formally homeless, and marginally housed and in, supportive housing and what we use for that is the houser comorbidity. they include many, hypertension, and other examples and so the severity of the mental illness is greater than the chronically men, i have told you that earlier. and you see here, the data that they have around this are very, very involved, and so i really only put out the, and i made a differentiation between the serious medical conditions, needing primary care and serious psychiatric conditions and substance abuse conditions and also at the bottom, the

people that have all three of those conditions and we have a lot more detail if you are interested and how many people are doing the diagnosis and so forth. but, as you can see, the percentage around women and certainly around transgender women are quite a bit over the general population. and i want to highlight some of our service and programs. and again, these for the homeless women, and the homeless families, and the community behavior health services and so that includes our mental health and our substance abuse programs, they fund quite a few programs specifically designed for homeless women and their homeless families and this is about 600 slots and i am giving a few examples here and some that you might have heard of, the woman's place and a homeless prenatal program and they have testified here before. and in your program, is the hs360 that is a former house, and hate ash bury merger and it

is a woman's hope residential treatment and of course, the housed one of the programs to have another one for women and families. and then tried our health service and homeless women and families in a variety of settings and a lot of times they are collaborating with other programs, and offering the services in other settings. so that there is a nutrition program and in fact they are working with hsa around cal works. in primary care programs, obviously, homeless women and homeless families can be served at any one of our neighborhood clinics or any one of our population specific clinics but there are some gender and diagnosis specific programs and they include the urban health clinic transgender klin clinic and a lot of people have heard of the tg tuesday and the women

living with hiv/aids and include the primary care for the health department and the urban health center also has a homeless health family teen and mentioned it earlier, and one things is that they have a collecting point and also have the advice at the shelters around the difficult cases. and the ones that i wanted to highlight is that we actually should the teen be and have a very small civilization unit for the moms and in the last month of pregnancy because that is not something that the program otherwise can currently handle and so it can be there in the last month of pregnancy and if they need to go into another program they can, and once a child is born. and then the housing, you know some of our programs, and we don't currently have any buildings that are women specific, and in general, we

don't serve families very much that is usually done on the hsa site. and when that does occur, we look at our larger units to try and accommodate the head of household and the child, or the children or we work with hsa to have successful transition. and the more appropriate setting. and the medical respite has a woman's floor and the serving floor has a specific ring of cores and we also offer the permanent housing for women living with hiv aids and one member of the family lives with hiv aids and we have it and then the programs that i did not list as obviously our hiv subsidies can be used by anybody, and that we have the women in subsidy and we have families in subsidies and we also are part of the safe house program that joyce commented on the funds that partially.

>> these are our services, you know, i added that we have a lot of gender specific groups that are something, that our clients in supportive housing ask for and that we tried to offer from the beginning on. and the obviously also we work with the women of the men or the transgender clients, on reunification issues if that is something that they want to work on that they are talking about. and again, we will be working with hsa if there was actually, lead to a child or somebody under 18. and reuniting with a parent. i have a couple of stories with me i don't know that those are something that you want to hear about and they are one of them is a success story of a woman that went from homelessness into housing. women as i mentioned earlier the amount of the severity of

mental illness among chronically homeless women and the women in the supportive housing programs is greater than among the homeless men and it is the same is true for substance use and co-morbitity and takes a while for the women to work on the trauma inflicted among homelessness and we know a lot about that now with all of the populations and we address that in our programs and it was in a transitional treatment programs or our supportive housing. >> good, you know i think that we are going to hear the stories in public comment. >> that is fine. >> okay. >> colleagues any questions? >> okay, much appreciated. lastly i wanted to call up carroll from the department on the status of women and i want to offer her a minute to talk

about their services. >> good morning, supervisors, thank you. and i am carroll, and i am the associate director of the department on the status of women and thank you for allowing any to speak this morning on homeless women as you are aware the department on the staff who over sees the city's investment of just over four million dollars in services for women survivors specifically of violence and support a range of services from emergency, shelter, and crisis line services and transitional housing services and legal services and case management and prevention education. women comprise, 27 percent of the homeless population in san francisco. and that means that there are approximately 200 women living on our streets, in our shelters and in non-traditional housing, and the housing for a couple of months and others for years and of the 2,000 or so women, some are heads of families but many are single. as with most individuals,

experiencing homelessness, homeless women have arrived at this situation because of complex factors and it is critical that the city figure how they contribute to the homelessness for women and strategies that take such unique experiences into account. many causes for homelessness, drugs and mental elness are a result of childhood trauma and violence and such concerns and other factors disproportionately impact women and in general, female homeless are more than twice of likely as males to have suffered child abuse, simply, the domestic violence in conjunction with the lack of housing and economic factors, including lack of a job, and one of the leading causes for female homelessness. and 15 percent, of women reported domestic violence as the primary cause of homelessness, and for family

heads that number jumps to 27 percent, in other words, dow domestic violence is the number one reason that the families are without permanent housing and the domestic violence does not end once the women or the family leaves the home, in january, the city experienced the first domestic violence and homicide in 44 months, and with the murder of a 48-year-old homeless woman as you heard from our city's hard working community organization and advocate organizations and advocates today, i encourage you to ask questions that impact the problems leading to and associated with homelessness, for women and families in different ways. why are so many senior women living on the street? and how have experiences with the foster care, trafficking, violence, contributed to youth experiencing homelessness, homeless women are less likely to speak about their needs to a male provider or advocate and this is true for cases where the woman has experienced

trauma. and the women have also been shown to be less likely to vocalize a specific need of services addressing this need are not already offered. i urge you to ask how women experience homelessness differently, what are the unique risks, faced by homeless women and how can our city's policies better protect these women in temporary situations while continuing to look for long term solutions. thank you for organizing the hearing today and thank you to all of the agencies and individuals who do so much every day for homeless women and our families. >> thank you very much. >> colleagues any questions for staff? >> okay. so thank you all for your work on this. we are going to start into public comment. i am going to call public comment cards once you hear your name called, feel free to come on up and if your name is called, line up against the wall here and we will take them one at a time.

jeff kasensky and erica kish, jeff bealic, amanda hire. dan bore socks, and todd robert and jennifer freeback. >> thanks for being here. >> good morning supervisors and thank you for holding this hearing and this very important topic one point two million school aged children are homeless in the united states, about quarter of a million of those live in california and 2200 live right here in san francisco and i know that the homeless count, said that there is 679 members of families that are homeless in the city but there is discrepancy in the numbers that our school district did a report saying that the number is actually 2200. you all have seen many of the problems and one thing that i wanted to point out is right now it is taking a family, almost a year or more to move beyond homelessness and 7 months on the waiting list and a five month stay in a shelter,

children are homeless for a year or more and all of this research and common sense tell us that long term homelessness is defined as six months or more has negative impacts on children and including the fact that a child who has experienced long term homelessness is five times more likely to be homeless as an adult. if we are going to move pass the homelessness in the country we have to address the family homelessness. we have selected housing first as the approach for addressing homelessness and i agree that is the right approach, we want to find solutions there is little housing in our city that is affordable for poor folks. a wait list to get into the affordable housing and that does not address the fact that right now, we have got over 200 families waiting to get into shelter and it is going to take them 6 months to get there and i think that rapid rehousing is

absolutely the approach that we should be looking at and the program struggles due to high rents in the city and we need to do better as a city and individual non-profit organization and however i think that we need to add additional 150 slots at a cost of 2.6 million dollars and that is going to have a significant impact on the waiting list and as it has in the passed when we had money for the americans in the recovery act and when the family made a gift to the city and we saw corresponding large increases and i think that we immediate to make that investment right now to address this crisis and it used to take a month or so to get into the shelter and now we are at 7 months and we can and should be doing better. >> thank you. >> thanks. >> next speaker, please? >> good morning supervisors thanks so much for your attention to this issue, i'm

erica kissh, and we acknowledge that we have been facing a crisis and for a walk down memory lane, when we opened connecting point in 1995, the wait for shelter was never more than three weeks. many of the families qualified for shelter plus care and can he could spend them a few blocks away to that office every tuesday and within a week they would be housed. we could always house a family in the tender loin that was generally the last option because there are so many options on the table. those were the days. today there are more than 200 families on the waiting list and on the past several years the list has hit a record high of close to 300 familis that is in the neighborhood of 750 to 1,000 parents and children, the wait is 9 months and families wait longer than six months for shelter placement. while there have been a few times that we have seen the list go down, when the money was infused and the bay view

gardens opened the upward creek. and unfortunately this seems like it has become the norm but it is not an acceptable norm. s and we all know about the trauma that the children face, when they are dealing with homelessness, parents as well and the fact is that a family that has been waiting for shelter for a month is in a such different state when they enter the shelter than the family waiting for shelter for nine months. and connecting point over the past couple of years has had a hard time answering the volume of calls that come through our crisis hot line and the last thing that we want is the families not to be able to get through and reach a live person immediately and we have engaged in the number of strategies to try to address that issue. the good news of the connecting point is that the stats, is that the presence of our three housing specialists has made a difference and over the past three fiscal years we have been able to divert, 739 families

from shelter. there has been some concern about families ties to san francisco, and i just want to share, some statistics from the connecting point, experience. and over the past three years, 66 percent of families accessing the waiting list report that their last stable living situation was in san francisco. and 18 percent of these, report that their last housing was in the bay area county and survey results from one year ago show that 90 percent of families were calling from san francisco at the time of their intake. and in a discussion the other day, when the colleagues sumed up the problem, and while we are all brought into the housing first model, the reality is that there is no housing and there is no housing within the means of our families in san francisco and finding housing outside of the city, has become more and more difficult. and the further we house families the harder it is to help them stay stable and to keep them housed. and we definitely need the creative solutions and i know

that the group has come up with a good list of ideas that can go a long way in helping to deal with this problem, thank you. >> thank you very much. >> next speaker, please? >> good morning, and thank you, for calling this hearing, supervisor farrell. i would like to briefly address the obvious by the way i'm jeff beallec the director of catholic charities and i would like to address the obvious, the most cost effective and humane way to address homelessness is to prevent the families from becoming homeless, this year we will help 1200 people avoid eviction, and stay housed and including more than 300 families that is larger than the current waiting list i think that this is a very important issue. this year, we are also, we have already helped families in every district of represented except 2 so far this year,

preventing homelessness works provided that we intervene early enough and we have to have good out reach and the money to cure the eviction notice and that the family must have a stable source of income that is sufficient to cover their rent with careful budgeting, the system can work in a successful in a large number of cases when we talk about homelessness, we need to differentiate between chronic and episode, most is temporary. and compared to emergency shelter, and even compared to housing preventing it on the front end is pennies on the dollars less expensive. we are part of the family eviction prevention collaborativive called sepco and that is an association of dozens of non-profit organizations that work collaborativively together with the city to coordinate services and insure that we don't duplicate the effort and more effectively refer to the service provider able to help.

what we need is we need the resources to continue to support this effort, and we need the flexibility in terms of how we can spend those dollars. and we are limited currently, by the stream of funding in terms of which families we are able to support. and it is primarily based on their income, and how that relates as a percentage of area income and so right now, we are limited to 35 or 30 percent of the median income and a lot of the families who need our help are in the 40, 50 and 60 percent range and the resources are not sufficient to be able to handle that. and so, and at the end, in conclusion, i would like to say our goal is for families to be securely and safely housed with a stable source of income and a rent payment that is appropriate to the income and i think that if we are working together and can come together on those out comes we have a good list of options to pick from, as we continue this dialogue and i want to thank you for allowing us, and i would also just like to

mention, that the community home came up and we are funded for another year. and so, we are going to keep doing that, thank you. >> actually, what happens after the funding runs out? i am just curious, are there plans to seek funding from other sources? or, you know, what are the plans, if you can reveal anything that you have been discussing? >> we have continued to have dialogue with the sales force.com foundation and we have discussed with them a longer term plan. and they have made it clear that they are very supportive of the work that we are doing and they love the out comes that we are achieving, and they would also like to not be the only one at the table with funding. and so, we are seeking partners, other s to keep it going. >> thank you. >> good morning, supervisors dan, boresocks and i am here to

represent the prenatal program and i want to dispel some of the rumors that seem to get started whenever this topic is up for discussion, so i will do a little myth busting today and the first one is this notion that people are coming to san francisco specifically for the services. a few years back there was a national conference on homelessness and one of the speakers got up front and said show of hands, how many of you are from a city whose media has labeled it as a homeless magnet. >> the point is that all cities are magnets for people of all types. and so, we really can't dwell on this if we look at our program data, it is 5 percent that we nifrng may be coming in from out of the county to take advantage of the services let's focus on that 95 percent. and this is about housing children and getting them into safe homes, and let's keep it moving forward on that and move past this debate and then the

second aspect of this is kind of the reverse, why are we spending city money to house the families in the east bay? and that is a simple economic reality, we have a program that is a maximum of $800 a month and you add that to a typical welfare check and you are around $1300 a month and that does not take you far in san francisco. the other part is that this is a one to two year subsidy and limited term and the idea is that the family is working on their education and employment, and taking over the full rent themselves so if you bring that back into san francisco you would have to triple the subsidy, and to allow the family to afford the rent and then, that is so much more the information of the family needs to make-up over the short term in order to actually, be housed and self-sufficient? san francisco and it takes for a family of four around $50,000 a year to scrape by in the rental market it is not

something that... feasible for the program, and let's have the focus on the housing that they can and supporting the affordable housing in the meantime and using the tools that we have. >> next speaker. >> good morning, supervisors, thank you so much for your time, and attention to this important matter. and i am mandy and i am the director of rapheal house, it is private funded. and we are here to support our community partners, and to highlight the progress made with the previous programming and to advocate for solutions necessary to service nearly 2200 children experiencing homelessness in san francisco and through our programming, we have found that creative and flexible solutions are imperative to meet the needs of a vulnerable population and to

provide viable options within a constrained environment and our experience is that having flexible policy regarding the use of subsidies allows us to place a family in long term units and this year alone, we have 50 families to acquire the housing through the subsidy and focusing on the short term subsidy, and are able to do that within a four to nine month period. and we feel that rapid rehousing and eviction, prevention are the most cost efficient and effective means for taxing homelessness and we also think that by tailoring our services and other s should be able to taylor their services to be more flexible, and it will allow to a lot more long term success for the familis that we are serving as well as the community agencies work with the city funded programs we advocate for a universal system to coordinate the services for the families and providers who aim to help to secure stable housing. so efficient and creative solutions are necessary to

address the issue, and considering that we have significant challenges for individuals at all income levels in our community today and all of us speaking today are open to exploring way to engage the technology community and assisting us with a solution to more broadly coordinate the crucial work that each of the organizations are providing in the community. >> thank you. >> i will call a few more speaker cards. teresa houston. tammy, joshua jones, maria avalos. and ken dra flesh man and jane shisle. >> good morning, my name is todd roberts i was called and asked to wish to speak on item 6. >> got it well stick around, thanks. >> hi, jennifer coalition on homelessness and thank you for having this hearing, and i want

to talk a little bit about the scope of the issue that we are talking about here today and i appreciate ta we are having this hearing. it was mentioned in the previous speaker about how we have 2200 children in our public schools that are experiencing homelessness and of course that is just the people in k-12 and most of the homeless families are actually young families and they have children that are not school age yet and you could you know very conservatively double that number if we wanted to get at how many kids we have that are homeless and a piece of that pie is the families who are waiting for shelter in shelter and there are a whole bunch more families. when we recently had a meeting with the director of the housing authority, and a lot of different parents came out and spoke, we had at least four different parents that are living in their vehicles, and a couple of them had grown up in supervisor breed's district. and young mothers with young

toddlers sleeping in their cars moving from place to place. and we have families who are living in garages, and families who are doubled up. and certainly, families and in almost every neighborhood in san francisco that are experiencing this crisis and you are going to hear from them and you are going to hear from you know, of course not all of them but some of them and you are going to hear you know their beautiful faces and who their beautiful faces and hear their voices and they come from a lot of different places and i want to thank supervisor mar for bringing up how hidden the population really is. and but we have a tremendous opportunity this year, to really make a difference. and we can stop the flow of homeless families, by keeping san franciscans housed. and we can do that, and we know how to do it, and it just takes the funding to make it happen and we could halt preventable displacements in san francisco and we could rapidly rehouse, as many house holds as we could through the hespa proposal and this is a great opportunity to

eliminate the waitless for families. >> thank you. >> my name is joshua jones and i would like to take this opportunity and i would want to share my experience with being homeless in san francisco. i am currently a resident at the hampton program, with my wife, and my daughter who is 17 months old. and we were homeless in 2011. struggled with substance abuse, 2012, we found out that my wife was 6 months pregnant and we went to ward 93 and able to get on methadone and substance abuse treatment and the hampton program has been a support for us and going from the street life into mental health or substance abuse treatment is a huge transition, and into the stable housing from there is a bigger transition, and the hampton program has been able to be a good support system and a buffer zone to help us get

stability and increase our income and really help us focus on finding stable housing. and the 6 months that we have been married, we have filled out 158 housing applications and just this last week, we have gotten two letters back that said, come and check out our apartments. and we are also got connected with hampton first avenue, and sf homes and we have been told that one of those places will be giving us a rental subsidy and that faces challenges, finding a apartment complex that will take the subsidies, and it will be difficult. and being at hampton, has just been a real help and allowed us to have enough time to find housing. and many of the shelters here, you are only allowed to stay for so long and finding housing in the greater bay area is really hard. not just specifically in san francisco. right now the only way that my

family can stay in san francisco is if we get into a place like mersy housing, and that is stable subsidy. and so there is a lot of challenges that are faced in it and i wish that there were more programs that were transitional like hampton. >> thanks. >> okay. thank you very much. >> next speaker. >> hi. i am cami and this is charlie. say hi, charlie. the family is all good and we are all concerned. but you know there are very little talk of the women up here. so what are women supposed to do? are they supposed to stay on the street? supposed to stay in abusive relationships to have the roof over their heads. or are they supposed to