gentlemen. i want to welcome you back to the chamber. today is thursday, april 19. 1:08 p.m. welcome you to back to the budget and finance committee. i want to recognize my other committee, sandy fewer, catherine stefani, jeff shery and normanee. i want to recognize sf gov to have been, they'll be assisting

us and linda wong is our clerk and she'll be helping us with the meeting. madame clerk, before we go -- before we call item one, i want to give opening remarks. so, colleagues, i want to say again, good afternoon, welcome. this is our second budget priority hearing. as we're all aware the city is facing ongoing and sustained crisis around homelessness. according to the last point and time, count, there are approximately 7500 people experiencing homelessness in san francisco on any given night. we have called this hearing because dealing with homelessness and behavioral health is a priority for the board of supervisors and we

would like to understand a few things. so we are calling the -- calling this priority policy meeting. there are three key things i want to call out for people to pay attention to. where our money is going. what specific outcomes we're trying to accomplish with the investment. and to what extent are we succeeding. colleagues, we're going to hear from the presenters, i ask that my colleagues consider the following. is there a specific aspect of this large issue that you're most concerned about? do we want to focus our resources on preventing evictions and homelessness? do we want to focus our resources on encampments and improving quality of life for those on the streets. or do we want to pay attention

to exit and behavioral health? another question, is there a particular population that we should be prioritizing. for example, families, those with mental illnesses. do we want to do something for the greatest number of people, or significantly expand services for a smaller population that is also in need? finally, as we think about a two-year budget cycle, i would hope that we would be able to prioritize one strategy through our budget in the first year, and possibly different strategy in the second year. this is just a rhetorical question for us to continue to contemplate. we're going to hear a series of presentations today and to the presenters, please, we've gone through your slides. one department in particular has a long deck. you know who you are. i won't call you out.

but the order is as much. first, city service auditor is here. homeless and supportive service housing director jeff will also be presenting. the department of public health director barbara garcia will be discussing with us about our behavioral health initiative. the mayor's office of housing, the lovely and talented kate hardly. and brian chiu. where is brian? not here yet. brian chiu, both of them will be discussing about -- discussing with us about our ladder. we have severin, who is representing the bla report and recommendation. that's an important function, because the analyst is an

independent entity that helps us analyze the budget. so rising above politics. that's why her job is incredibly important. and of course, we're going to close out and hear from the on the ground, nonprofit workers that are tirelessly rolling up their sleeves and providing services, specifically the hesspa coalition and within that coalition, ma lia, colleen, rebecca and joe.lia, colleen, rebecca and joe. >> supervisor cohen: please call item one. cloix hearing on homelessness and housing in the city budget.

>> supervisor cohen: i want to highlight the purpose of why we're approaching our budget process this way, it's an effort to bring more transparency, clarity and fairness into this budgetary process, so what we're doing, we're calling policy hearings, as i said in the beginning, this is our second one. as a result, we will then, the committee, will put what we hear in the form of a resolution that will be introduced to the full board of supervisors next tuesday, be passed and ultimately sent tt mayor's office. this is to capture our priorities, so it's reflected in the mayor's budget, which he will be presenting the city and county of san francisco june 1st. we have an ambitious goal before us. with that, i'd bring up natasha.

all right. good to see you. good afternoon, the floor is yours. sf gov tv, can you turn on the microphone. try again, natasha. hold on. we'll get it together. thank you, good afternoon. thank you for providing us the opportunity to come and present. i want to give a brief overview to explain why we're here and what we do in the controller's office. i manage the performance program that focuses on public reporting, so our few of our main products on the screen, we have the website with the performance score cards. we highlight key performance indicators across the city, across a wide variety of services. we do benchmarking of the city services. last week, we started adding to the score card website.

last week, we did transportation, later today we'll be introducing dash boards on park, libraries, water usage. and then we also do performance measures for all city departments and we report on those twice a year. we're working with the mayor's office to realign performance measures so they match department's goals and those will in the june 1 mayor budget book. today, we're here to talk about homelessness, as supervisor cohen mentioned, this is done once every other year on one day. the gray bars at the top are in 2013. the city expanded and did an additional youth count. >> supervisor cohen: you mentioned this is done one day and one point in time. is it done the same time of the year? >> correct, it's usually done in january. >> supervisor cohen: ok. >> sure. so in your remarks, this is on any one day, this number of

people would be experiencing homelessness. so if you imagine throughout the year as people enter and exit homelessness, this number could be double the number of people looking for services or housing. one of the other things that i mentioned that we do is benchmarking. i wanted to show you how we compare to other cities. so we looked at a variety of our peer cities and who we might compare to, to take a look at how many homeless individuals do they have per 100,000 residents. we do that to compare apples to apples. in this chart, the light blue on the top of the column is the unsheltered rate. and on the bottom is the sheltered rate. there are some states that have right to shelter, so their rates of sheltering are very high, because it's in the state policy they have to shelter homelessness.

they have significant numbers of people who are not sheltered, particularly in the seasonal weather they might have in those jurisdictions. san francisco, has hovered around 42% of sheltered since 2013. now, this data here is looking at the data that we get from hud. its jurisdictions are managed by the federal government in what is called continuums of care and these cross county boundaries. on the previous slide we looked just at cities. here we're looking at counties and the subpopulation. these exact percentages might differ slightly than what is in the san francisco point in time count, and that's because san francisco has a more rigorous counting method than required by hud. this gives comparison how we are with other cities in the four

major categories. we're higher than some of our peer jurisdictions. when looking at services and strategies, this is something you're going to want to look at. for veterans, we're about the same as other jurisdictions. homeless people and families were a lot lower than our peer jurisdictions in this category. and traditional aged youth, we're about double of what our peers are. so just to generally take a step back. homelessness is one of the areas where the public and policymakers and departments are interested in getting firm numbers around these things. we've been working closely with the department of homelessness and supportive housing to expand the performance measures we're tracking. so taking a look at how they match the strategic framework and the homelessness response system. we have outreach services, that is the health outreach, how many encounters do we have? they're going to look at temporary shelter.

for many of the measures, they're looking at the subpopulation, whether it's an adult, family, traditional aged youth. problem solving is another standing for trying to stop people from becoming homeless. housing solutions, whether it's permanent or rapid rehousings. as well as the housing ladder. these are the areas we're working with the department to get measures. i have a performance overview handout i provided. we'll get you numbers for 2017 as well as halfway through 18 to see what the counts are. some of the other measures we've been tracking for several years, one of them is problem solving. so in this case, we're looking at a couple of examples of programs we can do. what are the opportunities that we can prevent people from entering the system and resolve homelessness without the need for services? one of them is a one-time grant to maintain housing.

this is what we've done over the last few years. homeward bound connects friends and family. we've been doing this program for a long time in san francisco. you can see the trend over time. and then the last one, is permanent supportive housing, the city has been making tremendous investments on this topic. right now there is roughly 7400 permanent supportive housing units with another 1250 coming up in the pipeline over the next four years or so. so we're tracking this by placements within supportive housing by fiscal year for adults and youth as well as families. i want to make a quick note these do not include the federally funded supportive housing placements. we took a look at benchmarking, using the hud data, we tooked a look at how many beds -- we look

a look at beds. washington d.c. which is a little behind us, we by far have the most amount of permanent supportive housing beds per residents which is a policy choice the city has made. are there any questions? >> supervisor cohen: thank you. supervisor fewer. >> supervisor fewer: thank you very much, so when we were looking at our definition of homeless and we're looking at peers, so are we using same definition of homeless, what is a homeless individual as our peers? >> yes, hud does have standards what they define as homeless. that is