SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — Residents of a San Francisco building that has flooded twice since June are reporting theft and people going inside their vacant apartments.

On June 10, at 2:27 a.m., Kate Sutherland received a notification. A person had been detected inside her vacant apartment at 33 Tehama.

“Opened the video and I saw a random person just wandering through my unit and taking a video on flash. It sent chills down my spine,” said Sutherland.

The eerie video caught what looked like a person moving slowly in the dark. The building had been vacant for several days after a water main broke and flooded the building. Kate ended her lease four days after this video was recorded.

RELATED: Residents at SF luxury apartment displaced after pipe bursts, flooding all 35 floors

Luz Pena: “How did they explain what happened?”

Kate Sutherland: “They really know how to explain it. They just kept saying that it was unauthorized.”

Kate’s story is the tip of the iceberg. This week another resident captured a contractor using the bathroom inside one of the apartments and taking something on their way out. Hines, the real estate company that owns the building, confirmed the theft that took place Monday, saying in part:

“A contractor who was making repairs in one of the units at 33 Tehama was recorded taking items from the unit. This contractor was terminated immediately.”

In Stephanie Sunwoo’s case, thousands of dollars went missing from her bank account this morning.

“Two fraudulent checks cashed in my account. My bank account both in the amount of over $1,500 each,” said Stephanie Sunwoo, 33 Tehama resident.

RELATED: Residents at flooded San Francisco luxury building may not be able to return home until 2023

Residents of the San Francisco high-rise damaged by a massive water main break may not be able to move back in until late this year or possibly 2023.

Sunwoo says her entire checkbook is inside her nightstand in her vacant apartment.

“It is really alarming to think that somebody is rummaging through my bedroom through my nightstand, grabs a box full of my checkbooks and now I have deep fears of identity theft,” said Sunwoo.

Residents are also reporting theft in the bike room.

“Our bike room was completely looted. There are remains of people’s bikes. Some people’s bikes are completely missing,” said Sunwoo.

Regarding theft, Hines said in part:

“While we haven’t confirmed the validity of these allegations yet, we have temporarily removed all contractor access to resident units while we work on a solution to increase security measures.”

RELATED: Residents report 2nd water leak, presumed theft at luxury SF apartments

And for residents like Maarya Abbasi, these reports make them want to get all of their belongings out of the building fast. She says Hines is making it difficult.

“It just feels like the nightmare that never ends,” said Maarya Abbasi.

Hines is not allowing residents inside the building and is only letting them use movers assigned by Hines.

“That is something I also asked Tehama ‘What is the recourse if our belongings get damaged?’ All I was told was is that we would have to work through our own renters insurance,” said Abbasi.

Hines said they are providing locked storage pods to residents who have scheduled move-outs through the end of the month.

As to bikes getting stolen, they said they don’t know if any bikes have been stolen, but said a large number of bikes were abandoned.

RELATED: New ‘catastrophic’ details reveal what went wrong inside flooded luxury SF apartment building

ABC7 News has learned about new “catastrophic” details into what went wrong inside 33 Tehama luxury apartment building in San Francisco.

We also followed up and asked about the resident who said her checkbook was stolen and they said that’s a police matter.

Statement from Hines about 33 Tehama – August 16, 2022

“It has come to our attention that on August 15, 2022, a contractor who was making repairs in one of the units at 33 Tehama was recorded taking items from the unit. This contractor was terminated immediately. All construction workers at 33 Tehama are licensed, bonded, and insured, and are employees of reputable subcontractors. We have security on the premises 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and the safekeeping of our residents’ belongings is our utmost priority.

There are very few allegations of other issues with security in the units. While we haven’t confirmed the validity of these allegations yet, we have temporarily removed all contractor access to resident units while we work on a solution to increase security measures. At a minimum, these measures will include a comprehensive video monitoring system to capture footage while contractors are in residents’ units to safeguard their property in an active construction site.

When we learned that the timeline for reoccupation of 33 Tehama would extend into 2023 and notified residents that they would need to find alternate accommodations, we began working with city officials and local building ownership to secure housing for our most vulnerable residents, which include residents in the 60 below market rate (BMR) units at 33 Tehama. We have had success with the city who responded promptly to the request. We continue to work with local building owners to identify housing solutions for these residents. We are hopeful that San Francisco building owners with vacant BMR units will agree to support these 33 Tehama residents at this time by offering them housing.

Given that the financial and accommodation support for 33 Tehama residents ends tomorrow August 17, we have extended the financial and hotel accommodation support to tenants who meet certain income qualifications until August 31. This is to ensure that they have the resources to secure temporary housing while we continue to work closely with building ownership and in partnership with Supervisor Dorsey and other government officials to find a longer-term solution. “

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Walking around Sea Cliff on Halloween night often provided sights such as a family of pumpkins or children dressed as princesses, ninjas, or even ninja princesses.

For years, the bougie neighborhood has drawn in families for Halloween, particularly those with younger kids, thanks to its quiet streets, wide sidewalks and jaw-dropping homes promising full-size candy bars and over-the-top decorations.

“We give out about 1,500 in three hours,” said Gary Bengier, who wore a George Washington costume as he handed out XL Hershey chocolate bars in front of his garage, replete with Halloween decor. “We like to do something fun for the kids.”

But despite the hundreds of kids crowding the sidewalks, the sought-after full-size candy bars from wealthy homeowners appeared in short supply—with many children’s bags surprisingly limp as the night drew to a close. 

Families trick-or-treat in the Sea Cliff neighborhood in San Francisco on Halloween night on Tuesday. | Source: Garrett Leahy/The Standard

Along El Camino Del Mar, one of the more popular Sea Cliff streets with trick-or-treaters, homes decorated for Halloween were sparse, and groups of kids often passed several houses between stops for more candy, rather than going house-to-house in a continuous trick-or-treating spree.

Many homes had no decorations at all, and no lights came on inside them during the three hours The Standard spent in the neighborhood until 7:30 p.m.

“It used to be more decorations,” said 27-year Sea Cliff resident Kayda Ono alongside her 17-year-old son, Aiden, who was dressed as Aladdin. “When he was 5 years old, it was all the houses.”

‘A Robin Williams Effect‘

Multiple homeowners and locals said the Sea Cliff neighborhood’s Halloween celebrations had begun to slowly die down since the death of Robin Williams in 2014.

“There was definitely a Robin Williams effect,” said Andy McLaughlin, who has lived on Sea Cliff Avenue since 2010.

Families trick-or-treat in the Sea Cliff neighborhood in San Francisco on Halloween night on Tuesday. | Source: Garrett Leahy/The Standard

When McLaughlin moved in with his family, he said they would get around 900 kids every Halloween, with children lining up from their door to the sidewalk. This Halloween was different, even with at least six homes on her street giving out candy.

“This is the quietest night we had in 10 years, even with Covid,” Andy’s wife, Kendra McLaughlin, said.

The McLaughlin’s Sea Cliff home was richly decorated for Halloween on Tuesday. | Source: Garrett Leahy/The Standard

Others agreed with the sentiment that Williams’ death coincided with the decline in spookiness around Sea Cliff.

“Really, I think it was his passing that changed things,” Outer Richmond resident Donovan Truong said as his niece, Zoe, clambered into a stroller while clad in a pink tutu and plastic faux-diamond tiara. Truong said he was born and raised in the Richmond District and would trick-or-treat every year in Sea Cliff. “You’d look around and see all these houses without the lights on.”

Williams would give out glowstick necklaces instead of candy for Halloween, multiple residents said. 

Robin Williams’ former Sea Cliff home at 540 El Camino Del Mar is up for sale at a price of $25 million. | Source: Garrett Leahy/The Standard

“One year, he gave out toothbrushes too,” Sea Cliff resident Thatcher Davis said. “We thought it was hilarious, but the kids hated it.”

Williams’ former Sea Cliff home is currently up for sale at an asking price of $25 million.

Aging Owners, ‘Vacant’ Homes

Other Sea Cliff residents seemed to think part of the issue was that many of the longtime neighborhood residents grew older and could no longer physically hand out candy for hours on Halloween.

“It used to be the destination when Robin Williams was around,” said Craig Fong, who has lived on El Camino Del Mar for 22 years. “We’ve seen the residents aging, so they don’t participate anymore.”

Many of Sea Cliff’s homes are vacant or used as vacation homes by the wealthy, neighbors also told The Standard.

Families trick-or-treat in the Sea Cliff neighborhood in San Francisco on Halloween night on Tuesday. | Source: Garrett Leahy/The Standard

“This neighborhood used to be really popular for Halloween,” said Davis, who has lived on El Camino Del Mar for 15 years. “But, unfortunately, a lot of the homes are empty, or you have older people who aren’t comfortable giving out candy.” 

The Standard could not independently corroborate the neighbor’s claims the homes were empty. Locals said they knew which homes were vacant due to their long-standing presence in the neighborhood.

“I know because I live here,” said Michelle Molfino, who has lived in Sea Cliff for 20 years. “If you walk up Sea Cliff Avenue, there’s a bunch of vacant homes.”

Sea Cliff resident Michelle Molfino stands on El Camino Del Mar dressed for Halloween on Tuesday. | Source: Garrett Leahy/The Standard

The city will start a new vacant homes tax in January 2024 after voters approved it in the Nov. 8, 2022, election. The Empty Homes Tax would apply to homeowners with homes containing three or more housing units. 

Those subject to the tax would owe between $2,500 and $5,000 per vacant unit in the first year with the tax rising up to $20,000 by the third year for every unit that has been empty for longer than six months. Units exempted from the tax include single-family homes, duplexes and units under construction, among other exemptions. Filing and payment will begin for most people in 2025. 

But some locals think Sea Cliff is just in a spooky rut. Kendra thinks Sea Cliff Avenue is on the upswing as a Halloween destination.

“We’ve had some younger families moving in,” McLaughlin said. “I think in the next few years, it’ll really pick up more.”

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The world is filled with empty office space while workers fight for scarce and expensive housing. Why not solve both problems by converting the vacant offices into apartments?

Experts told me some office buildings could be converted into luxury condos.

Larger office buildings with a central elevator shaft, on the other hand, can hardly be economically converted into residential buildings. Grants may be required for conversions from office to affordable housing.

While this problem is resolved, investors should examine bullish bets on home builders and bearish bets on office building owners who are increasingly returning their keys to banks.

Too much office space

The pandemic has had a devastating impact on office building occupancy rates.

Employees do not commute to the office five days a week. According to Kastle Systems, which tracks security thefts in office buildings, the nationwide office return rate is actually 50% of pre-pandemic levels. Despite management’s best efforts, workers will likely continue to work from home and occasionally visit an office.

There is more office space than corporate landlords need, and they have billions to pay back — some even returning the keys to the lender. So much:

• Vacancy rate: 18.6%. According to Cushman & Wakefield, the average US office vacancy rate was 18.6% in the first quarter of 2023, up 5.9 percentage points from the last quarter of 2019. C&W estimates that by 2030, 330 million square feet of US office space could be obsolete.
• vacancies increase. Bloomberg estimates that more than 17% of US office supply is vacant and 4.3% is available for subletting. While these averages hide the wide disparities across the country — according to the Wall Street Journal, vacancy rates in San Francisco top at nearly 25% and in Silicon Valley at 17% (and counting) — C&W believes that the number of vacant office spaces will continue to increase until the second half of 2023.
• Billions in debt for landlords are due. The Mortgage Bankers Association estimates that office building debt of $92 billion will mature in 2023 and another $58 billion in 2024, according to Bloomberg.
• Some landlords return the keys to lenders. According to Bloomberg, a PIMCO-owned landlord has defaulted on its debts for seven office buildings in San Francisco, New York City, Boston and Jersey City. In February, Canadian asset manager Brookfield “pulled out of two prime Los Angeles office buildings after $784 million in loans defaulted.” according to fDi Intelligence. According to CNN, Mark Rose, CEO of global real estate consultancy Avison Young, has never seen such a high level of office returns.

In January, people working from home hurt New York’s economy. Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, a professor at Columbia Business School, told the New York TimesNYT, “On an average weekday, nearly half of New York workers stay away from the office; on Mondays and Fridays the proportion is even higher. The number of subway and bus passengers has fallen by a third compared to pre-pandemic levels. Serious crime increased more than 20 percent last year, and more than 300,000 people fled the city in the first year of the pandemic, generating total income of more than $21 billion. If office value decreases in proportion to usage, the city’s property tax revenue will decrease by $5 billion per year.”

Too little living space

At the same time, there is not enough housing for all but the wealthiest people. The housing shortage keeps real estate prices high – unaffordable for most people. Despite the high mortgage interest rates, housing starts are increasing rapidly. It remains unclear whether this will create enough affordable housing to meet demand.

Here are indications of housing shortages and efforts to meet demand:

• Millions too few housing units. According to Axios, Freddie Mac estimates that the US is short of about 3.8 million housing units – both for rent and for sale. There are 142 million housing units in the US, the Wall Street Journal reported.
• Average house prices have increased by 40% since January 2020. The average home price is $419,103 — although down 3.1% over the past year, according to RedfinRDFN — 40% higher than in January 2020. Contributing to the high price is a 39% drop in homes for sale since 2018 at, so Redfin reported.
• Housing starts increased by 21.7% in May. New home construction in the US surged 21.7% in May as homebuilders began work on single-family homes to meet strong buyer demand. MarketWatch reported that housing starts rose to 1.63 million a year last month from 1.34 million in April.

Builders are optimistic about the housing market. Richard Moody, senior vice president and chief economist at Regions FinancialRF Corporation, wrote in a note, “To say we didn’t expect that wouldn’t even come close to reflecting the extent to which May’s housing data surprised us.”

Challenges in converting office space into living space

Will property developers close the gap between supply and demand? Or could all that excess office space be converted into housing?

The short answer is that office remodeling is most likely to meet the demand of those looking for luxury housing rather than affordable housing. In addition to changing zoning restrictions to allow for office to residential conversions, here are the most common reasons why it is difficult to convert existing office space to residential:

• Technical obstacles. “The large floor slabs of many commercial office buildings built in the late 20th century pose challenges for conversions, including limited access to daylight in most of the interior space on each floor (which is a violation of most housing codes),” says Justin Steil, an associate professor at MIT law and urban planning, wrote in a June 20 email.
• The sanitary facilities need to be modernized. Although some cities like Portland, Oregon, Washington, DC and Chicago are streamlining permitting processes and facilitating remodeling, office buildings require more water and sewer lines to accommodate one or more bathrooms per dwelling unit, rather than one or two bathrooms per floor in a typical office building, noted Steep.
• Due to the significant cost of office remodeling, apartment prices must be high. The cost of these retrofits is so high that they make the most financial sense in cities with high rents. “The retrofit will cost $200 to $300 per square foot. For this to make sense, either the building has to be cheap or the resulting apartments have to be expensive. High-rent cities like Manhattan, San Francisco and Boston are seeing luxury apartment conversions happening,” said Joseph Gyourko, a professor at the Wharton School, in a June 21 interview.
• The conversion of affordable housing can only succeed with state help. Without “additional municipal measures”, the conversion of office buildings will not solve the problem of affordable housing, said Steil. Such a measure could mean the waiver of tax documents during the conversion process. “Cities won’t pay real estate taxes for two years until people live in the apartments,” Kosta Ligris, an associate professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, told me in a June 21 interview.
• Many office buildings will not make it. “The really good buildings will be fine. The older ones are difficult to retrofit. Working from home will average one day a week, which will reduce demand by 20%. There will be quite a few buildings that don’t make it. I don’t see any conversions for the middle class. There will be a large number of landlords returning the keys. What happens to the regional banks that loaned them the $40-50 million?” Ligris closed.

Van Nieuwerburgh is optimistic that government-subsidized construction of new downtown housing and conversion of commercial buildings into apartments can help Manhattan. “Best case scenario, we’ll remove 30 or 40 percent of the office stock in New York City and turn it into beautiful living space. New York City has all these great amenities, it’s a wonderful place that young people want to live, regardless of where they work,” he told the Times.

What Investors Should Do

Investors should consider bullish bets on homebuilders who will benefit from meeting demand for housing, while at the same time betting against office landlords and banks who are lending to them.

Homebuilders worth evaluating include KBHome, PulteGroupPHM and LennarLEN – which are at or near all-time highs. Investors should consider whether these stocks could continue to climb.

Office landlords that could suffer include Brookfield Corp — which has lost nearly half its value since its November 2021 peak. Investors should assess the future creditworthiness of such companies.

Banks I wrote about in April that could be exposed include Valley National, East West Bank and Synovus Financial. Investors should consider whether they should expect higher loan defaults.

follow me Twitter or LinkedIn. Cash my website or some of my other work here.

In 1994 I gave up Corporate America and founded a management consulting and venture capital firm (http://petercohan.com). I started tracking stocks in 1981 while I was still in graduate school at MIT and first analyzed technology stocks in 1998 as a guest on CNBC. In April 2011, I became a Forbes contributor. My 15th book – published in November 2020 – is “Goliath”. Strike Back: How Traditional Retailers Are Winning Back Customers From Ecommerce Startups. I was featured in the 2016 documentary We The People: The Market Basket Effect eight times. (http://www.themarketbasketeffect.com/). I also teach business strategy and entrepreneurship at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass. (http://www.babson.edu/Academics/faculty/profiles/Pages/Cohan-Peter.aspx)

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Much effort has been made to answer the question that has been on everyone’s mind for the past three years: what do we do with empty office buildings? The most popular solution was to convert vacant office space into living space. The idea has become a reality in places like New York City, Washington, DC and Calgary, where officials are helping to streamline the process through incentives and programs. In view of the growing real estate crisis, that makes sense. But “office-to-residential” is not a new concept. In Manhattan, for example, in the years following the September 11 attacks, dozens of lower Manhattan buildings were converted into housing units. The largest transformation in the country is currently being developed by GFP Real Estate and Metro Loft in Manhattan’s Financial District, where the former headquarters of the New York Daily News will be converted into more than 1,300 high-end luxury condominiums.

See also

While converting office buildings into much-needed housing seems like the simple solution, it can be complicated and costly. Office buildings typically have larger floor panels that don’t let in much natural light and air, and building systems such as HVAC and plumbing would likely need an overhaul to accommodate dwelling units. In an analysis of 300 office buildings across North America, global design firm Gensler found that only 30 percent of the buildings would be suitable for conversion into residential buildings. The company’s analysis also yielded a curious finding: features that were considered undesirable in an office environment were actually desirable features in an apartment building. For example, many Class C buildings have a floor height of about 12 feet, which is considered extremely low for an office today. But anything over 9 feet in a residential building is considered a luxury feature.

As office to residential conversions become more popular as a good way to repurpose vacant space, different types of use are also being considered. However, it may take some time before office remodeling is really done on a large scale. Daniel Colombini, director of New York City-based consulting and engineering firm Goldman Copeland, which focuses on modernizing and improving the infrastructure of existing buildings, said large-scale repurposing of vacant offices is a slow-moving issue. Traditional office leases typically run for 10 years, and with the pandemic now three years behind us, there is still a lot of space that is not yet ready to be leased. “Things are changing and the carrot and stick will realign in the real estate world,” Colombini said. “It’s happening, but it’s going to happen very slowly.”

Hotels

Similar to converting an apartment building, converting an office building into a hotel requires significant modifications that can end up being costly. Plumbing and HVAC systems would need an overhaul, and developers would need to add things like kitchens and bathrooms. Switching to hotel use could also require a change in zoning. Nevertheless, office-to-hotel conversions are taking place again and again. Since 2016, CBRE has tracked 45 office to hotel conversions, with a further seven in progress and seven planned. Most conversions take place in downtown areas that are within walking distance to shops, restaurants, entertainment venues, and major employers. In April it was announced that the owners of New York’s famous Rockefeller Center had struck a deal to open a luxury hotel on ten floors of empty office space. Hotel operator Aspen Hospitality plans to open the 130-room hotel in 2026.

laboratory room

The life sciences sector has boomed over the last decade, which has led to huge demand for laboratory and research and development space. Even before the pandemic, some office owners were converting their offices into labs, and this is even more common lately. In Boston, the nation’s largest life sciences market, offices have often been converted into labs in recent years. In San Francisco, another major life sciences hub, a vacant office building formerly the headquarters of clothing retailer Old Navy was recently purchased by developer DivcoWest, who plans to convert it into laboratory space. A CBRE report found that conversions of office buildings into laboratories increased 49 percent in the country’s 12 largest life sciences markets in 2021. said CBRE’s Matt Gardner. According to CBRE, the cost of outfitting a lab space with the type of plumbing, ventilation, and other special considerations that this type of space requires can be three times the cost of standard office space, but the rents that lab space fetches appear to be adequate to make it worthwhile for real estate owners and investors.

self storage

Operators in the self-storage industry were considering converting empty offices into new self-storage facilities long before the pandemic began. For example, Bethesda, Maryland-based Washington Property Co. converted an 82,000-square-foot office building in Rockville, Maryland into a CubeSmart self-storage facility. Especially in suburban areas, vacant office buildings were considered prime candidates for the shift to self-storage. Utilization is seen as a cheaper and shorter-term option than conversion to housing. The conversions took place in densely populated locations where many higher-income tenants needed storage space. It’s not easy to find concrete data on how many office-to-self-storage transitions are actually taking place, but many developers across the country are certainly considering it.

See also

Retail, restaurants and event spaces

In some cases, an office owner or developer may wish to change the use of only a portion of an office building, such as the lower floors of a property. A partial conversion transforms an office building into a mixed-use development and can include retail, restaurants and event space on the lower floors. There is no need for existing office tenants to move during construction and then take advantage of the additional amenities of the new concessions. In Manhattan, the Rudin family and Thomson Reuters added Touro College to 3 Times Square, a trophy office tower in the heart of the Times Square area. The college agreed to a 32-year lease on a 23,000-square-foot campus and will have a private entrance and lobby for its students, faculty and staff. The building’s owners refinanced the building for $415 million last June to help with the partial remodeling.

Property owners have many choices when deciding what to do with vacant office space, and with the current trends toward remote and hybrid working, they need to explore those options sooner rather than later. When making these decisions, the ever-increasing importance of CO2 emissions must also be taken into account. Converting empty offices to other building uses, whatever that may be, will likely have a lower carbon footprint than tearing down a building and starting a new project from scratch. “What we want is building reuse, period,” Colombini said. “We hate when sound buildings are demolished when buildings are abandoned.” Finding better uses of office space not only benefits the building owner, but also the surrounding neighborhood, and that will have an impact on the local economy and property value .

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• Over 18 million square feet of San Francisco office space is vacant, the SF Chronicle reported.
• Thirty-one percent of downtown San Francisco offices are reportedly available for lease or sublease.
• Check out the Chronicle’s interactive map of downtown San Francisco office building vacancies.

An interactive map from the San Francisco Chronicle lets you see just how bad the city’s commercial housing crisis has gotten since the pandemic.

The map, created with data from real estate agent Lee & Associates, helps visualize downtown San Francisco’s 18.4 million square feet of vacant offices — a massive expanse that can accommodate 92,000 people, The Chronicle reports. That’s the same area as 13 Salesforce Towers, the tallest tower in the city.

The rising number of vacant office properties reflects in part the impact of remote work on office attendance.

Over 30% of downtown office buildings have space that can be rented or sublet — up from 19.7% in the first quarter of 2022. The vacancy rate in early 2020 before the pandemic was just 4%, The Chronicle reported.

Last month, an office building at 25 Taylor St used primarily by WeWork lost two-thirds of its value and was 97% vacant after WeWork moved out, according to commercial real estate data company Trepp.

A telling sign of the San Francisco office building market could come from a 22-story office tower at 350 California Street that is said to cost $60 million after being valued at $300 million in 2019.

Click here to view the San Francisco Chronicle interactive map.

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The Empty Homes Tax campaign announced Thursday that it was submitting 13,734 signatures to the city — well above the nearly 9,000 needed to appear before voters this fall.

If approved by a simple majority in the Nov. 8 election, the tax could make about 4,500 vacant units available over two years and generate more than $38 million in annual revenue, according to a January report from the Board of Supervisors’ Budget and Legislative Analyst .

The tax measure, backed by Supervisor Dean Preston and some of his allies, is an attempt to make inroads on the city’s housing shortage by freeing up more of the existing supply of units that are currently unoccupied.

It’s also an effort to emulate taxes imposed in other expensive cities, including Oakland and Vancouver, British Columbia. Berkeley is considering placing a similar tax before voters as well.

“Even among folks who may disagree on other issues, I think everyone’s really frustrated by prolonged vacancies,” Preston told The Chronicle. “This is the strongest tool to address that problem.”

The January analyst’s report, which was prepared for Preston, found that San Francisco had more than 40,000 vacant homes in 2019. Many of them were listed for rent or sale, or they were empty because a tenant hadn’t moved in yet, the unit was intended for part-time use or it was unoccupied for some other reason such as ongoing repairs.

However, the fastest-growing segment of vacant housing identified by the report was more than 8,000 empty units that were “sold but not occupied.” That category may include some homes that owners bought “as investments or cash havens with no intention of moving in or renting them out,” the report said.

The proposed tax would range from $2,500 to $5,000 in the first year, depending on the size of the unit. It would increase to a maximum of $20,000 in later years. The tax would apply to owners of vacant homes in buildings with three or more units, if the units in question had been vacant for more than 182 days. Single-family homes and duplexes would be exempt.

“This is targeted at the real estate speculators who have the business practice of buying and holding these properties,” Preston said. “They’re just not really in the single-family home space in San Francisco and haven’t been.”

Money raised from the tax would be earmarked for affordable housing acquisitions and rent subsidies for seniors and low-income households.

The potential ballot measure comes as San Francisco sees a huge slowdown in construction and Mayor London Breed is looking at strategies to jump-start residential building. The city is also facing state mandates to plan for the construction of 82,000 new homes by 2031.

JD Morris is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jd.morris@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @thejdmorris

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Supervisor Dean Preston announced the initiative at a press conference Tuesday morning. It would need about 9,000 valid signatures to qualify for the ballot.

The goal is to incentivize property investors who leave homes vacant until the market is in their favor to list or rent the property.

“These are folks who are buying and selling housing in San Francisco as if they’re buying and selling stocks on the stock market. They couldn’t care less about providing homes for anyone, and we are going to put an end to it with the empty homes tax,” Supervisor Preston said.

He estimates the tax could bring in about $38 million dollars a year. He proposes that the money go toward preventing homelessness and affordable housing.

RELATED: SF considers taxing vacant apartments to help with housing crisis; new report shows 40K empty units

The tax rate would be based on the property’s size and how long it has been vacant. For instance, a unit smaller than 1,000 square feet would be taxed $2,500 for one year, $10,000 for three years. A home that is 20,000 or more square feet would be taxed $20,000 for its third year of sitting vacant.

Exemptions would include a property being remodeled, a natural disaster or a landlord who is in long term care or has died.

VIDEO: SF metro area remains most expensive place to live in US

“If it’s a legitimate, good faith reason that there’s some kind of vacancy, this tax is not going to tax. But if you are in the business of holding units off the market for prolonged periods of time, we’re not only going to tax you but each year of that vacancy that tax is going to go up,” Preston said.

Some critics call this proposed tax a distraction and say what city leaders really need to focus on is building more affordable housing.

“When we look at the size of our shortage and how many houses we need to build, this is a drop in the bucket. San Francisco has a history of not building enough housing and the Board Of Supervisors is trying to avoid actually fixing the problem ,” said Corey Smith, the deputy director of the Housing Action Coalition.

RELATED: Wealthy Bay Area city pushes back against new housing proposal

The Board of Supervisors recently voted down a plan to build an apartment building on the valet parking lot of a Nordstrom Department Store.

Preston’s office says it isn’t an either/or situation.

Preston says the city of Vancouver implemented a similar tax and saw vacancies decrease by 20%.

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An estimated 40,458 homes and condos are sitting vacant in San Francisco, and that number could potentially go down if the city were to introduce a vacancy tax that would fine homeowners who leave their properties empty, a new report released Monday by the city’s budget and legislation analyst said.

The report was commissioned by Supervisor Dean Preston, who wanted to take a deep look at the scope of residential vacancies in San Francisco and explore whether vacancy tax policies adopted in other cities could help ease SF’s housing shortage.

Vancouver, British Columbia, is among the cities that have imposed an empty home tax. The Canadian city adopted the tax in 2016, and its overall vacancy rate decreased from 4.3% to 3.1% as a result, with 1,676 units returning to occupancy in 2018 , followed by an additional 220 in 2019, the report said. Vancouver’s tax generated the equivalent of about $21.3 million in 2019; the city used the net proceeds for affordable housing initiatives, the report said.

Preston said that if San Francisco were to introduce a tax similar to the one in Vancouver, “just under 5,000 homes in two years would go from being vacant to occupied — that’s 90% of our annual new housing production.”

“The main idea was to look at the issue, to quantify it and get some data on the issue of residential vacancy,” added Preston, who represents District 5, which includes areas such as Haight Ashbury, Hayes Valley, Japantown and Western Addition. “There has been a lot of anecdotal talk, but there hasn’t been a systematic look at it.”

Washington, DC, also has a vacancy tax, fining owners $5 for every $100 of assessed value for vacant properties, and $10 for every $100 of assessed value for blighted properties. The tax generated $9.4 million in gross revenue in 2016, the report said.

San Francisco saw the number of vacant units go from about 33,300 in 2015 to 40,458 in 2019, rising roughly 20%. (Note: 2019 is the most recent year vacancies were reported.)

“This increase has outpaced the number of new residential units as the vacancy rate has increased from 8.5% in 2015 to 10% in 2019 whereas housing units grew by 4.2% during that period,” the report said.

The fastest growing segment of vacant housing in the city over five years through 2019 were homes that were sold and not occupied.

“This type of vacancy may be due to owners buying new units while they are still under construction but it may also be due to owners purchasing them as investments or cash havens with no intention of moving in or renting them out,” the report said.

The highest number of vacant homes are in SoMa, Downtown and the Mission District, the neighborhoods that have seen the highest concentration of new housing in recent years, the report said.

It’s also interesting to note that the city’s rental vacancy rate (housing available for rent) is only 3%, which reflects the tight rental market. San Francisco’s rental vacancy rate is lower than the rate in other major metro areas including New York City (4.6%), Chicago (4.6%) and Houston (8.7%).

Editor’s note: This story was updated at 8:45 am on Feb. 2 to include information on San Francisco’s rental vacancy rate. It was updated again on Feb. 5 as it included the incorrect rental vacancy rate for New York City.

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“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.”

Paperwork bottlenecks stand the process of moving people indoors

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 confidently strode 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.”

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 non-profit struggles 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 brassing up.”

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 the author at nuala@sfpublicpress.org.

The post In San Francisco, Lots of of Properties for Unhoused Folks Sit Vacant 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.”

Paperwork Bottlenecks Stall the Process of Moving People Indoors

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.

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