U.S. health agencies gave in response to COVID-19.

“We have the vaccine, take it, but you’re gonna need booster after booster,” she said, recalling the government’s guidance. “And oh, by the way, we’re not gonna let you go back to a normal life.” 

The U.S. government’s messaging was also in stark contrast with how it had handled the AIDS pandemic decades prior, when new drugs made the disease manageable for most people in the mid-1990s.

“We got these biomedical advances like protease inhibitors and life turned around” for the people who took them, Gandhi said. At the time, people celebrated a return to normalcy.

Her book contains a list of recommendations for the next major outbreak: 

• The government must spring into action to develop and distribute vaccines, especially to low- and middle-income nations. 
• Pharmaceutical companies should develop antivirals and other therapies to treat the infected, similar to the prescription drug Paxlovid and the infusions of monoclonal antibodies — laboratory-produced proteins intended to stimulate the body’s immune system — used to battle COVID-19. 
• Celebrate medical advances by easing restrictions, when possible. 
• Avoid what she calls “medical rituals,” like cleaning groceries with bleach or taking temperatures at airports. 
• Keep public parks and playgrounds open to avoid isolation and get people out of buildings where respiratory viruses are more likely to spread. 
• Re-open schools as soon as possible, especially after teachers have been vaccinated, to avoid learning loss and social isolation among children. 

“In this era of global warming and everything else, we’re going to get another pandemic,” Gandhi said.

Read a Q and A with Dr. Gandhi about how she and her colleagues reacted to the greatest pandemic in a century in our Reporter’s Notebook piece, “The Epidemic She Didn’t Expect to See.”

The post Reporter’s Notebook: To Prepare for the Next Pandemic, Let’s Not Forget the Last One appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Four years out, this seems like a good time to look back and reflect on those days. I’ve been working on a “Civic” episode to examine what we’ve learned so far about the COVID pandemic, what we could have done better back in 2020, and what we failed to learn from earlier pandemics, such as HIV/AIDS. That work will be published this spring as part of our current season of “Civic” podcasts. 

As we near the lockdown anniversary, I want to share part of an interview I did with Dr. Monica Gandhi, author of “Endemic: A Post Pandemic Playbook.” She is a professor of medicine and associate division chief of HIV, infectious diseases, and global medicine at UCSF and Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. She also serves as the medical director of the HIV Clinic at San Francisco General Hospital’s Ward 86.

Mel Baker: Can you think back to those first few days when the news was coming out of Wuhan and this looked like it might be a pandemic?

Dr. Monica Gandhi: So, all of the division of infectious disease and the entire Department of Medicine here at San Francisco General were crowded into our auditorium, terrified and listening to updates from Wuhan, China. We met again when we thought that there was the first case of community transmission in San Francisco. It was two days later that the shelter in place orders came down from the San Francisco Health Department because there was community transmission. 

I remember feeling faint. I didn’t think I’d see a pandemic like this in our lifetime. I was so much more familiar with HIV, but this was so unknown. Watching anything from New York was so hard and so sad. So, yeah, it was a feeling of incredible shock. And I just felt dizzy really all the time.

Baker: It must have been like, you’ve trained all your life for this moment — and here it is. One of the astonishing things you say in your book is that the numbers initially coming out of Wuhan were between 1 and 10% fatality. I remember reading a story claiming 5% mortality and sharing it in a San Francisco Public Press staff meeting — we were all on Zoom of course — and I said, “5% — you realize what that means? I mean, that’s like civilization-destroying!” If it had been 10%, the potential would have been full societal collapse.

Gandhi: You’re right. Anything with some mortality rate like 10% would be incredibly devastating and would resemble what happened in 1918 with the influenza pandemic. 

(Reporter’s note: Recent estimates for the 1918 influenza pandemic range from 50 to 100 million deaths worldwide, when the global population was about 1.8 billion people.) 

I was interested in writing this book, in a way, because I want us to have more trust in public health. A lot of this book is about increasing trust. God forbid we get another pandemic that is spread through droplets and respiratory secretions. If it has a very high mortality rate like Ebola does, we would literally have to go crazy [with public health measures.]

(Reporter’s note: The World Health Organization cites Ebola death rates of up to 90% without treatment.)

Part of the reason I waited to publish this book until COVID was declared, quote “over” — and it’s never over, but over in the pandemic sense — was to say, okay, these were the mistakes made. These were the ways that we did good things, like really fast technological advances, biomedical advances, vaccines, therapeutics. Let’s put it all together, and let’s build up our trust. Because we have no idea what the next pandemic will be. 

Baker:  There are plenty of viruses on the horizon that could potentially become pandemics. Are you hopeful that our ever expanding toolbox of vaccines and drugs will be enough for us to manage the next one? 

Gandhi: I’m profoundly hopeful about vaccines. So, I’m really hopeful how fast the vaccine got developed. I was floored. You know how I said I was feeling faint and dizzy at the beginning of the pandemic? It was around Nov. 4, 2020, when the first positive results came back, and I was elated. That day was like my birthday. I remember just feeling like wait, it took this long? This is not that long! 

So, I’m very hopeful about our technology, about how we can produce really effective vaccines and treatments quickly and well. That’s why I really do want people to start trusting doctors and public health people more, even though everyone’s tired of the pandemic right now.

The post Reporter’s Notebook: The Epidemic She Didn’t Expect to See appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

More than one month after statewide eviction protections expired on June 30, less than 4% of rent relief funds requested by San Francisco households remain unprocessed, with 55% of funds paid out. 

Over 20,600 San Francisco households had asked for almost $340 million in rent and utility assistance from both state and local COVID-19 rent relief programs as of the week of July 11, government figures show. The amount requested declined 9% between April 11 and July 11 as the state continued to weed out ineligible applications. The state stopped accepting applications on March 31, more than a year after it opened a financial aid program to cover housing debt incurred by tenants due to pandemic hardship. 

Households whose applications have been approved can stay an eviction even if they have not received payment yet; however, those with applications under review or pending applicant information — a category that applies to 1,154 applicants in San Francisco — are vulnerable to eviction.  

California passed legislation to ensure all eligible households who applied by the March 31 deadline will receive funding. Recent budget proposals would earmark additional money for rent relief. 

The following figures include San Francisco residents’ requests from California’s COVID-19 Rent Relief Program and San Francisco’s original Emergency Rental Assistance Program, which stopped taking applications in September 2021. It does not include requests from the city’s newest rent relief program, which began accepting applications April 1. 

Over $140 million in rent and utilities requested from the state program by San Franciscans had been denied as of the week of July 11. Almost 1,000 San Francisco applicants appealed their denials. 

On July 7, an Alameda County Superior Court judge barred the state from denying any more pending applications or any appeals of denials that occurred in the previous 30 days until a hearing is held to determine if applicants’ rights to due process were violated in the application review process. 

In 2021, California received $5.2 billion for emergency rental assistance funds from the federal government. The state has since acquired nearly one out of every three dollars of federal reallocations of unused funds from other states, for a total of $198 million.  

Tenants who had previously applied to the program and were awaiting rent relief were protected from eviction through June 30 for rent due between April 2020 and April 2022 under AB 2179. Under the same bill, local eviction protections passed unanimously by the Board of Supervisors in March were voided until July 1, but have since taken effect.  

In response to the state’s move to cease accepting applications, the city reopened its own rent relief program for tenants who are seeking funds for rent debt accumulated in April and beyond. So far, it has distributed close to $4.3 million in funds to 713 of the 4,415 households that have applied, and residents who need help are encouraged to apply. 

In its previous rent relief program, San Francisco assisted over 3,200 applicants with $22.8 million in relief. An additional $243,878 in requests from 53 households are yet to be processed. 

The statewide eviction moratorium, protecting tenants who could not pay rent because of COVID-19 hardship, was originally scheduled to end Jan. 31, 2021, but lawmakers extended it twice. Following the moratorium’s final end date, Sept. 30, San Francisco tenants became vulnerable to eviction for nonpayment of rent if they had not paid at least 25% of the rents due in the preceding 13 months, as well as October’s rent. 

However, California lawmakers did create some protections for renters who were unable to pay back rent after the moratorium expired. Tenants who applied to the state’s rent relief program before the deadline and were waiting on relief were protected from eviction through March 2022. State lawmakers in late March extended those protections through June 30. 

Even though they may have been barred from evicting some tenants, starting in November 2021, landlords could sue tenants to obtain unpaid rent that was due from March 2020 through September 2021. If a landlord pursues the debt in small claims court, they and the tenant must represent themselves in the courtroom. 

Are you facing eviction? Call the Eviction Defense Collaborative at (415) 659-9184 or send an email to legal@evictiondefense.org as soon as possible. The organization advises that tenants respond within five days of being served with court papers to avoid the risk of a default judgment against them.

Is your landlord suing you to recover pandemic rent debt? Go here to read our guide on how small claims court works, and how to argue your side of the case.

The post San Francisco Rent Relief Tracker appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Over the past several months, health care providers have been warning San Francisco officials that while the city was focused on fighting COVID-19, rates of HIV infection and related illnesses were creeping in the wrong direction.

From the very beginning, and throughout the HIV epidemic, which began in 1981, San Francisco led the way in prevention, care and treatment that came to be recognized around the world.

But that reputation is lagging, according to HIV activists and health care professionals in San Francisco, where more than 15,800 residents live with HIV. On March 21, dozens of HIV survivors, activists, politicians and health care providers held a die-in rally on the steps of City Hall to draw attention to the suffering among one of the city’s most vulnerable populations.

“We have people dying from HIV,” said a speaker named Junebug. “This is a reality. We can’t be silent. And sometimes you feel trapped and stigmatized. And even though it’s 2022, ignorance is so real. But how do we fight ignorance? Well, one way is we’re going to break the silence.”

Rally co-organizer Michael Rouppet, executive board member of the Harvey Milk LGBTQ Democratic Club, said that the San Francisco Department of Public Health’s 2020 HIV epidemiology report revealed the need for renewed efforts in the fight against HIV.

“I’m a long-term survivor with HIV,” Rouppet said. “We’ve survived, now, two pandemics. And what we’re seeing happening with the recent epidemiological report is that San Francisco is losing the opportunity to be a trailblazer.”

In 2016, the city launched an initiative called Getting to Zero with these goals: zero new HIV infections, zero HIV deaths and zero HIV stigma by 2025. The strategy calls for three initiatives. The first is expanding the awareness about and use of pre-exposure prophylaxis — aka Prep — a daily pill that reduces the risk of HIV infection by 99%. The second is Rapid — the Rapid ART Program Initiative for HIV Diagnoses — which allows newly diagnosed HIV patients to quickly access antiretroviral therapy through several clinical hubs around the city. The third focuses on retention — making sure patients with unstable housing or mental health issues, or who are suffering from addiction, still regularly engage in HIV care and treatment.

The strategy was showing signs of success every year. By 2019, the Department of Public Health’s Annual HIV Epidemiology Report revealed that new HIV diagnoses had dropped to a record low of 166 — down 19% from the previous year. Nearly all the cases were linked to care within a month, and 78% were virally suppressed within six months after receiving a diagnosis.

This is important because high viral loads can lead a patient to progress to AIDS. Virological suppression means that the amount of HIV in the body is minimal enough to keep the immune system working and to prevent illness.

But that viral suppression trend began reversing course during the COVID-19 pandemic, said Dr. Monica Gandhi, director of Ward 86 at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, one of the oldest HIV clinics in the country.

The number of virus-related deaths had been consistently declining until last year when it rose to 160 from 137 the previous year. That reversal may be linked to the shelter-in-place order issued on March 16, 2020, Gandhi said. It meant that in-person care was converted to telephone medicine. And for patients who have substance use issues or are marginally housed, finding a quiet, private space to call a health care provider can be challenging.

Prior to the pandemic, 75% of city residents with HIV were virologically suppressed. That went down to 70% during the pandemic. And among the homeless population, it fell from 39% to 20%.

“We saw a lot of people being admitted to the hospital with opportunistic infections and who were quite ill because their viral loads were up and subsequently their T cells were down,” Gandhi said. “So, the slippage was very obvious.”

Higher viral loads can also lead to higher rates of HIV infection in the community. It remains to be seen whether the rate of infection has gone up because testing rates plummeted by nearly half during the pandemic.

“I will say, anecdotally, we’ve seen a lot of new diagnoses at Ward 86,” Gandhi said. “Many of these new diagnoses are in women and populations that we haven’t seen so much before. And so now, only with systematic testing, will we know the impact of transmission.”

CORRECTION 06/02/2022: Deletes incorrect reference to Hepatitis C at top of story.

The post While SF Fought COVID, HIV Prevention Stalled appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

If state lawmakers don’t act fast, tenants across California will become vulnerable to eviction next month for rent debts they accumulated during the pandemic.

Amid increasing calls for Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature to avert an eviction wave, the San Francisco Public Press held a live panel discussion Wednesday about how the state got to this moment and what comes next. The Public Press spoke with Ora Prochovnick, director of litigation and policy at the Eviction Defense Collaborative, which provides free legal aid to people facing eviction, and Shanti Singh, communications and legislative director at Tenants Together, a statewide coalition of tenant-rights groups.

“We are definitely facing a serious crisis,” Singh said, adding that if tenant protections expire, “you’re going to see a lot of people who incurred rental debt during COVID who will be left effectively defenseless.”

The main takeaways:

• Tenants who have struggled to pay rent because of COVID-19 hardships should immediately apply for rent assistance. Qualified applicants will receive financial aid, though it may take months for the money to arrive.
• Applicants for rent relief cannot be evicted for their pandemic rent debts while they await a decision from the government. That protection expires March 31, which is also the state’s deadline to apply for rent aid.
• Multiple organizations, as well as San Francisco Mayor London Breed, have called on the state to extend eviction protections beyond March.
• Tenant advocates are worried that the state will override protections recently passed at the local level. Unless that happens, San Francisco tenants facing COVID-19 hardships will be shielded from eviction for unpaid rents due in or after April.

Eviction protections are complex, and tenants can better understand them by checking this Public Press flow chart.

Are you facing eviction? Call the Eviction Defense Collaborative at (415) 659-9184 or send an email to legal@evictiondefense.org as soon as possible. The organization advises that tenants respond within five days of being served with court papers to avoid the risk of a default judgment against them.

Is your landlord suing you to recover pandemic rent debt? Go here to read our guide on how small claims court works, and how to argue your side of the case.

The post ‘A Serious Crisis’ — Experts Discuss Expiring Eviction Protections appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

As encampment fires spiked in Oakland and San Francisco during the first year of the pandemic, they fell by half in the Rangers community to just six. One reason for the disparity? The Rangers beefed up fire precautions. The community’s last tent fire occurred 18 months ago, and when a vehicle caught fire in December 2021, residents were prepared. They used fire extinguishers to put out the blaze.

A mother of three who was caught under a freeway overpass in San Francisco’s Glen Park neighborhood didn’t have the good fortune to live in a community with the Rangers’ tools and preparation. A February fire killed her and severely injured three others.

Encampment fires are a fact of life due to the exposed conditions unhoused residents live in, and have led to painful consequences for residents of encampments like the pair of sites along a freeway exit in Berkeley known as Seabreeze, who were removed by state officials last summer after a series of fires. But the Rangers’ camp demonstrates that there’s hope for controlling these incidents without official intervention. The key to their success has been fire preparedness, including measures like installing smoke alarms and keeping fire extinguishers on hand, according to Derrick Soo, leader of the Rangers community.

“Fire safety measures are a necessity, including at encampments, because every human life is valuable,” said Paul-Kealoha Blake, a member of Berkeley’s Homeless Commission and a volunteer with the nonprofit Consider the Homeless! “Encampment fires are an issue because they endanger both the resident of the structure that’s on fire and endangers the encampment.”

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About a year ago, former Berkeley councilmember Cheryl Davila pushed to create an official program to address encampment fires. Davila proposed using existing homeless services funding to distribute fire extinguishers and fire prevention tools through social service providers. The City Council tabled the proposal in March 2021.

Fire preparedness is essential “to protect the safety of our people and preemptively stop the spread of preventable fires,” said Davila in a report to the council last year.

As an example of work the city could build on, she pointed to outreach done by residents and homeless advocacy nonprofits that have distributed chemical fire extinguishers to people living in tents and vehicles.

Those tools might have helped residents of a large Wood Street encampment in Oakland, where multiple vehicles caught fire on March 1, including an RV. Within a week, another encampment less than a mile away also went up in flames. Fires increased 14% in Oakland during the first year of the pandemic to 611 from the previous year’s 535, tent encampment fires are projected to decline slightly in the second year.

During the first year of the pandemic, fire incidents associated with homeless encampments in Berkeley rose at a similar rate, climbing 18% to 133 from 113 the previous year. About a third of those fires were at the Seabreeze Camp on the Interstate 80 University Avenue exit, where passersby reported smoke, cooking, trash fires and tent fires.

Residents at the Seabreeze camp used extinguishers to control some of their fires, but each time one was used, it had to be replaced or refilled, which made it difficult for volunteers to abate all fires without support from the city.

In this camp and many other locations, residents approach fires differently than the Rangers.

On the edge of the freeway

On a cold, windy evening at Seabreeze Camp, Mama West looked for spare poles to fix her sleeping quarters and prevent her tent from blowing away. 

For the past six years, Mama West lived on this strip of land along the University Avenue freeway exit in Berkeley. Residents and advocates named the community after a nearby market. Seabreeze is also an apt descriptor: The winds can reach 30 miles per hour here near the Berkeley Marina, and fire is a necessity to maintain warmth.

As the sun set, her partner, Drew, got ready to start a blaze in their fire pit, a metal tub wide and high enough to shield a sizable bonfire. He found fuel from a neighbor, Shawna, who keeps stacks of chopped-up pallets in front of her tent.

In early July 2021, the Seabreeze Camp was scheduled to be dismantled by Caltrans due to the growing issues with trash and fires. Berkeley city staff also cited problems like crime and domestic disputes.

On Aug. 9, Gov. Gavin Newsom joined the transportation agency staff in clearing part of the encampment before holding a briefing on his California Comeback Plan, which dedicates $12 billion to housing, shelter and services for people experiencing homelessness, plus $50 million for local governments to resolve encampments.

After the cleanup at the “downstairs” section of Seabreeze where people camped under the freeway, “11 residents accepted services,” said Will Arnold, a spokesman for Caltrans. Several others were displaced onto city streets without securing housing services.

A week later, when the Seabreeze “upstairs” cleanup took place, another 17 residents who lived on the islands along the University exit and Frontage Road had nowhere to go. They relocated to city sidewalks and a nearby freeway exit. About two dozen, including Mama West, moved into hotel rooms through Project Roomkey, which places unhoused residents in hotels. Two people accepted a four-person tent at the 24-hour Horizon Transitional Village shelter, according to a Berkeleyside report and a reporter’s visit to the indoor tent site.

Those who declined shelter beds pointed to bans on guests, pets, cooking and substance use. In addition, they said, showers are available only twice a week and lights stay on all the time. “Several people have turned down Horizon because their outside tents are bigger than the indoor tent that sits on the concrete floor inside,” wrote activist and civil rights attorney Andrea Henson in an email. “For some with severe disabilities and chronic pain this makes a difference.”

A civil rights lawsuit filed against Caltrans in August on behalf of Seabreeze encampment charged that some “did not receive any offer of housing at all” and others “had disabilities that prevented them from accessing alternative shelter.” The plaintiffs won a preliminary injunction allowing them to remain at the former Shellmound camp, located at the Ashby freeway exit, for six months. Caltrans has appealed. On March 23, the injunction is set to expire, and another hearing is scheduled to determine a four-month extension. Plaintiffs also ask to return to the Seabreeze camp, saying it’s a safer and more accessible location to connect remaining residents to housing services.

Mitigating fire risk

After gathering fuel, Drew loaded the fire pit with wood scraps and a Burger King bag filled with cardboard clamshell containers and paper wrappers. His torch lighter ignited the flames, and he placed a metal rack with an empty skillet on top. But he forgot the water he intended to boil, and stepped into the darkness of the tent, searching for a water jug.

“Do not leave your skillet unattended without water!” yelled Mama West when she spotted the pan. She threw it in the sand and covered the fire pit with the skeleton of a metal chair, protecting other items from coming close to the open flames.

In 2021, Mama West’s tent has caught fire three times as winds spread the flames from fires set by neighbors for cooking and warmth. Once, a small barbecue grill was knocked from the cooking table.

About a month before this dinner, Mama West lost one of her puppies in a tent fire that began while she stepped outside to make a cup of tea in her fire pit. Suddenly, smoke poured from her tent, and she dashed inside to rescue her six puppies and adult dog. She doesn’t know what set the tent ablaze.

The greatest loss for her was not her personal identification documents and other belongings, but her dog Patches and the puppies she considered “grandbabies.” Berkeley’s Animal Control      put her dogs up for adoption and charged Mama West with animal endangerment in the death of her puppy. She fought to get the charge dropped, but her animals were not returned.

Seabreeze Camp residents successfully fought for years against Caltrans efforts to clear the parcel where they lived, but their eventual displacement felt inevitable. The agency’s policy calls for evicting residents immediately when encampments pose an imminent threat to safety or relocating them over a longer timeline when the risk is high but not critical.

“Immediate threats include modifications to structures that increase the risk of collapse, encampments that physically block traffic or pathways and put people in the encampments or the traveling public at risk of imminent danger,” Hector Chichilla, a Caltrans spokesman, wrote in an email, adding that fire risk may also fall under this category. 

The pandemic put a crimp in the encampment removal policy. Cleanups fell to less than a quarter of their pre-pandemic numbers in 2020 before rebounding in 2021.

In Berkeley, the most common fire calls associated with unhoused individuals and encampments are survival-related fires — those used for cooking and warming — the notes in Berkeley Fire Department reports show. Warming fires almost doubled to 35 during the first year of the pandemic, while cooking fires fell by about half to 33. Advocates and homeless communities concerned about fires say the city could do more to help them, especially given its efforts elsewhere.

The Berkeley Fire Department has often made donations of surplus equipment and vehicles to residents in need in countries as far afield as Argentina and South Africa. They have also donated locally, helping the Berkeley School District, Berkeley Boosters Association and the Northern California city of McCloud.

Berkeley does run an emergency weather shelter, but by December 2021, it was at capacity, hosting only 19 residents due to COVID-19 restrictions. In late January, the city also relocated 27 unhoused people to hotel rooms at the Berkeley Inn through a special winter housing program, but less than a month later, almost all were returned to the streets, where temperatures dropped below 40 degrees. Many lacked tents, as their property was seized during sweeps Jan. 26 and Feb. 1.

“We don’t have enough shelter space,” said Blake of the homeless commission. “It’s all full. And the Horizon shelter has no heat.”

Dinner al fresco

As the moon lit up the night sky above their tent, Drew returned with a clear jug and put the skillet back on the fire rack, boiling water for soup with instant noodles. Mama West heated a foil plate of prepared rice, broccoli and teriyaki chicken from a homeless-services nonprofit.

While the food warmed up, Mama West stashed her groceries from weekly donations in the mended tent to keep them safe from rats. Plastic bags and bins filled half the tent, leaving the edge of the mattress open for the two to sit. After she and Drew reorganized the food bins, Mama West put her prized keyboard back inside. She loves making music.

With the food secured, dinner was ready. They sat on the mattress and laid out dishes to share on top of their metal ice chest. Mama West dug into the chicken teriyaki plate with her fingers and Drew slurped his chicken noodles, watching the fire crackle.  

Fire prevention: community solutions

In deep East Oakland, leader Derick Soo set up a fire safety system for the 77th Avenue Rangers and advocated for temporary access to a nearby fire hydrant. Kyle Mitchell, a lawyer and Soo’s friend, helped out. 

Mitchell has purchased fire suppression tools for the Rangers like extinguishers, alarms, Thermoses and power banks. The power banks allow people to charge devices and provide light, so residents can avoid the danger of open flames or wildcat hookups to electricity poles. He also distributed 20-gallon jugs of water to unhoused residents throughout Oakland, and advocated for water access at encampments to become an official city program.

For fire suppression, smoke detectors are effective, and with 10-year batteries, will last a long time. Because fire extinguishers are expensive to buy and refill, Mitchell taught unhoused residents how to cheaply refill them with pressurized water and soap. They can be refilled at gas stations or with a bicycle pump, but they are heavy – and this soap-and-water mixture won’t work on electrical or gas fires, although those incidents rarely occur at encampments due to their lack of amenities.

Soo uses a power solar grid that holds 4,000 watts with eight batteries, and a diesel generator for extra power to charge residents’ devices and two community refrigerators at night. Diesel is much less flammable than gasoline.

For heat, camp residents use gadgets fueled by propane because the power required to generate heat is more than any power bank or individual solar grid can provide. Propane is portable, abundant and long-lasting compared to other alternatives.

Fire prevention tools are distributed to Oakland residents living in homes and apartments, but on the streets, unhoused residents are responsible for devising their own solutions. Nonprofits and volunteers like Mitchell work to bridge that gap and distribute these much-needed essentials.

These tools can make a difference, especially when it’s cold. During the pandemic, fire incidents surged in winter, when temperatures dropped. Oakland averaged about 70 fires per month from November 2020 to March 2021, compared with 58 a year earlier. In 2021, fires continued to climb, spiking to 99 in March –– the highest monthly incident rate in the last three years.

The numbers are likely an underestimate, as Oakland Fire Department reports showed only encampment fires, not trash fires, vehicle fires, or other types of fires connected to unhoused residents.

Camp residents have identified several affordable tools and other alternatives for safe heating, like a portable propane heater that turns off when tipped over, or a diesel air heater. Soo heats his home with a turkey air fryer running on a small propane tank that can last him a month, but it costs him a whopping 60% more than a year ago.

Soo used to pay $15 for a 20-pound refill. Now he pays $24. The coronavirus pandemic increased demand for outdoor activities and recreational camping, and portable propane tanks were also often out of stock. Other options when propane is not available and money is tight are bottles filled with hot water or heated stones, according to Mitchell.

Soo has experimented with fire retardant paint on fabric and plywood surfaces. But even with these modifications, tents are not very resistant to any of the elements. 

“Typically, here on this street, tents last about two months because of the wind,” said Soo. “Wind just tears them up. Tents don’t hold very well even when you put tarps on them.”

Because of tents’ minimal weather protection and lack of security, Soo is designing Conestoga huts for the Rangers. These tiny homes, which look like the back of a covered wagon, will be built on a platform and have electricity, hot water, windows, showers and a mini kitchen. Each home has a water tank and infrared water heater. The rounded roof/wall uses plastic for waterproofing and tar paper for fire resistance under a heavy-duty tarp.

While these homes can be a solution to providing safe shelter, they are still temporary. Since 2016, Soo has been advocating for the sanctioning of his camp, and he also helps camp residents get connected to housing services. By March, the occupancy of the camp had dwindled down to half, and the city canceled their mobile shower service. But this has not defeated him, and Soo built a solar shower.

“Camps are a necessity because some folks have only known violent streets,” said Soo. “People don’t know a village community.”

The post Grassroots Nonprofits and Homeless Communities Create Their Own Fire Prevention Solutions appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Local governments throughout the state will have to figure out how to help people still struggling to cover rent as the economy continues its climb back to pre-pandemic levels.

“We are working diligently with our community-based program partners on a public information and outreach campaign to get all eligible tenants and landlords to apply and respond to the program by March 31st,” said Audrey Abadilla, spokesperson for the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development.

The state has committed “to provide support to eligible applicants” who apply for rent relief by then, according to a government memo the Public Press obtained and that Abadilla verified as authentic.

“It is critical applicants act as quickly as possible to complete their application and reply to any requested action or response,” the memo said, because that would allow quicker processing.

People can apply for financial aid to cover past or future rent and utility fees, going back to April 2020.

Though the statewide eviction moratorium ended in October, rent-relief applicants have retained eviction protections while they awaited a decision from the government.

Those protections will also terminate at the end of March, meaning that landlords will be able to evict renters with outstanding debts beginning April 1. To avoid eviction, by that date tenants must pay at least 25% of what was due from the beginning of September 2020 to the end of September 2021, as well as 100% of what came due since then.

Potentially thousands of San Franciscans will still be awaiting payments by April, leaving them vulnerable to eviction, based on a recent Public Press analysis. Renters across the state could face the same risk, according to a survey published Tuesday by Tenants Together, a statewide coalition of tenant-rights groups.

San Franciscans have continued to apply for rent relief in recent weeks, though the pace has slowed compared with earlier in the pandemic, according to the Public Press’ Rent Relief Tracker. The government had received $298.4 million in requests and paid out $115.7 million by last week.

Throughout California, requests totaled at least $7.1 billion by mid-February, and the state had paid out at least $2.1 billion from more than $5 billion available, according to data from the California Department of Housing and Community Development. Those figures do not count requests and payments processed by locally operated rent-relief programs throughout California.

Last month, the Legislature passed a budget bill that authorizes the state to pour more money into the rent relief program if the volume of eligible applications merits it.

Eviction protections for people facing COVID-19 hardships are complex, and the Public Press has created a flow chart to help tenants understand their rights.

Are you facing eviction? Call the Eviction Defense Collaborative at (415) 659-9184 or send an email to legal@evictiondefense.org as soon as possible. The organization advises that tenants respond within five days of being served with court papers to avoid the risk of a default judgment against them.

Is your landlord suing you to recover pandemic rent debt? Go here to read our guide on how small claims court works, and how to argue your side of the case.

The post California’s Rent-Relief Program to Stop Taking Applications March 31 appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.