New Ordinance NoticePublisher's Note: This Chapter has been ADDED by new legislation (Ord. 92-22
, approved 6/24/2022, effective 7/25/2022). The text of the Chapter and its constituent sections will be included below when the enacting legislation is effective.
Title. | |
Findings. | |
Definitions. | |
Shelter Policy. | |
Implementation of Telephonic Shelter Registration System. | |
Place for All Implementation Plan, Survey of Real Property, and Data Tracking. | |
Establishment of the Place for All Program. | |
Annual Estimate of the Number of Unsheltered People. | |
Implementation and Evaluation. | |
Undertaking for the General Welfare. | |
This Chapter 118 shall be known as the “Place for All Ordinance.”
(Added by Ord. 92-22, File No. 220281, App. 6/24/2022, Eff. 7/25/2022)
(a) San Francisco has struggled with homelessness for at least four decades. Since the 1980’s, successive mayoral administrations have implemented different and sometimes divergent strategies to address the City’s most enduring crisis.
(1) In 1982, Mayor Dianne Feinstein launched a network of faith-based emergency winter shelters and soup kitchens.
(2) In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Mayor Art Agnos took a different approach, unveiling the “Beyond Shelter” plan to provide unhoused people access to supportive services and a pathway to long-term housing. In 1990, Mayor Agnos opened the City’s first two Multi-Service Centers, which were homeless shelters with onsite mental health and substance use disorder services.
(3) In 1993, Mayor Frank Jordan instituted the Matrix Program, which tasked police officers accompanied by social workers or health aides with clearing unhoused people from City streets and connecting them to services. In the first six months of the program, police issued over 6,000 citations for quality-of-life misdemeanors, such as public inebriation or sleeping in doorways. In 1992, voters approved Mayor Jordan’s Proposition J, which banned aggressive panhandling. Voters also approved Mayor Jordan’s 1994 ballot measure, also named Proposition J, which banned loitering within 30 feet of an automated teller machine for more than one minute.
(4) After his election in 1995, Mayor Willie Brown declared homelessness unsolvable at a local level, and insisted any measurable improvement would require state and federal dollars to fund the housing and services needed to keep people off the streets. During his two terms in office, Mayor Brown’s administration nonetheless added thousands of units of affordable and subsidized housing, including leasing and renovating single room occupancy hotels for low-income and unhoused people.
(5) Prior to his election as Mayor in 2003, as a member of the Board of Supervisors, Gavin Newsom authored a 2002 ballot measure, entitled “Care Not Cash,” which reduced City-funded General Assistance cash payments to unhoused people, and redirected the savings to fund services and supportive housing. According to a 2008 City Controller’s audit, the Care Not Cash program housed 2,127 people between its implementation in 2003 and December 2007. The Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (“HSH”) estimates that Care Not Cash led to the creation of 1,300 units of permanent supportive housing.
In 2004, Mayor Newsom introduced his “Ten Year Plan to Abolish Chronic Homelessness,” which proposed to create 3,000 units of permanent supportive housing by 2010, and to replace shelters with 24-hour crisis clinics and sobering centers. By 2014, the City was still 300 units shy of the 3,000 pledged units, and had reduced the number of shelter beds by a third, from 1,910 beds in 2004 to 1,145 beds in 2014.
Mayor Newsom authored two additional voter-approved ballot measures aimed at responding to homelessness: Proposition M in 2003, which amended the City’s panhandling and loitering bans, and Proposition L in 2010, which made it illegal to sit or lie on sidewalks citywide from 7am to 11pm.
(6) Mayor Ed Lee oversaw the opening of the City’s first Navigation Center in 2015, and in 2016 sponsored legislation creating HSH, pledging to spend at least $1 billion over the next four years to address homelessness. Mayor Lee directed implementation of the City’s Coordinated Entry system, seeking to improve the coordination of services by consolidating the dozens of City-funded homeless service groups into one system with a shared database. In 2017, shortly before his death, Mayor Lee pledged to move 1,000 unhoused people off the streets, and open two more Navigation Centers.
(b) Now, four decades after Mayor Feinstein first attempted to respond to rising homelessness in San Francisco, the issue continues to vex the City. According to the Homeless Point-in-Time Count conducted on January 24, 2019, more than 8,035 people were experiencing homelessness at that time, a 17% increase from 2017. Among those surveyed, 5,180 were unsheltered, with 86% of unsheltered individuals sleeping outdoors in streets, parks, or tents. According to a database of homeless individuals who use health care and other services, the number of people experiencing homelessness over the course of a year is estimated to be much higher than the number of people who experience homelessness on a given night, with estimates that more than 17,500 people experience homelessness in San Francisco during a given year.
(c) During those same four decades, San Francisco has earned a national and international reputation for the severity of its homelessness crisis, with widespread reports of the City’s street conditions appearing in media outlets around the world. In January 2017, Leilani Farha, a United Nations Special Rapporteur on adequate housing, issued a report finding that San Francisco’s response to its unhoused population constitutes cruel and inhumane treatment, and is a violation of international human rights law including laws establishing the rights to life, housing, health, and water and sanitation. Her report further stated “[T]he scope and severity of the living conditions in informal settlements make them one of the most pervasive violations of the human rights of dignity, security, health and life worldwide.”
(d) San Francisco voters expressed their own dissatisfaction with the current state of homelessness in a Dignity Health CityBeat Poll conducted in May 2021. Eighty percent of San Francisco voters identified addressing homelessness and street conditions as a high priority for the City, and 88% stated that homelessness and street behavior had gotten worse in the past few years.
(e) The COVID-19 pandemic and the City’s Shelter in Place response exacerbated street conditions and contributed to an increase in the number of tent encampments citywide, with large numbers of unhoused people seeking shelter in neighborhoods throughout the City. This was at least partly due to a 75% reduction in available shelter beds, and a halt on new admissions to the shelter system in the early days of the pandemic, in compliance with guidance from the Centers for Disease Control requiring social distancing in the City’s homeless shelters, thus necessitating a decrease in shelter capacity.
(f) Although encampments increased across the City during Shelter in Place, the increase and related impacts were felt more severely in neighborhoods where homelessness was most acute prior to COVID-19. In the Tenderloin, the number of tents increased 285% between January and May 2020.
(g) On May 4, 2020, UC Hastings Law School filed a lawsuit on behalf of a group of Tenderloin residents and business owners over conditions in the neighborhood. As part of a settlement, the City agreed to achieve a 70% reduction in the number of tents by July 20, 2020. By July 3, 2020, the number of tents in the Tenderloin had decreased by 65%. By July 10, 2020, the City had reduced the number of tents in the Tenderloin by over 73%. As of August 18, 2020, the City had moved 87% of tents from the Tenderloin, and placed more than 600 people into Shelter in Place (SIP) hotels or other shelter.
(h) Following the issuance of new guidance from the Department of Public Health (“DPH”) regarding street encampments, the City’s Healthy Streets Operations Center resumed resolving encampments in other neighborhoods as well, subject to the availability of alternative placements.
(i) Notwithstanding such efforts, conditions on our streets remain unacceptable. While some progress has been made in parts of the City, many thousands of people continue to sleep in unregulated, unsafe encampments without access to basic services such as water, food, sanitation, or bathrooms.
(j) As demonstrated by the summary of mayoral initiatives above, the reality that thousands of individuals remain without homes or shelter is not for lack of effort or investment in solutions by the City. Since 2004, San Francisco has helped over 26,000 individuals exit from homelessness. Today, the City has more than 9,000 units of permanent supportive housing which house over 10,000 formerly homeless individuals every night who would otherwise be homeless. The City’s efforts to resolve homelessness have proved successful for many individuals. But for many others, and for the City as a whole, the homelessness problem persists and, in some respects, has worsened.
(k) Since 2015, the City’s development of the Navigation Center model has represented a significant expansion of shorter-term shelter as well. Navigation Centers are unlike traditional emergency shelters because they are service-intensive and low-barrier, and provide case management, meals, showers, laundry, and 24-hour access, and allow guests to bring their partners, pets, and belongings.
(l) Since 2015, HSH has opened ten Navigation Centers, eight of which are currently operating. According to HSH, from the launch of Navigation Centers in 2015 through the end of 2019, 48% of Navigation Center exits were either to permanent housing or reunifications with family or friends through the Homeward Bound program. Over 5,000 clients have been served at Navigation Centers from 2015 to December 2019.
(m) In October 2018, Mayor London Breed announced a commitment to open at least 1,000 additional shelter beds, including Navigation Center beds, by the end of 2020. Prior to the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, the City was close to meeting this goal, and opened 880 of the proposed 1,000 beds by March 2021.
(n) In November 2018, the voters approved Proposition C (“Prop C”), creating a new gross receipts tax on high-grossing companies estimated to generate over $300 million annually for homeless housing and services. In June 2020, a state appeals court upheld a lower court decision validating Prop C, and on September 9, 2020, the California Supreme Court denied further legal review, freeing up nearly $500 million in revenue that had been collected but remained unspent pending resolution of the litigation.
(o) During Shelter in Place, the City acquired over 2,441 SIP hotel rooms to provide shelter to homeless individuals determined to be medically vulnerable to COVID-19. The cost of providing a hotel room is approximately $260 per person per night, although the City anticipates that 100% of eligible sheltering costs for hotel residents who meet eligibility criteria set by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (“FEMA”) may be reimbursed by FEMA.
(p) On September 29, 2020, the Board of Supervisors enacted the Fiscal Year 2020-21 budget, which included funding for the acquisition or leasing of an additional 1,500 permanent supportive housing units through Fiscal Year 2022-23, largely funded through Prop C revenue. These units, proposed in Mayor Breed’s Homelessness Recovery Plan, represent the largest one-time expansion of permanent supportive housing in San Francisco in 20 years. The budget for HSH increased from $367,690,818, in Fiscal Year 2019-20, to $852,100,000, for Fiscal Year 2020-21, and $667,800,000 for Fiscal Year 2021-22, with the bulk of the increase paying for Shelter in Place hotel rooms and new permanent supportive housing units.
(q) San Franciscans are justifiably frustrated that after multiple decades and many billions of dollars of investment in additional shelter bed capacity, hotel placements, and permanent supportive housing units, thousands of unsheltered people continue to sleep on the streets night after night, and that the City relies on residential neighborhoods to serve as campsites of last resort for unhoused people, including individuals struggling with significant behavioral health conditions and substance use disorders.
(r) The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in a case entitled Martin v. City of Boise, 902 F.3d 1031 (9th Cir. 2018), held that the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment bars a city from criminally prosecuting people for sleeping on public property when those persons have committed no offenses other than sleeping on public property, and the city has not offered alternative shelter. The Boise case provides a further impetus – though none is needed – for San Francisco to provide more shelter options for unhoused people in our midst.
(s) Notwithstanding the many investments described above, San Francisco has never established a comprehensive citywide strategy for meeting the shelter needs of the unhoused. Additional shelters, safe sleep sites, Safe Overnight Parking Lots, and non-congregate cabins offer a potential multi-pronged strategy for addressing the needs of thousands of people who continue to suffer outside every night.
(t) According to the Bay Area Council’s June 2021 report entitled “Bay Area Homelessness: New Urgency, New Solutions,” most Bay Area governments have defunded shelter and interim housing to increase permanent housing production, while remaining “unable to scale permanent housing faster than the rate at which residents are becoming homeless.”
(u) San Francisco’s failure to provide adequate shelter for our unhoused population is reflected in the fact that the 2019 Point in Time Count found 8,035 total people experiencing homelessness, 2,855 of whom were unsheltered. As a point of comparison, Boston’s 2019 Point in Time Count found 6,203 total people experiencing homelessness, only 121 of whom were unsheltered.
(v) A February 2021 report by All Home entitled “A Call to Action from the Regional Impact Council” calls for Bay Area governments to balance homelessness spending using a 1-2-4 framework, under which every $1 invested in shelter or interim housing should be matched with $2 invested in permanent housing and $4 invested in homelessness prevention. As of January 2022, the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing estimates that to align with the 1-2-4 framework, San Francisco would need at least 2,000 additional shelter beds.
(w) During the COVID-19 pandemic state of emergency, the City acted quickly to establish thousands of temporary non-congregate shelter placements, including Shelter in Place Hotels, safe sleep sites, and a non-congregate cabin village.
(x) San Francisco is in urgent need of additional non-congregate shelter options for our unhoused residents, including non-congregate cabins, Safe Overnight Parking Lots, and a limited number of safe sleep sites. This is both a humanitarian need, to help unhoused residents sleeping on our streets and in our public spaces every night, and a quality of life need, to relieve housed residents who endure the daily quality of life disruptions that result from open-air drug use, psychosis, and other behavioral health issues exacerbated by unsheltered homelessness.
(Added by Ord. 92-22, File No. 220281, App. 6/24/2022, Eff. 7/25/2022)
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