This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the San Francisco Public Press. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Tabitha Davis had just lost twins in childbirth and was facing homelessness. The 23-year-old had slept on friends’ floors for the first seven months of her pregnancy, before being accepted to a temporary housing program for pregnant women. But with the loss of the twins, the housing program she’d applied to live in after giving birth — intended for families — was no longer an option.

After several weeks in a hotel, which a prenatal program for homeless people had paid for while she recovered, Davis went to a brick building in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood to apply for a permanent, subsidized housing unit. There, a case worker she’d never met asked her more than a dozen questions to determine if she was eligible.

Some of the things he asked: Have you ever been sexually assaulted while experiencing homelessness? Have you ever had to use violence to keep yourself safe while experiencing homelessness? Have you ever exchanged sex for a place to stay? “Those are the questions that really bothered me,” she said. “Whatever my experience is of being sexually assaulted, or what I had to do in order to stay safe on the streets, shouldn’t pertain to whether or not I deserve housing.”

That day, Davis was informed that the score she’d been given based on her answers to the questionnaire wasn’t high enough to qualify for permanent supportive housing. It was a devastating blow after an already traumatizing few months. “I thought, ‘You put me on the streets right now, mentally, I will kill myself,’” she said.

What Davis encountered with those questions is called coordinated entry, a system designed to match people experiencing homelessness with housing. In San Francisco’s system, applicants are asked 16 core questions, and their answers are given a point value which is then tallied. The total number is intended to reflect applicants’ vulnerability; currently, a score of 118 points means they qualify for one of the city’s permanent supportive housing units, which is subsidized by the government and comes with wraparound supportive services. Applicants with lower scores may qualify for rent assistance or a bus ticket out of town, but if they want housing in San Francisco, they have to wait six months before taking the test again.

Though the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing has an annual budget of $598 million and the majority of that is spent on housing, there simply aren’t enough permanent supportive housing units available to accommodate the thousands of homeless people in San Francisco. (A 2019 survey estimated the number of homeless people at more than 8,000.) The threshold for approval is directly tied to housing availability, and right now, roughly one-third of people who take the assessment score high enough to qualify.

“It’s really prioritizing scarce resources,” said Cynthia Nagendra, the department’s deputy director of planning and strategy. “There has to be some prioritization, unfortunately, until we have some housing resource for every single person.”

Coordinated entry was meant to be a more objective tool than the previous system, which offered resources on a first-come, first-served basis. In contrast, coordinated entry aims to determine who is most vulnerable and who should therefore get access to the limited supply of available housing.

Through records requests, the San Francisco Public Press and ProPublica obtained the questions and scoring algorithm used in San Francisco’s coordinated entry questionnaire, which has never before been made public. The news organizations solicited feedback on that tool from front-line workers, academics and people experiencing homelessness. Some raised objections to how the questions were phrased. Others pointed out inequities in the scoring. And many more criticized the way it was administered, suggesting that the process itself — in which applicants are asked very personal questions by a stranger — might make it unlikely that already-distressed people would answer accurately.

In our interviews, it became clear that the survey fails to identify many of the vulnerabilities it was intended to catch. And what was supposed to be an objective tool winds up, as a result of how it’s written and administered, making it harder for certain populations — immigrants, young people and transgender people, among others — to get indoors, experts and advocates told us.

For Davis, that meant some of the hardships she was experiencing were overlooked. For instance, there was no question in the survey that would give her points for the losses she had just suffered. Failing to qualify for housing resulted in weeks of stress and instability while she recovered from the trauma of losing her children. Eventually, with the assistance of case workers at several organizations, she found a place in a transitional housing program for youth. But being told, during the lowest moment of her life, that she did not qualify for permanent housing left its mark. “It made me feel invalid in my own experience,” she said.

In response to these critiques, homelessness department spokesperson Denny Machuca-Grebe said in an email, “I want to make it clear that anyone who comes to our department for help should NOT ‘be left out.’” For those deemed ineligible for housing, he said the city offers other services; these may include shelter placements, relocation help and rental assistance. In general, the department had not responded to requests for comments about individual cases in the past, and it didn’t comment on Davis’ experience.

Excluded Populations

Coordinated entry was first implemented in 2018, after the Department of Housing and Urban Development began requiring regions that apply for federal homelessness funds to create a tool “to ensure that people who need assistance the most can receive it in a timely manner.” Much of the rest of the country adopted a tool called the Vulnerability Index, Service Prioritization Decision Assistance Tool. San Francisco developed its own set of questions, intended to determine which unhoused people are in greatest need of a home.

In the four years since the requirement was implemented, some cities and counties have reviewed their coordinated entry systems and uncovered trends such as significant racial or gender biases. A 2019 analysis of data from Oregon, Virginia, and Washington found that even though people of color were overrepresented in the homeless population, they tended to score significantly lower than their white counterparts, making it harder for them to access permanent supportive housing. The study recommended that HUD consider revising its coordinated entry guidelines to ensure that communities “equitably allocate resources and services.” This year, San Francisco started its own analysis of its coordinated entry process, and it expects to present the findings before the end of the year.

Nearly every expert we interviewed suggested that the experiences of people of color may not be fully reflected in their answers to the coordinated entry questions. San Francisco’s own data shows Black, white, Asian and Indigenous people being approved for housing at roughly equal rates. But Nagendra, from the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, is looking into concerns that conditions that often make people of color more vulnerable are not being fully captured and that the numbers may not tell the whole story. “When you look at quantitative data, ours will show we are actually prioritizing people who are Black at an equitable rate. But when we talk to people, they might tell a different story,” she said.

Courtney Cronley, an associate professor of social work at the University of Tennessee who has written about racial bias in coordinated entry systems, pointed to one of San Francisco’s questions as an example of possible bias in action: “How many times have you used crisis services in the past year (for example, mental health crisis services, hospital, detox, suicide prevention hotline)?”

“Black people are less likely to use formal health care systems,” Cronley said. “They’ll reach out to family and friends and social support systems rather than going to the doctor. The doctor is not someone that they necessarily trust. These questions are biased towards persons who are white in our communities and biased against African Americans.”

The Department of Homeslessness and Supportive Housing has also said that very few transgender and gender-nonconforming people have been taking coordinated entry assessments. In a December 2021 meeting, Megan Owens, the department’s coordinated entry manager, presented demographic data on who was being assessed. She said that the number of people reporting those gender identities during assessments is “lower than in the best estimates of the homeless population.” In March, city data showed that transgender and gender-nonconforming people constituted only 2% of those taking assessments to try to get housing.

Critics of San Francisco’s coordinated entry system also say that one of the most basic questions, “How long have you been homeless this time?” leads to the exclusion of immigrants and younger people.

That question might sound simple, but it’s difficult for many people to say how long they’ve been homeless — and answering accurately can be critical to getting housing. That’s because San Francisco’s algorithm grants people more points the longer they have been unhoused: A person who has been homeless for more than 15 years receives 12 more points than someone who’s been homeless for one to two years. Anyone who says they’ve been homeless for less than a year gets zero points on this question. (On average, adults who qualify for housing in San Francisco report being homeless for six years.)

Credit:
Daniel Liévano for ProPublica

Gayle Roberts, the chief development officer at Larkin Street Youth Services, a nonprofit serving young homeless people in San Francisco, said it is “common knowledge among social service providers that it [the coordinated entry system] is weighted heavily toward serving the needs of those who have experienced homelessness the longest.”

Laura Valdéz, executive director of Dolores Street Community Services, is one of several nonprofit leaders who questioned the efficacy of the system. “For many newly arrived immigrants, the way they literally interpret that question is since they’ve been here in San Francisco,” she explained. “So their scores are really low in comparison to other folks. But a large percentage of our immigrant community were unhoused in their home country.”

Valdéz also said the coordinated entry system can lead people living outdoors to accrue significant trauma before they qualify for permanent supportive housing. The program, she said, “requires people to stay in that system that is creating greater and greater harm to them for them to be able to score higher.”

The duration-of-homelessness question can also be tricky for homeless youth, defined as those between 18 and 24. In a 2019 count, they accounted for 14% of the city’s homeless population. Many young people are intermittently homeless, making it difficult to calculate the full length of that experience, said Dr. Colette Auerswald, a professor of community health sciences at the University of California, Berkeley.

“Maybe they stayed on their friend’s couch for five days and they were on a bus last night,” she said. “So they may be like, ‘Well, one day,’ but actually they’ve been in an unstable situation for a really long time.”

San Francisco’s homelessness department acknowledges this bias against young people seeking housing. In an attempt to address the age gap, the department included two questions that are only scored for people ages 18 to 24: “In the place you are staying, are you experiencing physical or sexual violence?” and, “In the last 12 months have you traded sex for a place to stay?” If they answer yes to either one, it provides a significant bump in their overall score: 12 points for each question. But if anyone older than 24 who has been sexually assaulted or has traded sex for a place to stay gets no points at all. (While the answers to these questions are only scored for 18-to-24-year-olds, they are asked of every person who takes the assessment. When asked why these questions were asked of people who could not receive points for answering, the department said it was for “data gathering.”)

Machuca-Grebe, the department spokesperson, explained that the question was added because “we have found that without the score placed on the questions for youth, they would be seriously under prioritized — leading to a disproportionate exclusion of youth.”

Davis was in the 18-to-24 age range when she first took her coordinated entry assessment, so those questions were scored. But she does not believe they should be asked at all.

“There’s not a single person that I can think of that is female-presenting that hasn’t been sexually assaulted while experiencing any part of their life, not just homelessness,” she said. “So you’re telling me that because someone hasn’t been raped, that she doesn’t get housing, and then she stays on the streets and then does get raped? And now she can? No, that doesn’t make sense.”

Questions From a Stranger

It is not just the wording and scoring of the questions that give experts pause. They also said that the way the assessment is given can fail to accurately assess a person’s vulnerability.

In San Francisco, all questions must be read by a trained staff member from one of the nonprofits that contract with the city to conduct the assessment. The questions are pulled up on an iPad or a computer. A drop-down menu offers a prewritten set of answers to select from, and the score is automatically added up by the software.

Coordinated entry assessments are frequently conducted in semi-public places, like a bustling office or a street corner under a highway. Applicants rarely have a preexisting relationship with the person asking the questions, and, due to understaffing at many nonprofits conducting assessments and the high number of people in need, there may not be time to build one.

“You really need to have interviewers establish rapport and relationship with the client prior to conducting or doing any assessment, because if they don’t trust interviewers, they’re just not going to talk to them,” said Cronley, the University of Tennessee professor.

The stakes are high: When an interviewer chooses the “Client refused” option from the pull-down menu of potential answers, the applicant receives zero points for that question.

Valdéz also sees lack of trust as a problem in the communities she serves. “Many of us would not feel comfortable speaking about our personal traumas, in 45 minutes, to a complete stranger,” she said. “My family experienced homelessness, and I can tell you right now, if I’m sitting in front of someone that I’ve just met, it is very unlikely that I would share that in an assessment.”

This was a concern voiced by Auerswald, the Berkeley professor, about the youth questions on violence and trading sex for a place to stay. She said the phrasing would not secure accurate results.

“My worries here is that a lot of young people are gonna say no,” she said. “And obviously, here, they really need to say yes. It’s one of their only hopes at prioritizing for housing, even though it’s a super traumatizing question.”

People’s personal interpretation of each question can affect their answers, Auerswald said. “A lot of young people who are trafficked would say no to this question,” she said. “They’d say, ‘Well I wasn’t raped, it wasn’t violent. I have someone taking care of me and I am paid or given something in exchange.’ Definitions of violence are different now. Violence is a lot of things. You can have sex under threat of violence, even if you don’t have a mark on you.”

Cronley said racial bias in child welfare and policing plays a similar role in determining how forthcoming people are willing to be when answering these questions.

“Black women are going to be more likely to fear that their children will be taken away from them if they report illicit behaviors, or if they report any sort of mental health challenges,” she said. “If you’ve got kids and you’re homeless and you’ve traded sex for money, you’re not going to tell them that you did that. No way.”

Credit:
Daniel Liévano for ProPublica

Davis had enough experience with systems for homeless people that she knew not answering the questions was not an option. “I had no choice but to answer them or I couldn’t get into housing,” she said.

For some, though, the experience is so uncomfortable that they drop out of the process entirely. A native of El Salvador, Luis Reyes has lived in San Francisco for 30 years and been homeless for 10 of those. Reyes said he has taken the coordinated entry questionnaire twice — once in 2019 and again in 2020, right before the pandemic hit. Like Davis, he went to the brick building at 123 10th St., the city’s largest drop-in center for these assessments.

“There was a guy who did the assessment in Spanish,” Reyes said, through an interpreter, of his 2020 interview. “‘Are you incapacitated? Are you a senior citizen? Do you have AIDS?’” Reyes remembers him asking. “He even asked me if I was gay,” he recalls — a question that is not included in the coordinated entry assessment. Reyes answered no to all of the above and says he was then told he didn’t qualify for housing.

The experience discouraged Reyes, who was living in a shelter at the time of his second assessment. He decided not to take the questionnaire again. He has spent some months sleeping in his car, and more recently he stayed with his girlfriend at a senior living facility. But she’s not allowed to have guests, and soon he will have to return to the streets.

System Under Review

Across the country, cities and counties are starting to critically examine their coordinated entry systems. Last year, eight communities, including Chicago and Austin, Texas, studied the data on their coordinated entry results and discovered significant racial disparities. Both cities revised their systems using community feedback, redesigned their processes and wound up approving more people of color for services.

In San Francisco, 17,000 coordinated entry assessments were conducted between the launch of the system in 2018 and the middle of 2021. This year, the city announced it would be undertaking its own review to determine if the government is serving people equitably and if the housing options offered are a good fit for those in need. Nagendra, at the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, is overseeing the city’s review.

“If things have gotten away from our overall intention and design, we can look at those things and figure out where we need to redesign, refresh, whatever it might be,” she said in an interview.

The city’s approach to its review is driven by data and leans heavily on interviews, which are being conducted in focus groups and through outreach at encampments. The agency plans to make the research findings public in late May.

Critics would like to see a more radical overhaul of the coordinated entry system and the way it is pegged only to the supply of housing.

Joe Wilson, executive director of Hospitality House, a community center for homeless people in the Tenderloin neighborhood, where the majority of the city’s unhoused population resides, explains the problem with that approach.

“This algorithmic-based decision-making process is designed to keep the problem small enough so we don’t have to truly address it,” he said in an interview. “They’re not filling housing based on need, they’re assigning it based on capacity. It is not logical, it’s not consistent, and it’s not effective.”

For example, families used to be required to hit 40 points to qualify for housing. In February, the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing doubled that number to 80 points due to a shortage of family-specific housing. Owens, the coordinated entry manager at the department, estimated that the change would reduce the number of families who qualified for housing to between 50% and 60% of those taking the assessment, down from 75%.

Critics of the coordinated entry program have been proposing solutions as the city begins its review. In a February report, the Coalition on Homelessness, San Francisco’s largest nonprofit advocating for homeless people, recommended that the city “develop an assessment tool that categorizes people according to what type of housing would be the most suitable for their situation, instead of assigning them an eligibility score. This will tell us what type of housing and assistance is needed, versus how much housing we have.”

The organization also proposes letting case workers and housing providers work together to identify the best place to house an applicant. This approach, the Coalition argues, would create “a real-time housing placement system” that would more quickly bring vulnerable people indoors. This could help address the city’s chronic difficulty in filling the vacant units it has available: As the San Francisco Public Press and ProPublica reported in February, 1,633 people who had been approved for housing were still waiting to move in — some for months — even as more than 800 apartments sat vacant. At least 400 people had been on the waitlist for more than a year.

Child Advocates Sue New York Over Proposed Shadow Foster Care System

For those working on the front lines of the homelessness crisis, change to the coordinated entry system can’t come fast enough. Last July, in a meeting with the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, Wilson told a story about a client his organization had helped.

“We have an 86-year-old woman who has been homeless for 14 years who has not been prioritized for housing,” he said, noting that she took a coordinated entry assessment but did not hit the 118-point threshold for housing.

A key insight from that experience, he said: Algorithmic decision-making “moves us away from the absolute necessity of human judgment and human interaction in human services.”

The post San Francisco Rations Housing by Scoring Homeless Folks’s Trauma. By Design, Most Fail to Qualify. — ProPublica appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the San Francisco Public Press. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

At a bustling makeshift flea market on a street corner in San Francisco’s Mission District, Ladybird sells her wares. One afternoon in December, wearing a black hoodie, faded black jeans embroidered with roses and carefully applied makeup, she biked three blocks from the city-sanctioned tent encampment where she lives, carrying a bag with a still-sealed Minnie Mouse stationery kit and a brand-new pair of brown high heels. Almost immediately, she was approached by a man interested in buying the stationery kit to give to his daughter for Christmas. “Eight dollars,” she said. He talked her down to five, and a deal was made.

During a pause in bartering, a text message appeared on her phone. “I’ve been assigned a case manager! It happened this morning,” she exclaimed, calling over her friend Johnny to tell him the news. “I’m going to be moving indoors in the next couple weeks.”

Ladybird said she hasn’t lived indoors in seven years. This winter, she said, she finally got approved for a permanent supportive housing unit — a subsidized room with health, employment and social services, paid for by the city and federal government. But despite her optimism, that didn’t mean the end of her wait. In San Francisco, the path from homelessness to housing can take as long as two years, and that’s for someone lucky enough to make it onto the waitlist.

San Francisco’s struggle with housing its homeless population is notorious across the nation. Multiple mayors have promised to get the crisis under control. The city’s dedicated homelessness department, created in 2016, has an annual budget of $598 million — a sum that has more than tripled in its short existence.

Nonetheless, as of early February, the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing reported 1,633 homeless people like Ladybird — approved for housing and awaiting their turn to move in. Yet records provided by the department show 888 vacancies in its permanent supportive housing stock as of Feb. 22. Filling those empty rooms would not just cut the waiting list by more than half. It would be enough to house roughly one in every eight homeless people in the city. The homelessness department said it cannot talk about individual cases, but officials acknowledged that at least 400 people have been waiting more than a year, far beyond the department’s professed goal of placing applicants into housing 30 to 45 days after they’re approved.

Hundreds of Housing Units Sit Vacant as Only a Small Fraction Are Filled

Monthly vacancies in permanent supportive housing compared with the number of people who moved in.

Credit:
Source: San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing

These persistent vacancy numbers stem largely from two new bureaucratic problems. First, the homelessness department created a policy that bumped hundreds of people who had previously been approved for housing to the bottom of a new list. In December 2020, the department rolled out a plan that reserved all available permanent supportive housing units for residents of shelter-in-place hotels, which had been opened during the pandemic to keep people who had been living on the streets safe from COVID-19.

This led to a spike in vacancies as many hotel-dwellers opted to stay in place rather than accept a more permanent option. It also meant that everyone else — people on the streets, in shelters, in navigation centers and in city-sanctioned tent sites — was out of luck, simply based on where they slept at night.

It’s into this void that Ladybird fell. A resident of a tent site, she was behind an even larger number of people on an already-massive list.

Second, even when someone is approved to move in, the city is slow to send the paperwork — what’s called a “referral” — over to the private nonprofit organizations contracted by the city to manage housing units. Over the course of the pandemic, this problem has grown steadily worse.

Doug Gary recently retired from one of those organizations, Delivering Innovations in Supportive Housing. A year ago, he reported that the organization had 38 vacant units, with no referrals. Gary remembered passing people sleeping on the sidewalk as he walked to work, knowing he had empty units languishing in his buildings.

“There are going to be 38 people stuck on the street tonight, and they could be in DISH housing,” he recalled thinking. “And that’s been true for months.”

The last count of San Francisco’s homeless population numbered more than 8,000. There is not enough housing for all of them. To try to help, the city’s mayor, London Breed, is pursuing a new goal: She has allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to procure 1,500 new units by the end of 2022. The city is on track to hit Mayor Breed’s goal, and may even exceed it.

But with so many units of housing already sitting vacant — a number that according to the department has roughly doubled during the pandemic — a critical question arises: Will the city be able to fill them?

A Deprioritized Population Struggles to Get Indoors

Funding for permanent supportive housing constitutes the largest piece of San Francisco’s budget for the homeless, and the supply of housing is growing rapidly. It consists mostly of older hotels converted into single-room-occupancy residences. The city contracts with a dozen nonprofit organizations to run the nearly 150 buildings and manage social services, such as moving people in and out of units, maintaining the properties and managing individual cases, including everything from connecting people to treatment for substance use disorder to helping someone apply for food stamps. Residents pay 30% of their income, including Social Security benefits, toward rent, and the city subsidizes the rest.

All of the 1,633 people in line for a permanent supportive housing unit had to answer a series of questions to determine who is most vulnerable and therefore most in need of housing. Every year, more than 3,000 people take this assessment, called “coordinated entry,” which takes into consideration, among other things, how long they’ve been homeless, if they have any mental or physical disabilities and if they’re addicted to drugs. Those who score highly by the city’s complex algorithm — in theory the most vulnerable — are marked “housing priority status,” and are then put on a waitlist for permanent supportive housing.

But actually getting off of the waitlist and into those units isn’t easy. The city’s software to track vacant units is error prone, unit maintenance problems take a long time to resolve, case managers quit and it can be impossible for people who have been living on the street to meet document requirements. (The homelessness department said that the city is currently working on the software and documentation issues, and has put a raise for case managers into its budget request for next year.)

Bianca Bagnarelli, special to ProPublica

On top of all that, the city’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic made getting housed harder by creating a system that gave top priority to those least likely to want to move in: those who suddenly found themselves living for free in shelter-in-place hotel rooms.

In spring 2020, as the city locked down and its housed residents stayed indoors, advocates raised concern for the thousands of homeless people living outside and in temporary shelters, many of whom had health conditions that increased their risk for severe COVID-19. Those fears were realized when 92 residents of a large one-room shelter contracted the illness just one month after the city shut down.

In response, San Francisco leased hotel rooms to help people experiencing homelessness quarantine indoors. It was always meant to be a temporary measure, and as the pandemic dragged on, the homelessness department strategized on how to wind the program down. The optics of sending anyone back to the street were not great, and the city created a policy of prioritizing residents of the shelter-in-place hotels for housing.

“I will be candid: It is both one of the biggest opportunities and one of the biggest challenges our city has faced in our homelessness space,” said Abigail Stewart-Kahn, then director of the homelessness department, during a Nov. 10, 2020, Board of Supervisors meeting at City Hall, where she justified the new policy. She added that the department would keep an eye on the data, and would “course correct” to ensure the process was successful. In subsequent interviews and email exchanges, the department did not respond to additional questions about why that policy was created and pursued.

The data over the past 15 months shows a gradually increasing crisis: In October 2020 there were 544 vacant units. A year later, vacancies had nearly doubled to 1,064. While units sat vacant, people living outdoors were waiting to get indoors. Any course correction has been slow to come.

From the get-go, the policy of reserving housing for people in hotels was difficult to implement. Although residents knew the hotels were temporary and could close at any time, many were reluctant to move from free, modern rooms with private bathrooms into small, older units with bathrooms down the hall, at a cost of 30% of their income. All of a sudden, one housing provider said, three applicants for housing had to be referred in order to fill one vacant room.

Inside one of San Francisco’s permanent supportive housing buildings, the kind of housing both Ladybird and Marquita Stroud hope to move into

Credit:
Yesica Prado for the San Francisco Public Press

In the first seven months after the policy was implemented, supportive housing vacancies jumped 61%, from 600 units in November 2020 to 964 in June 2021, a period when the city was also adding new units. In February 2021, the homelessness department reported that 70% of shelter-in-place hotel residents who were offered a spot in the Granada Hotel, a newly purchased permanent supportive housing building, had rejected the placement.

When someone turned down an available housing unit, it sat vacant until a new referral appeared. Providers found themselves in a new position: having to offer incentives to persuade potential tenants to move in.

Georgetta Lovett, a property supervisor at DISH, oversees more than 300 units of permanent supportive housing. She said the organization now provides move-in benefits: free rent for the first month, free meals for three months and a free Muni transit pass.

Resistance to moving into permanent housing is not something Lovett experienced when showing units to people who had been living outside.

“People coming directly off the streets would take the place immediately,” she said. “We would be able to show them a room, they’d say, ‘Oh, this is nice.’ Most of them don’t come with a lot of stuff, and they were like, ‘I can move in today, or I can move in tomorrow.’ And normally we can make that happen right away.”

A Feb. 24, 2021, a budget hearing at City Hall on shelter-in-place hotels showed the homelessness department was aware early on that the policy was adding to the vacancy crisis in permanent supportive housing.

“We are noting that people who are not in shelter-in-place hotels are more eager to take permanent supportive housing placements,” Stewart-Kahn said, adding that it was “putting pressure on our system.” She said that the department was “reevaluating” the policy.

Three weeks later, Stewart-Kahn resigned, moving to a new role as an adviser to the city’s Department of Children, Youth, and Their Families. That same month, the city established an 18-person shelter-in-place hotel housing team. Their task: to more efficiently implement the policy and move everyone qualified for housing from shelter-in-place hotels into vacant units. As a result of the change, move-ins did increase. In the six months before the housing team was established, the city moved 325 people into permanent supportive housing. In the six months after its creation, that number grew to 488.

In an email exchange with the San Francisco Public Press and ProPublica in February, Megan Owens, who oversees much of the housing process of the city’s homelessness department, acknowledged that the policy “caused a huge delay” for adults living outside of the hotels.

In June, the department told the news organizations that it planned to open up a portion of permanent supportive housing vacancies to unhoused people living outside of shelter-in-place hotels. But the department offered no transparency about how units were being allocated.

Neither effort did enough to catch up to the growing supply. By September 2021, vacancies were at their height, with 1,064 permanent supportive housing units empty.

The delay in access to housing has been rough for people living outdoors. According to the official numbers, the current median wait time for a unit is 82 days.

But Owens admitted that the software the city uses doesn’t accurately track the time between being approved for housing and moving indoors. The city and federal government spent $8.5 million for that system over the past five years, but information on people trying to get indoors still isn’t recorded accurately.

For example, if someone doesn’t contact their case manager for 90 days, their spot on the waitlist expires. In acknowledgment of the long delays, at the start of 2021 the city automatically reinstated those applications, but the software then started the timeline over from scratch.

“The 300 people that expired off the queue and were reinstated in December and January are now listed as having waited 20 to 45 days, depending when they were reinstated, but their experience is that they’ve been waiting for months,” Owens explained.

That lack of clear data worries Nan Roman, president and CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. People who are unsheltered “have very high needs, and they need to get into permanent supportive housing,” she said. “If you don’t keep good administrative data, you can’t track them. You can’t support them. You can’t find them. You can’t know what their situation is. It’s very important to have good data to make these programs work properly.”

Many of those who are waiting are living in city-sanctioned tent encampments in empty parking lots around the city.

A view inside the sanctioned tent encampment where Ladybird lived for 15 months, starting in late 2020

Credit:
Yesica Prado for the San Francisco Public Press

That’s where Ladybird, ineligible for housing under the policy that prioritizes hotel dwellers, lived for 15 months. (She requested the use of her nickname for this story due to complicated family matters; her identity was confirmed by a member of the city’s health department.)

After years on the streets, Ladybird committed herself to finding a home. She said she took the coordinated entry assessment for housing three times — going through a mandatory six-month wait between attempts. She was finally approved in November.

“Six months is a long time,” she said about the time between applications. “You basically have to be sitting out here waiting to be raped every night.” (A University of California San Francisco study found that 32% of women living outdoors reported instances of sexual or physical assault.)

Research backs up Ladybird’s experience. “The impact of waiting weeks, months or years in a shelter or outside rather than a home has devastating consequences for a person,” said Chris Herring, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California Los Angeles. “Homelessness for even short periods of time has negative impacts on people’s physical, behavioral and mental health, can strain familial and social relations, have lasting impacts on future employment opportunities, and can entangle people in the criminal justice system.”

In the city-owned parking lot where Ladybird lived during the last year, her cheap camping tent, which rested on a wooden platform in a parking lot, got moldy during a wet winter. She developed pneumonia, and said rats would run around at night, hiding under the pallet she slept on.

“I can’t be there anymore,” she said when interviewed in December. “Your body goes through a lot being homeless. I’ve had pneumonia for two months now, from black mold on my tent. My tent is literally killing me.”

While the city said it is taking steps to mitigate delays, months of living in a wet tent site took its toll on residents. In text messages sent late one night, Ladybird described the chaos that had ensued as one of her neighbors had a mental breakdown. “This situation is getting worse by the day, it’s more twisted than anything I’ve seen in my decade out here,” she said. “I would be better off on the streets.”

The situation felt hopeless. “This site hasn’t placed anybody,” Ladybird said. “Anybody who’s getting out of there is doing it on their own. There’s no social worker. It’s just a dead end.”

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A tall fence encircles a city-sanctioned tent encampment in San Francisco’s Mission District.

Credit:
Yesica Prado for the San Francisco Public Press

While the policies of the last two years left people like Ladybird living outdoors, those living in shelter-in-place hotels haven’t always fared better, with some of them waiting more than a year to be connected to a home.

Marquita Stroud is one of those. She said that she has been homeless for 15 years, but that about a month before the COVID-19 outbreak began in earnest, she was approved for permanent supportive housing. “God was on my side!” she said when interviewed in December.

In April 2020, she was relocated to the Hotel Whitcomb, a historic tourist hotel repurposed to allow people experiencing homelessness to quarantine safely. Stroud was one of 500 homeless people the city moved from large, warehouse-style shelters into 25 hotels around town.

Stroud is an optimist, high-energy and cheerful, who wears her hair tied up neatly in a scarf. “It’s wet!” she exclaimed on a rainy morning, as she strode confidently down Market Street with an umbrella in one hand, pushing a cart containing her small, fluffy dog, Blue, with the other. She headed straight to a corner of the public library, a place she knows well.

Under COVID-19-era rules, Stroud isn’t allowed visitors where she lives, so she meets people at their apartments, outside or in public places. The prohibition on guests didn’t bother Stroud too much when she first moved in. But she felt isolated and, as the months dragged on, no one contacted her about moving into her own place. Stroud watched her friends and neighbors — many of whom arrived in the hotel the same day she did — move into permanent housing. Her turn never came.

In large part, that’s because the homelessness department’s process for reviewing and selecting unhoused people for referral is slow. And in the period when Stroud was waiting, things were markedly worse. In October 2020, 32% of vacant units had no pending referrals for a resident. In January, that ratio had more than doubled, to 66% of available units, according to the city’s own data. The department did not respond to questions about why this might be.

Gary ran eight buildings through DISH. In February 2021, before he stepped down, he said the problem wasn’t new, but it was getting worse.

“Somewhere there is a bottleneck where the city is not sending us the housing application — that is, the documented representation of that person that we can process,” he said. “We report the vacancy to the city, and those vacancies languish for weeks to months without a referral of a real live human being who can be housed.”

Credit:
Bianca Bagnarelli, special to ProPublica

At least part of the problem is a shortage of case managers, who are the crucial link between vacant units and the hundreds of people approved for housing. There is frequent turnover in the high-stress positions, and nonprofits struggle to fill new job openings.

Stroud said she has been assigned six case managers in two years. To figure out who is assigned to her, she regularly checks a piece of paper taped to a wall in her hotel, which lists the name of the case manager assigned to each floor. She describes calling her case manager repeatedly to set up an appointment and not getting through.

“They pretty much don’t go knocking on your door,” Stroud said. “You got to ask for them. If I see one in the hallway — like if I see a worker talking to a client in the hallway — I always ask, ‘Are you a counselor? Are you my counselor?’ Because they don’t tell you.”

Nearly two years after being approved for a housing unit, Stroud is still at the Hotel Whitcomb. Although she dreams of going back to school, publishing her journals and giving back to the homeless community, her reality is much different. She’s had items stolen from her room, and the building has fallen into disrepair. “When we first got to this hotel, it was so cute,” she said. “Now they got the bedbugs, the roaches, the mice. Every other day, the pipes are messing up.”

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Recently she met a woman who had recently moved into the Whitcomb, but was already on her way out: She’d been assigned a housing unit.

“I was asking her, what did she do to get her housing that quick? And she said her counselor just came knocking on her door like, ‘You ready to go?’” Stroud said, clearly frustrated. “I haven’t talked to anyone about housing,” she said this month, as she approaches her two-year anniversary at the hotel. “I’m still here just waiting.”

As for Ladybird, she was approved for housing in November, but three months later, she is still without a home. In January, she left the tent encampment for a short-term residential hotel, but it comes with a time limit. “After 28 days, we get put out.”

Are you currently homeless in San Francisco, and trying to get housing? Do you have experience with the city’s housing process? Email us at nuala@sfpublicpress.org.

The post In San Francisco, Tons of of Houses for the Homeless Sit Vacant — ProPublica appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.