Breed has plan to help ease increase in homeless families
Mayor London Breed wants to spend tens of millions of dollars to respond to a surge in homeless families that has overwhelmed city shelters and forced immigrant parents to sleep in cars on the street.
Breed said Tuesday her upcoming budget would address the crisis by funding a mix of rent subsidies and vouchers to pay for emergency shelter in hotel rooms. The total cost of the mayor’s plan amounts to about $50.4 million, with much of the funds expected to be used in the coming two fiscal years, though some of the rent subsidies could be spread out over five years.
Breed’s administration came under attack at an April hearing in City Hall on the issue, when families and advocates said the city wasn’t acting quickly enough to address the unfolding crisis. She will include funds for the plan in her next budget proposal that she’s due to submit to the Board of Supervisors for approval by early June. The mayor’s office said the money will come from proceeds generated by Proposition C, a business tax to fund homeless services and housing that city voters approved in 2018.
The increase in family homelessness, which has been particularly pronounced among new immigrants to San Francisco, has been marked by full shelters and long wait lists for beds. City officials say the number of homeless tents on city streets has declined recently, but homeless families are more likely to be taking shelter in cars. San Francisco Unified School District is also struggling to respond to an influx of migrant families, many of whom need help with housing and other basic needs.
Family homelessness is among several pressing problems Breed and supervisors must address in the budget as she looks to close a two-year deficit of about $800 million while also trying to help boost downtown’s slow economic recovery from the pandemic and continue responding to the fentanyl crisis, among other issues.
Breed said in a statement that while the city had already added hundreds of shelter beds and housing slots, it is “now seeing a sudden increase in families struggling with homelessness.”
“We have unsheltered families, most of them living in vehicles across our city, and we need to move them into more stable shelter and housing so they can get on a path to safer, healthier situations,” Breed said. “This is about creating the opportunities to stabilize families, support our young people, and create stronger communities.”
Specifically, Breed said she wanted to provide 115 emergency shelter slots that families can use in hotel rooms paid for with vouchers. The mayor’s office said the first 35 of those vouchers would be made available in the current fiscal year and are already being processed. More than 500 families could be helped with those shelter slots over the next year and a half, because families typically only use the vouchers for a few months at most before moving on to longer-term housing, according to Breed’s office, which said the cost would be about $11.6 million.
Additionally, the plan includes about $28.9 million in funding for the addition of 165 rent subsidies that could support some 400 families over a twoyear period. Another $9.9 million would fund 50 slots that would last for up to five years for families where the head of the household is between the ages of 18 and 24.
Supervisor Hillary Ronen, who represents the Mission and has advocated for the city to do more to help homeless families, said in a statement that she was “thrilled that we have an ambitious plan to address the emergency of family homelessness that has been impacting children who have had to sleep on our streets because they had nowhere else to go.”
“This plan takes bold measures to rapidly expand shelter options and create supportive housing as an exit out of homelessness,” Ronen said. Supervisor Myrna Melgar also supports the plan.