Homelessness

Under Mayor Breed, San Francisco has been a national leader in meeting the major challenge of homelessness. Dramatic expansions of shelter, housing, and prevention programs, paired with new and innovative street teams have led to 20,000 people exiting homelessness and tent encampments reducing to lows not seen since before the City started counting encampments in 2017.

While cities across the country, especially on the west coast, have struggled to meet the challenges of homelessness due to the high cost of housing and the influx of fentanyl and post-pandemic headwinds, San Francisco has shown what is possible when resources are paired with outreach and accountability.

During the COVID pandemic, San Francisco confronted a significant influx of people living on our streets after shelters were forced to significantly decrease capacity due to health orders. Tent encampments ballooned to levels this city had never seen. In that moment, Mayor Breed’s Administration opened hotel rooms, created safe sleep sites, and began to move people off the street and into more stable situations. But temporary shelter was only a first step. Mayor Breed created a two-year Homelessness Recovery Plan that included creating 1,500 new housing slots across the city. By the end of the plan, the City had doubled that.

This dramatic expansion of housing created even during the difficult years of the pandemic, was part of the foundation that led San Francisco to become a national leader in permanent supportive housing. Today, San Francisco has more housing slots for the formerly homeless than any city in the country besides Washington D.C. If the rest of the Bay Area had the same number of housing slots per capita as San Francisco, we could house the entire population counted in the nine county Bay Area 2024 PIT Count.

Despite this success, for every person that exits homelessness, three more entered it during this time. While many resolve homelessness on their own, the need for services cannot match this influx. So Mayor Breed created new homelessness prevention programs to help people from falling into homelessness in the first place. More cost effective than waiting for someone to end up on the streets or in shelter, these programs provided emergency rental relief or other support to keep San Franciscans stable in their homes, preventing thousands stable in their homes.

In addition to housing and prevention expansions, Mayor Breed pushed for and achieved a dramatic increase in shelter. In her first term, she created a plan to add 1,000 shelter beds in one year, which the City was on track to meet until COVID pandemic hit. But that initial push laid the foundation for the largest increase in shelter the City has seen in decades — a 90% expansion of shelter beds funded and planned during her time in office.

San Francisco’s street response teams leveraged these increase in resources to help move people off the streets and into services, bringing the City’s tent count down by 78% from its high point during the pandemic, and to the lowest levels the city has counted since tents increased across the city prior to 2018. This effort was led by multi-agency teams, including the Healthy Streets Operation Center, and also supported by the Street Crisis Response Team, a new 24/7 team launched under Mayor Breed to help those with mental illness and addiction. In 2024, San Francisco’s street homelessness population reached its lowest level in 10 years thanks to this mix of outreach and expansion of services.

The path ahead is clear. Under the Mayor’s Five-Year Strategic Plan, launched in April 2023, the City set goals to move 30,000 people into housing and reduce unsheltered homelessness by 50%. This plan builds on the City’s success to increase access to shelter and housing over the last few years, which resulted in a 13% decline in people living in tents and on the streets, the lowest it’s been in 10 years. More people experiencing homelessness in San Francisco are living in doors than ever before. Homelessness will never be fully solved at the local level, but under Mayor Breed San Francisco has made tremendous progress.

Expanding Housing

Mayor Breed’s housing expansion increased the overall housing portfolio for the formerly homeless by 50%. San Francisco has more housing for the formerly homeless of any county in the Bay Area and more units per capita of any city in the country besides Washington D.C.

This expansion relied on innovative approaches, including:

• Creation of a new Flex Housing Subsidy Pool, which allowed the city to create vouchers for people to live in buildings across San Francisco. San Francisco is now one of the only communities to have a locally funded ongoing subsidy that allows for easily placing people without only relying on site-based homeless housing.
• Acquisitions of new buildings allowed the city to increase the quality of its housing for the formerly homeless and expand faster than under development. The City acquired X new buildings, including buildings like City Gardens, the Margot and the Mission Inn.
• Rapid Rehousing expansion to allow for more people to get access to rental support.

To help people reconnect with family and the communities they come from, Mayor Breed expanded relocation services through the Journey Home program as well as additional relocation support services. Mayor Breed issued an Executive Directive that provides clear and comprehensive guidance to all departments with staff that engage with individuals experiencing homelessness.

The Directive did the following:

• Mandated all City and contracted staff who directly engage with individuals experiencing homelessness to offer access to one of the City’s relocation assistance programs before offering any other City services, including housing and shelter.
• Required first responders, including police officers, firefighters, and paramedics to be provided with handouts that provide information on the City’s relocation services and a contact number.
• Established a tracking system that will publish data measuring the effectiveness of each program.

Filling vacancies faster

As San Francisco dramatically expanded its housing availability, it experienced a higher rate of vacancies. To close those rates, Mayor Breed initiated a number of policies. By the time she left office, there were fewer than 100 units that were vacant and ready to be occupied that did not have someone in the process of moving in.

Key strategies to bring more people into vacant housing units include:

• Launching the Street to Home initiative, where requirements were waived to bring people directly from the street and indoors while their placement work was done retroactively.
• Lowering requirements necessary to move into housing
• Increasing wages for frontline supportive service and property management workers to improve housing retention and speed up the timeline for turning over vacant units
• Creating a dedicated Housing Placement team to help people navigate the housing process
• Improving the quality of older legacy buildings to increase the rate at which people move into vacant units

Nearly Doubling Available Shelter Beds

To bring more people indoors, Mayor Breed launched a significant expansion of shelter, including launching new models to diversify the city’s model to provide more options for people to come indoors. Under Mayor Breed, the overall shelter portfolio, including projects in the pipeline, will have increased by 90%. Thanks to this work, San Francisco is able to shelter over 9,000 people throughout the year.

Key Strategies driving this expansion were to diversify the different kinds of shelter available. Prior to the pandemic, San Francisco added new sites like the Navigation Centers in the Bayview, on the Embarcadero, and for Transition Aged Youth on Nob Ill. During the pandemic, the city experimented with new types of shelter, and leveraged that experience to add new cabin sites, purchase hotels, and created more semi-congregate sites where multiple people could share one room instead of relying just on larger single sites.

During the pandemic, the City’s Shelter-in-place hotel program was stood up in the matter of weeks, creating over 2,000 emergency shelter beds to help people off our streets as traditional shelters were emptied out. This program also created a unique opportunity in its winddown to place people into long-term housing. The success rate of housing people from these hotels was far higher than it is in the traditional shelter system.

Prevention

Mayor Breed brought a new and expanded focus to preventing people from falling into homelessness in the first place. For every person who exits homelessness, three more become homeless. To truly bring down homelessness, Mayor Breed attacked the issue from both the front end and the back end.

Key initiatives include

• Launching new problem solving support and flexible financial assistance. This direct support for those on the verge of becoming homeless helps to prevent a singular incident, like a car breaking down, from becoming the reason someone loses their home.
• Expansion
• Improved targeting of these programs to people most likely to become homeless, making the use of these dollars more efficient and impactful in preventing homelessness.

Outreach/Encampments

To improve the conditions on our streets and help more people into services and care, Mayor Breed transformed the city’s street response by building new specialized teams and coordinating them with existing teams. Through this work, San Francisco saw its largest decline in tent encampments since prior to 2018, and an increase in people seeking treatment and services.

• The Healthy Streets Operations Center conducted daily encampment operations to offer shelter, bring people indoors, and clean up encampments. These multi-agency teams have been essential to the work to reduce tents on our streets and bring people into shelter and care.

System Improvements and Coordination

While Mayor Breed expanded resources, she also delivered systems improvements to strengthen how our agencies do the work to bring people indoors and house them. To improve systems and set bold goals, the City developed a 5 year strategic plan called Home by the Bay. This plan was founded on the pillars equity and housing justice, quality, and innovation, and is anchored by a set of five bold goals that aim to drive significant, lasting reductions in homelessness. She authored and passed a Shelter Crisis emergency law to expedite contracts to more quickly open shelters and deliver services. Under her leadership, the Department reduced documentation requirements to speed up housing placements, created a single data system to better track people and their outcomes, and improved the coordination to more effectively bring in federal funding.