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tv   BOS Land Use Committee  SFGTV  March 2, 2020 4:10am-8:31am PST

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to take the necessary steps to incorporate these adjacent areas into the right of way proper. right now for purposes of the assessment, they are treated as privately-owned parcels outside
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of the right of way. >> so to take it a little bit further, once they accept, once public works accepts these as public rights of way, the assessment of $4,000 will go away? >> not quite. it's a two-step process. but in essence you are correct. the first step would be for the city to accept these parcels from ocii but in doing so, they would still remain a private parcel in public ownership. d.p.w. would have to take the second step and incorporate, merge these two lots into the right of way. and at that point, what you said is true, it would no longer be subject to the assessment. >> do we know how long that process takes and whether public works has that on their list of things to do? >> we've had discussions with public works. it is my belief that the first
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they are aware of this fact, and second it is my belief they plan to incorporate this into the right of way once accepted. there is a little bit of a technical issue, because streets and sidewalks have to be -- have to meet certain specifications, so d.p.w. would have to assess the sidewalks to make sure that they were, they met city standards. >> and now you are raising another question, which is have they done that, and what would that cost public works, and if we are accepting this, and it comes with an out year capital liability, is ocii going to pay for it going forward? >> i cannot speak for ocii but the proposal that is before us is the transfer of these to the city which would then become a city responsibility. >> through the chair. it seems to me that -- that's fine, you can answer the question in a moment, but it
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seems to me that the analysis should be done, whether or not these will meet the specifications. as i understand that process fairly well, that you have to go through an acceptance process. i know it goes through the bureau of streets and mapping, and they have to determine whether or not it makes city specifications. but if it does not, right now you have listed that the city will be taking on this cost. so we have to ensure -- i would be more comfortable knowing that it's going to be accepted, and the city is not going to have to reduce its allocation. >> i'm development services manager at ocii and i appreciate the supervisor's question. it's true, in our active project areas where we actively have obligations and funding to build infrastructure, those follow acceptance process. these sites are a little different in that they were
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completed many years ago and closed out, and we have no further authority under disillusion to do any improvements to them. while we certainly understand the city's concern to assess and make sure they are in a condition, our disposition authority is to transfer for governmental purpose as is, since we have no authority to expend funding on these essentially. >> so you are not paying the bill currently? >> there is no bill currently. >> there's no bill to the community benefit district? >> sorry. the two parcels, the sidewalks, we are paying the c.b.d. assessments. >> that's the question at hand. so if you transfer and all of a sudden it doesn't meet the specifications, who is going to pay that? >> post transfer, it would be city. so i don't have a better answer than that. >> so i would say it would make more sense to find out if it's going to be accepted. we have that answer before we
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make the transfer. >> i understand that. >> i assume we are talking about standard width sidewalks, the curbs, gutters? >> correct. these were all improvements that were built at the time. >> all right. is there anybody here from d.p.w.? okay. well, i'm sorry, we don't call it d.p.w. anymore. but the charter does, and we are people of the charter, so we do. >> thank you, chair peskin. i want to go back to the sidewalk issue at the end of the presentation but i wanted to continue on to the last proposed transfer of the day if we could have the slide. and that is the proposed transfer to the recreation and parks district. >> and i saw mr. keen's memorandum where he indicated on
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behalf of rec and park although rec and park hasn't verified that that would be no additional maintenance cost to them given the fact they maintain the rest of the park? >> that's correct. they have been maintaining this portion of the park as well as the rest of the park for some time. mr. keen may have also informed you and for the benefit of the public, the rec and park commission has also passed a resolution accepting this parcel or recommending its acceptance. it makes sense that this parcel would go to rec and park because, one, they have been maintaining it for some time and also because the area has been dedicated for open space recreation. going back to the ongoing cost, as was stated earlier, these transfers are at no cost to the city. basically that means that the city is not paying a purchase price for these parcels. ocii indicated that the only
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incremental cost for the operation and maintenance associated with these transfers is the issue of the c.b.d. assessment which also happens to be the parcel that is related to whether or not d.p.w. can accept those parcels as part of the right of way. so there is a cost balancing on either side of the equation for the acceptance of those street parcels. one, the payment of a $4,000 per year assessment, which is a known cost, versus an acceptance of those streets as part of the right of way which has an x factor as a cost. that cost may be zero or it may be some significant sum. i don't know if the board is willing or comfortable with moving forward with this resolution while those issues are being resolved.
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>> i have a proposal for you. >> yes, chair peskin. >> i need mr. spitz first. jeremy. i have one other question, which is a simple question. it may be an ocii question. i think it is. which is that this resolution applies to the aforementioned rights-of-way in the grocery store and the park and any future additional assets not listed in the list of former agency real property would be brought back to this board for consideration. i just wanted to know, is there, i think only ocii can answer this. is there any other real property or assets that are not listed in the list of former agency real
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property? >> yes, there are. there are a known number of finite assets, and i can list them for the committee's pleasure including the fillmore heritage center. there are future transfers of assets in our active project areas, for example parks that have yet to be completed, the mission bay parks that are being built out which we leased that land from the city. so we would be terminating that lease. in some cases there are c.b.d. funds that go with those maintaining those entities, the facilities. those are fully-disclosed in our p.m.p. document which is the finite list of what we have disposition authority for, but i have a summary if it is of interest to the board. >> i would love to have it, and any of those would have to be brought back to the board of supervisors for approval. >> that is my understanding.
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our disposition authority is granted through the approval of the p.m.p. which the oversight board approved. my understanding is it is a city requirement for the the supervisors for the by citi can accept that property on the city's behalf. >> that's what it seems to say here at the bottom of page 2 at line 25. so it is written. mr. spitz. if this committee were to forward this item to the full board, you would have eight days to figure out whether or not this is going to cost nothing, a little bit or a lot of money to accept. and while he said on the one hand if we don't accept it, we just have to pay $4,000 a year, i think these streets should be accepted because they are parts of public rights-of-way, and
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that is the right thing to do separate and apart from the $4,000 per year fee. but i would like to know if public works can, between now and a week from now, create and write down the potential cost of what it would take to accept these. >> thank you, chair peskin. we will certainly do that as soon as possible. i haven't gotten a time estimate from any of our staff, but i will do that right away to try to get that as soon as we could. >> so we have two choices here. we can continue it here in committee and wait for that, or we can send it to the full board with the understanding that until we get that information we'll just continue it at the full board. it's kind of six of one, half a dozen of another. and i'll defer to my colleagues on that. >> i have a -- okay. i have a question about the
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grocery store. i want to add for the record that i have reached out to the district 10 supervisor's office with regard to 345 williams street where the aforementioned grocery store would be transferred from ocii to the city and county through the mayor's office of housing and community development. and it is my understanding that the district 10 supervisor is in support of that so i just want to put that on the record. that was one of my notes. supervisor safai? >> i wantedd to ask a question about the grocery store. so can you tell a little bit more about that? i guess it sounds like it has a deed restriction. is the lewis use -- is the use limited only to grocery? is there anything that happens in this transfer? >> it was purchased with
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community block grant money, and i think if we were to change the use, we would have to refund the $4 million of cbg money? is that correct? >> there's two forms of encumbrance on the 345 williams project. one is the lease. >> there are termination provisions on that lease. >> for default i would leave that to a conversation with the city attorney but there are provisions for default. the options for extension are at the tenants' discretion provided they are in good standing. >> they pay approximately $325,000 a year? >> $325,000 a year.
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so that's the lease. the other restriction if you will, it's not a deed restriction per se, it's that the property was purchased with c.d.b. renewal. so the proceeds, right now the lease proceeds, solis revenues all go from occii to mayor's office of community development. they program that for services in the bayview currently. so that's what i those lease revenues are going to, 100% of them. those are, that's a process that mohcd controls through the cdbg process and annual plan. should the property be sold at some future date, those proceeds would be income also, so they would go through that same programming process that the lease revenues currently go through. so it doesn't restrict the use per se of the property, but the
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proceeds that would be generated. >> right. >> does that answer your question? >> i understand that portion. i guess what i was -- beside the source of funds being cdbg, what was redevelopment? the cdbg funds, how did the redevelopment agency get involved? what was your interest interest in the property? >> there was an initial food desert essentially in bayview, and there was an ask to interest the safeway had closed, and there was interest in helping attract a full-service grocery store to the community at that time. >> did the redevelopment agency put money into the property? that's what my question is. >> we did. we put some tenant improvements into the property at the time. it was an existing building from 1964 i believe. >> so it was built in 1964 and you bought it in 1990? >> right. and we had a small, i think it
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was a few hundred thousand, it was not a significant tenant improvement loan. >> i'm asking if the bulk of the funds were cbgg why was the property under your jurisdiction and not the mayor's office of housing originally if all you put in was tenant improvement money? >> i wasn't there at the time so i don't know the origin of the original ask. it was a survey project area. it was not a project area at the time. >> so why now are you transferring it? >> we are required to under dissolution law. >> i know you dissolved but you have a list of properties. are there an existing list of properties that have been completed that you have not transferred yet? >> we are trying to transfer all our completed assets >> because you dissolved how many years ago? >> we were dissolved in 2012. we could not transfer anything
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until our long-range property management plan was approved in november of 2015. so that's when we then had authority and we started, the city with our partner, we have to work in tandem together to transfer those assets. >> that's my question. i understand it was dissolved years ago, about five years now. why are we bringing this one in particular? what is the process by which you decide over the last five years and going forward existing assets since your dissolution, that you are deciding to transfer? >> so under law, we are required to transfer everything. these are the completed, we are trying to transfer all our completed assets, otherwise obviously in mission bay, transbay, we can't transfer those yet. we work in tandem just as we developed the property management plan in consultation with our city partners, we try to plan that work plan together, so we are prepared to transfer everything as quickly as we can,
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but we work together to manage that work flow. that's the best i can answer. >> they are working their way down the list. before we figure out what we are going to do with this thing, are there any members of the public who would like to comment on this stimulating item, number 1? seeing none, public comment is closed. what is the sense of the board as to my 6-of one, half a dozen of another? have you had time to assess that? >> we think we would be able to do it before next tuesday or within a week. >> all right. well, then, colleagues, if there is no objection, i would suggest that. >> may i be heard? >> yes, of course. >> the one last thing i didn't get to in my presentation was the amendment. >> i was just about to do that
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for you but go for it. >> thank you. i submitted to the clerk, red lines of the resolution, the form of deed and the assumption and assignments. and they have made the changes that you requested to make those documents grant deed and reference a grant deed by a quitclaim deed. so it asks that the board make findings on the revisions as well as the item. >> i was just about to do exactly that, so for those of you who do not know, the difference between a quick claim deed and grant deed is a quick claim deed is an instrument by which property title is transferred where in the transferrer, the seller, if you will, makes no representations to the buyer as to what they own or what encumbrances are on that
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title. as compared to a grant deed wherein that as a matter of law makes representations that the seller actually owns it and that it is generally free of many encumbrances. and i felt strongly that because this is a transfer from a former creature of state law to a city that i thought the successor agency, ocii should make those representations, the city and county of san francisco. and thank you as i said earlier, for humoring me on that, and we will, if there are no objections, colleagues, make those changes. we'll scratch quitclaim and insert grant deed. and if there is no objection,
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send this item as amended to the full board with recommendation pending information from public works as to what acceptance will cost and we will do that without objection. madame clerk, can you read the next item? >> item 2 is an amendment to the planning code to aallow yards and usable open spaces if they meet the specified requirements and allow bay windows that don't meet the specified requirements to apply for a waiver. >> she has a new, better revised powerpoint presentation on section 136 of the code. another earth-shattering piece of legislation. the floor is yours. >> thank you, supervisor peskin. the san francisco planning department. i also have with me maya small,
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designer of the urban plan team, and hopefully i have a powerpoint presentation. bear with me for just a moment. there we are. today we are here with a planning commission sponsored ordinance. it would amend code 136 which permits pay windows that don't meet the standards of section 136 to apply for a zoning administrator waiver. the first change would be to architectural projections. currently they may be horizontal in nature. the vertical projection may not be longer than two and a half feet. at roof level they can extend no more than three feet over the allyways and setbacks and every
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other level they may extend no more than one foot over the streets, allies and setbacks. we have examples on the slide. the issue is under the current standards, many types of decoration encompassing new and traditional design do not qualify as permitted obstructions. so we have some examples on the slides there. so why this change? the planning department has received numerous proposals that incorporate interesting and high caliber architectural decorations. however due to strict nature of the code, they cannot approve them. new energy code requirements often prompt the use of sunshades, however because they are largely vertical in nature, they do not qualify as a permitted obstruction. so give you an idea of what we are proposing, it's fairly simple. we are deleting the word horizontal. so that means a projection may now be vertical, diagonal, anything in the middle.
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and to change that at roof levels we are going from 3 feet to 4 feet. and at every other level it's from one foot to four feet. and i just wanted to clarify that all of our residential design guidelines and urban design guidelines and all the review processes would still be applied to this new change. so a second change is not necessarily a change in standards but a change in process. it is bay windows. so a bay window, we have very, very specific standards to qualify as a permitted obstruction, which are here on this slide. if a proposed design doesn't fit within the limitationed outlined, the applicants only other option beside redesigning the project is to seek a variance from the section. and so we have some examples on these slides here. both modern and traditional. none of these by today's standards meet our design review
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for section 136 guidelines for bay windows. so why do we want this change? the required finding for a variance are very difficult to meet for bay windows. it's because of the fact that bay windows' unique design is not necessarily the result of an exceptional or extraordinary circumstance applying to the property but rather a product of architectural design. the zoning administrator has expressed a desire to develop an alternative to variances for bay window designs that don't meet the standards of section 136 but are considered desirable due to their high-caliber design. so what would this look like in the code? we would be changing the process. so if a proposed window design doesn't fit within the limitations, they must seek a variance, instead we would say section 307h allows these types of designs to go seek a zoning administrator review. they will still need to meet the same massing requirements, so
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hopefully they will not turn into giant bay windows. those controls still apply. design review still applies. this is a planning commission-sponsored ordinance. so this is going back to 2018. they then asked us to hold some community meetings, so we did that, and we did receive support from the community meetings that we held. the historic preservation commission heard this item in september of 2019, and they approved it, as did the planning commission who heard it on october 4 of 2018. so that is our presentation. but both myself and maya small are available for questions. thank you. >> thank you, audrey. are there any questions or comments from members of this committee? are there any members of the public who would like to comment on item number 2? you must all be here for
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something. we will close public comment. and thank you, audrey and maya for meeting with me earlier relative to the one issue i raised, which was that i hope as we give architectural flexibility and expand what these no longer horizontal architectural features can be, that you will be smart and sensitive, particularly in finer-grained building typology about inadvertent shadowing of sidewalks. but i think you will be smart about that. and if there's no objection, we will send this item. >> can i say something? >> you may >> i wanted to say i appreciate the work being done to facilitate both the historic design and modern design in this regard and to make it more user-friendly for the architects
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and project sponsors. so i think this is -- although it might seem small, it does save staff time, does allow for your staff to focus on other items rather than dealing with lack of clarity in the code and/or inability to do things that are more forward-thinking, so i really appreciate the work. >> thank you, supervisor. and i should also add that this was initiated by the planning commission, and the planning commission ultimately recommended this to the board unanimously with one member absent. and with that, we will send this item with recommendation without objection for hearing next week at the full board. madame clerk, could you please read the next item. >> item 3 is an ordinance amending the planning code to create the intermediate length occupancy residential use characteristic amending the administrative code to clarify existing law, prohibit the use of rental units for temporarily
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occupancies by nontenants, requiring the controller to conduct a study and affirming appropriate findings. >> thank you, ms. major. this legislation is the result of many years of city efforts to effectively and appropriately regulate what is commonly referred to as corporate rentals in residential dwelling units in san francisco. i am not the first supervisor to take a run at this. i think the late greatter rance rance -- terrance did so. supervisor tang did so in the late 1990s. and of course we have all grappled as recently as 2016 with the issue of short term rentals, rentals under 30 days,
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that i was proud to work with then supervisor campos on that is now the law of san francisco. there's a lot that i would like to say and talk about and let me start with this, which is in the almost 20 years that i've been on and off this board of supervisors, i don't think i've ever introduced a piece of legislation that has engaged the interest of virtually every singled registered lobbyist in the city and county of san francisco. this legislation has done that. on behalf of all sorts of different interests in a rapidly-evolving field, and i want to share with you what i've shared with all of them who came to my office and met with myself and my chief of staff, which is that this type of housing is an absolutely necessary and legitimate use in urban settings throughout this country and
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throughout this world, whether you are an employee who is relocating, whether you are punching artist who is here for -- a performing artist for a play or a visiting nurse, there are many, many different reasons that people use this kind of housing. as you'll hear momentarily, from our budget and legislative analyst, who issued a report today, which i would want my colleagues and the public to have time to think about and consume, so i'm going to offer some amendments today, but i do not want to vote on this today. i want to continue this conversation. i want to get this thing right. but what you'll hear from the b.l.a. is that in the last decade, this type of use has grown by a remarkable percentage, not only in san francisco, but in the united states of america, no surprise as the internet has made this
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type of use more accessible. so i'll drill down into the legislation and the amendments that i'm offering today and hear from members of the public and parties ranging from folks who -- and companies that have done this for decades to new entrants in the field like saunedder and zeus and others we have met with. i wanted to start first by thanking sonny for the tremendous amount of work that she has put into it as well as the team from the city attorney's office, yang and pradon who have been working on crafting, honing and refining this legislation over the last many months. and with that, i would like to thank fred and the budget and legislative analyst office for their remarkably thorough report
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and turn it over to you for presenting the b.l.a. report. thank you, fred. copies of this, you will announce, are available to the public online. and we can disseminate copies to anybody who would like a hard copy. [off mic] >> good afternoon, chair peskin and supervisor safai and supervisor preston. fred from the budget and legislative analyst office. as supervisor peskin mentioned, we have issued a report that he requested this morning.
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and you should all have hard copies as well as copies of this handout. and the topic of the report was intermediate length occupancy housing in san francisco, also known as corporate housing. and i'll just give a quick overview. the industry, it is in san francisco, there are many uses of this type of housing, and supervisor peskin mentioned a few, though it's called corporate housing, there are many people who have a need for temporary housing in san francisco or elsewhere. and these types of housing units are available for that purpose. a quick overview of the what we know about the national industry and then a little bit about san francisco. and unfortunately we have a lot more information about the national industry than about san francisco. and i'll explain that in a
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minute. but the national industry has an estimated 71,201 housing units throughout the country, dedicated to this purpose. and it's grown since 2010 when there were 58,259 units. you can see the graph here which shows the uptick from 2010. there were more in 2007 and there was a decline during the great recession. but it has come back, not to the same level, but it's definitely been on the increase since 2010. in the u.s. the average daily rate for one of these units is 161 $. the average length of stay, 78 nights, and the average occupancy rate, 86%. so that's a fairly good occupancy rate if you compare it to the hotel industry, it is certainly something that would be desirable from the commercial
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lodging perspective. in san francisco, the corporate housing providers' association, national grade trade group, did a survey, they do one every year, and 2018 is the most recent. so for 2017 they found the average daily rate here, $231 per night, higher than the national, not surprising, given the relative cost of housing here. and a similar occupancy rate, 86% and an average length of stay of 71 nights. in terms of how these units are used, and here's a pie chart that portraying, again, the national industry from 2017. corporate relocations is the top use, 33% of the uses in that year were for that purpose. next you see at 21%, projects and training. so this could be, for example, a
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team of consultants that comes to the city like san francisco, and is going to be here for a two-month project, and they would stay in this type of housing instead of a hotel. other uses include attorneys who come for a trial, doctors, nurses who are here on a temporary basis, patients receiving medical treatment, individuals or families that are relocated by their insurance company because of a disaster or problem with their regular lodging. in terms of industry, down at the bottom of the slide, the top user industry-wide is the technology industry, that's nationwide. obviously that has some meaning in san francisco where that's one of our major employers and one of our grows employers. so when you think of the combination of relocating employees and the technology industry, you can see how those factors would be important in
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san francisco. and then others and individuals or other uses, professional services, which is management professionals from different types of industries, attorneys, and then government and military is the fourth most common use. in terms of the industry profile, which is one thing supervisor peskin asked for, what we found at the national level and also true here is sort of two pieces to the industry. one is what we'll call the longer-term stable companies that have been in place for many years, actually many decades. and then in addition to that, there is a new brand of companies, and it is saunedders, zeus, blue ground are some of the names. formed in 2010, all pretty much receiving venture capital to help them get started.
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and following a business model where they master lease units in the building for multiple years and then release them to tenants which could be a corporation or it could be individuals such as employees who are being relocated and have a fixed amount that they can spend for temporary housing when they first come here. another characteristic of the newer companies is much greater use of information technology. so in terms -- the units are listed online. they can be negotiated and leases can be filled online. the arrangements for meeting the tenants when they show up are done online with entry codes sent via smartphones. and then requests for services, while the tenants are in the units can also be done online. so this is a change from what we'll call the old guard or
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businesses that have been providing this kind of housing for decades in the past. in the past i would characterize the industry as more relationship-based. there were property managers and owners who knew human resources personnel in the companies that might need this type of housing had personal relationships with them or relocation specialists so that they would often make the arrangements through a phone call rather than any kind of online presence. and those businesses are still in place, and they still operate that way. though most companies now have some kind of online presence and advertise the housing online though there may be people in the background who are making the arrangements by phone or through personal communications. one of the key questions that supervisor peskin asked for this analysis was how big is the industry in san francisco? and there is no easy answer,
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unfortunately, to that. we went to all the likely city departments that might have this kind of information, which is department of building inspection, planning, the assessor, the treasury, tax collectser and even the rent board -- collector and even the rent board, and none of them identify housing in that way. when housing is built, it is classified as residential, commercial or industrial. and if it is used for intermediate-length occupancy housing or corporate rentals, it is simply classified as residential as it goes through the review and approval processes. so there is no count that way. so we went to trade associations to see if they had inventories, and we went to a number of providers so get numbers from them, some of them did share them, though we can't say we have a count from all providers. but using the trade association information, and that included mostly the san francisco
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apartment association and the -- which is local and the corporate housing providers association, the national group i mentioned before. the apartment association estimated that 1 to 3% of their members' units are used for intermediate-length occupancy housing. and they have i think about 9,000 units if i'm remembering right under their -- excuse me, 90,000 under their -- within their membership. so the 1 to 3% shown here, the estimate of 2,705 to 8,115. the high numbers seemed very high from what we could gather, but there's a lot of listings and a lot of housing in this industry that doesn't appear online or wouldn't be immediately accessible if you didn't know property managers or have the personal relationships that i alluded to earlier.
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so we did review websites where listings are posted. we counted them, we identified characteristics such as what neighbors they are in and how many bedrooms the units had and what amenities they offered. and we have information about that in our report. but based on what we could cobble together, we come up with an estimate of at least 2,000 units. we easily got to 1300 with what was available from providers and websites. we know there are many that aren't even listed that we couldn't see, but there are some being occupied now, for example, that wouldn't be shown as available. and then there are those that don't appear online. so we are conservatively estimating 2,000. could be more. the apartment association believes there are more than that. so we end up with a range absent better data of between 2,000 and
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2,700. just a quick review from our sample. these are neighborhoods where we found 461 listings that are available and that were available in march of this year. and that was our test period. and we picked up the information on that. and as you can see, over half are in six neighborhoods south of market is the big one, south of market and rim done hill combined. rincon hill combined. it mirrors what you see in the short term rental market, a lot of the same neighborhoods seem to be popular with this market as well. >> a quick question before you leave the neighborhood. how did you determine, through the chair, how did you determine this list? did you find this list through the internet? did you look at the different companies? i'm just curious how you came up
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with the list. >> right. we did get it off the internet. the companies have listings. >> that would be over 30-day stays? >> yes. and they all -- 30-day stays so they are distinct from short term rentals though a quick comment about that, airbnb does list a lot of corporate rentals also. and they've actually started a separate business or initiative that is for business purposes entirely. so it's possible that there are some units that are going back and forth between short term and intermediate. >> essentially it's through the company? >> through the companies. and they are more explicit than short term rentals in terms of what neighborhood they are in or in many cases listing addresses of the buildings. that's something you won't find -- >> i did a quick survey of the neighborhoods, and i only see one that would be in my district. interestingly.
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>> this is not a complete list. but in march these were the neighborhoods that we could identify from the listings. >> okay. thank you. >> from the sample, here's some information about rents being charged, broken down by size of the housing units, one bedrooms, they average from our sample per night is $159. a little less than we reported earlier from the 2017 survey. and for a two-bedroom, $200 a night. so compared to market rents, which we took from zillow, and you can see that here, they were reporting a $3,580 average rent for a one-bedroom and a $4,530 average rent for a two-bedroom apartment. so the difference per night is shown there, $44 for one bedroom, $54 for two bedrooms. and then multiplying that out
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and assuming an 86% occupancy rate for the intermediate length units, we come to $4,239 a month for a one-bedroom apartment. and you can see the difference per month there. $659 or over the period of a year, 7,900 more dollars than market rent. or more a two-bedroom, $802 more and 9,624 per year. it's important to note this would be offset by additional costs. the market rents are largely for unfurnished units. so if you go into the intermediate length housing business you need to furnish your apartments and provide services. it requires more of the owner's time to meet the tenants and make arrangements, and there's more interaction with them required while they're in the
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units as well. this is part of the appeal, by the way, of some of the newer companies because they do all of that. so if you are a landlord, you could do this yourself or you could make an agreement with zeus or blueground, and they will do this. may will pay you market rent, and then they take care of all the business arrangements for getting an intermediate-length occupancy tenant into the unit. and they incur the cost of the furnishings and so forth. another point on this is -- >> sorry. i have a question. so that slide that shows the difference, doesn't that understate it? because obviously for the market rents, if rented by longer-term tenants, then rent control on most of these properties is going to kick in. so over time that differential is going to be significantly higher, is that right? >> that's right. that was the point i was going to get to now was
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rent-controlled units. so this is for market rate. if a unit is converted from being a rent controlled unit to an interneed yacht-length occupancy unit, the -- intermediate-length occupancy unit, the difference is much greater. it could be a substantial jump. and you are absolutely right, then as it goes forward, if a tenant stays 78 days and leaves and a new one comes in, the rent can keep increasing at market rate. so it will just keep going up to whatever the will bear at that time. and these rents often are paid by a third parties. when you say why is the he tenant paying this much? if it's relocating an employee, it's probably the employer play paying. if it's someone whose house was damaged in a flood, it's their insurance company paying. if it's patient visiting their
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medical insurance might be paying. but in most cases, it's not the actual person who is residing in the unit who is paying the rent. finally, we tried to get an estimate of what's the impact of whether this industry is growing or not. all signs are it is growing. it's certainly growing nationally. i mentioned earlier on that the growth rate and supply was 22% between 2010 and 2017. we don't have a baseline number for san francisco, but we did this calculation by taking the san francisco apartment association estimate of 1% of the housing stock being dedicated to intermediate-length occupancy housing and went back to 2010. so let's assume it was 1% at that time. so that's what this number is, this 2,486, based on multi-family housing units in place in 2010.
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and then we advanced it forward. to between 2010 and 2017, multi-family housing in san francisco grew by 7.8%. and if that were true also for intermediate-length occupancy units, they would have added enough units to get to 2,680. if they grew at the national rate, it would be 22%. and then there would be 3,038 units or a difference of 358. and the significance of that is what that would be doing is taking a disproportionate share of the new housing units that were added to the san francisco housing stock and dedicating them to intermediate-length occupancy. so it would be more than its share, if you will, of the 7.8% growth. >> your report also references, and this was in the press, one particular brand new building on
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market street where the entire building was dedicated to that use? >> right. 2100 market was taken over by sonder. they arranged an agreement with the landlord there for all the units. and that is unusual. in most cases, it will be, and the apartment association has told us that most owners will limit the number of units that can be used for this purpose to maybe 10% or so of the total in the building. so sonder, the arrangement at 2100 market was unusual. i think there might be one other in san francisco at 21st and capp that is the same type of arrangement. but most of the companies are not doing it that way, at least at the present time, most of the landlords are not allowing for all units to be converted to that purpose. so that is a summary of the
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report. i think that we have more information in the document about job growth in san francisco, the nature of job growth, the increase in what's high-wage jobs that are particularly in the tech industry but also in professional services and how that dovetails with industry growth in the intermediate-length occupancy market nationally, we think it's very relevant here, it seems to be growing. there's certainly a lot of money to be made in it. one can look at this and say why isn't everyone doing it? i think for a lot of landlords, there are impediments, there are costs, there are some new costs and requirements that they would have to fulfill to move into that industry. but for many, they are seeing a great opportunity for earning more on their housing stock. so i will stop there. but i'm happy to answer any
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questions. >> colleagues, are there any questions for him? and we all will have plenty of time to read all 28 pages of the report that was released earlier today. once we make some amendments and continue this item, so if there are no questions -- >> i have some questions. i'll wait until after public comment. >> go ahead. >> i wanted to follow up on the question about the source of some of the info. i'm curious if there's any information from the companies listed on page 10 of the report about the number of rentals that they are doing, either voluntarily provided by any of those companies or through reports that they've generated for investors or publicly disclosed? >> right. so the information on page 10 is from -- and i'm just going to quickly look at it to make sure. yes, so those companies, some of
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them did provide their inventory but most did not. we didn't talk to all of them either. the listings on the website were the source for the neighborhood distribution and the prices and other characteristics that we identified. >> thank you. >> supervisor safai, any questions for mr. brew sew? -- for mr. brusseau >> i'll wait until after public comment. >> this is a complicated piece of legislation but i think supervisor preston put his finger on one of the most important moving pieces, which is there's a huge economic incentive as it relates to prix-1979 rent-controlled -- pre-1979 rent-controlled stock to push tenants out because it is more lucrative to have a
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interneed yacht-length -- intermediate-length occupancy model. i believe the ordinance precludes this type of use, nonetheless it has happened. and one of the fundaments of what i'm trying to do here in this legislation is to effectively ban corporate rentals in rent-controlled housing. so i want to move that conversation, which as i said earlier, is a necessary and legitimate use, to post- '79 housing. and i'll drill down into that later, but i know we have a lot of people here who would like to speak, and diego sanchez is on behalf of the planning commission that heard this item not once but twice. so mr. sanchez, if there's anything you would like to put on the record, and we'll open it up to public comment. >> i'll be quick and summarize what the planning commission, what action they took on januar.
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they voted unanimously to approve a resolution in support of this ordinance with two modifications, the first was to enact a interim control, be it a neighborhood notice c.u. requirement or moratorium on new intermediate-length occupancy activity and collect data on the scale of this activity as we have been hearing. data collection seems to be imperative given that the city doesn't have a definitive grasp on the scale or locations of this activity. this is an activity that may have multiple benefits but may also be detrimental to the housing supply in san francisco. the second modification they approved was to clarify the proposed admin code amendments exempting nonprofit organizations from the proposed cap on ilo and add this clarified language to the planning code. so that concludes my presentation. and i'm also hear here for questions. thanks. >> thank you, mr. sanchez.
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and so that brings me to corporate rentals which currently exists in buildings that historically have not been protected by the rent stabilization ordinance and those would be the post-june 13th, i'm making up that date but i think june 13, 1979. and the board actually recently passed legislation to extend the rent ordinances just eviction protections to these units, though they remain without price controls. and this has created a sort of what i'll call middle bucket of dwelling units that this legislation seeks to reasonably phase into compliance under a new residential use designation, and after receiving feedback from planning staff as well as the commission about the desire to have interim measures to collect data and understand the true impacts of the industry, i've included planning code amendments to accommodate a reasonable and limited amount of
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these corporate rentals or interneed yacht-length -- intermediate length occupancies, i.l.o.s, that would be permitted through a conditional use process at the planning commission and operators and developers would have two years to come into compliance with this new designation. the underlying intent is that after those two years and the completion of a nexus fee study by the city controller in consultation with the board, that this board of supervisors could decide whether or not to impose permanent controls for future i.l.o.s, depending on what the data says. so we are obtaining that baseline data that mr. brusseau is trying to figure out. this is also dependent on what kind of compliant success rate we have with developers and operators and whether or not they are willing to learn from the mistakes of the original
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disrupters in the short term rental market, and actually share their data, and as mr. brusseau said, many companies actually did share data, some better, some not so good, some not at all, but that was helpful in trying to get our hands around what the right public policy regulatory fix is. and as i said before, i say that because i think there is a role for intermediate-length occupancy uses in san francisco. currently, the legislation has set a cap of 1,000 units to be legalized over the next two years, during which time corporations would come into compliance with the new i.l.o. law and self-report data to the planning department that would allow the city by and through the board of supervisors and the planning department and planning commission to set reasonable boundaries for the industry. that being said, i'm open to
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considering other ideas in addition to what's in the legislation, and i do actually want to make a couple of amendments, one to remove the exemption and the other to clarify that the intermediate-length occupancy designation only applies to this middle bucket of non-price controlled units, and those in progress under construction that have not vested in the building permit process. so with that, why don't we open this up to public comment? i have a number of speaker cards if you want to line up to your right, our left. [calling speakers]
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>> good afternoon, members of the board of supervisors. my name is susan marsh. several things came up listening to this report. the first is that very simply, the data on -- the information on exactly how many rent-controlled units are being rented out as i.l.o.s is highly incomplete. the estimates that were provided seem to be lowballs, frankly. this should not matter as long as the possibility, the
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availability of this alternate -- alternative exists for landlords and speculators and property owners, they will be tempted to take it, and it is definitely an incentive for them to cannibalize the stock of rent-controlled housing. therefore i'm glad to hear that what is on the table is a total ban on such i.l.o.s. as for the rest, well, we have been told over and over again that we are in a housing crisis that's due to a shortage of housing. we've been told this over and over again as an excuse for building housing that frankly doesn't serve the needs of most of san francisco's population. the existence and availability of the alternative of turning i.l.o.s makes a mockery out of this. these are long-term hotels. these are not housing.
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they are what is known as non-housing housing. they are speculative investments. so i would urge you to take that into consideration. thank you so much, and thank you for introducing this. >> thank you. next speaker, please. >> members of the board of supervisors, my name is greg pennington, i moved here at age 20 in 1977. i've lived in the same apartment for 42 years. and to my horror, veritas just bought my apartment building about three months ago. during that three months, the water has been shut off ten times, the elevator is out of service, the intercom is out of service, there are workmen coming in and out all the time, endless construction, continual noise. it's been a total nightmare. and nothing like what i had my first 42 years. i live in district 3, aaron peskin, i'm very happy to have you as my supervisor. thank you for putting forward this legislation. we need affordable housing in this city. i'll tell you right now, my
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entire life is here. if you allow veritas to put me out on the streets, which is what they want to do, i'm going to be on the streets. i'm going to be joining the 7,000 living there now, because i have nowhere to go. so i would ask the board of supervisors to do everything they can to stop veritas and brick and timber from continuing to run amuck. we need affordable housing. so this is important legislation. i noticed the east cut only had one of those i.l.o.s, the east cut is where tens of thousands of market-rate housing the being built. take those i.l.o.s out of market rate housing. those people need to live in those neighborhoods. they don't want to live in neighborhoods like mine where there are humans shooting up drugs at bus stops. people shouldn't be paying high rents in those places. i support this legislation whole hearteddedly, and i spend on all of you to allow me to continue to live in san francisco. thank you.
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>> thank you. next speaker, please. >> linda chapman, and i'm representing old hill neighborhoods, because at the time we were dealing with short term rentals as opposed to this. so i think this is a good way to refer to this as the bucket bill. it seems odd that, unless i'm reading it wrong, there are a lot of people who don't actually put down roots. we were concerned about people who put down roots, but even in the building where i lived, people came and went. not that i'm opposing this but i'm puzzled. but my real concern is about short term rentals. you passed legislation a while ago which might have been wonderful, i don't know because i wasn't able to find anything about it. in order to get something from the clerk, i need the legislation number, the agents i talked to not just in my supervisor's office but the sponsors couldn't get the notion that there was such a thing as a dwelling unit or that we passed
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legislation at the same time as the residential hotel was passed. it absolutely outlawed renting a dwelling unit which you know is the thing with the kitchen, like the studio, for less than a month. and there was no problem in the court, you know, there was a problem of course with the residential hotel thing, and it had been written in a way, that was overturned, we had to rewrite it. no problem at all with the other thing. i live in fear that people are going to write something that prevents, that somehow grandfathers in things that were already done, because i don't know what you passed here. and there's some language here about things that happened before. i don't have time maybe to read it to you right now. either it outlawed every single dwelling unit, renting less than 30 days or not, they weren't corporate, right. they were owned, some of them,
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by governor properties, by his wife, and i just want to make sure. otherwise my ghost will haunt city hall. i can't die happy. >> thank you. next speaker, please. >> good afternoon. my name is bree and i'm the vice president development and strategic partnerships for ronald mcdonald house charities bay area. for over 30 years, ronald mcdonald house charities partners with ucff to provide communities of support, access to medical care and the healing power of family and home for critically-ill children. last year, ronald mcdonald house charities provided 3,752 nights of lodging and more than 10,000 free meals here in san francisco. the need for temporary housing is greater than what we are currently able to provide. each year, thousands of children and their families travel to san francisco seeking--saving treatment. ucff is ranked the best in northern california in five
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specialties including pediatric cancer and cardiology and cardiac surgery. the clinical services with the sickest patients requiring the longest lengths of stay, on average about 45 days. a recent assessment demonstrated that 25% of pediatric patients are inpatient more than 30 days, and 54% of families are less than $50,000 a year. and 40% ranked access to temporary housing and a place to rest as their family's greatest need during their child's medical crisis. as advocates we rely on flexible interneed yacht-length housing to keep -- intermediate-length housing. our partnerships have allowed us to provide nights for families in the last quarter alone. we rely on these important partnerships to meet the growing need. i would like to share a quote from charlie scott, a recent
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recipient of a free corporate apartment. coming from a rural city, life was a culture shock, but the apartment made us feel comfortable. without the opportunity to stay in this apartment, it would have been difficult for my wife and i to spend time with our newborn child. thank you. >> hello. my name is kiana martinez, and i have been a volunteer with the housing rights committee of san francisco for a few months now. i just want to say that on the ground, going to see -- working with tenants every day, all of us together, we are seeing this firsthand, we have seen every building i've gone to, i've seen locks on the doors of the units where there is nobody living there. we have people living there for short term, and we have around 7,000, as someone said, 8,000
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folks on the street. so firsthand, we deemed this place either outside of the city who are long-term tenants who are contributing to this city and we have seen people who are ending up on the streets. and that's on the ground. that is what we are seeing. so i just really thank you, mr. peskin, for putting this forth, and i hope that you all see that for long-term tenants of an san francisco, this is really needed, and it's clear that the companies like veritas and other developers are taking advantage of this. and it's an extra incentive for them to evict long-term tenants. it's an extra incentive. so i hope that you take this onto consideration. and thank you so much. >> thank you. next speaker, please. >> thank you for putting forth this legislation. the real estate industry is back
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with a new business model and a new disruption. we understand that there are the occasional rare case where there's somebody who needs temporary housing. but regular folks can't compete with the kind of money that can be made off these corporate rentals. these regular folks are the folks that i've been working with my -- for over ten years in san francisco, folks with terminal cancer who wound up getting evicted because their landlords know they can make more money off their units, folks -- and whether it's people who are trying to move in today or whether it's folks who are trying to hold on to the units that they have, folks -- these folks cannot compete with these $5,000 a month-type of rentals. in these situations where landlords are incentivized to rent to companies instead of people, to rent to these companies are not going to assert tenants rights, they are not going to ask for their
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repairs to be made, that are not going to stay, and instead just make as much money as possible off of our limited housing stock. thank you so much for protecting our housing. >> thank you. mr. shaw. >> good afternoon. my name is shaw, i live at 698 bush street. i'm a member of housing rights committee. and i strongly support and urge the committee to move forward. i was a tenant with veritas, and their building at 698 bush street, 10 to 12 units empty for more than a year. they kept it empty, and we are having a housing crisis in the city, and they are talking about greed. they want to flip the property
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so the more empty the building is, the more they can get the money. so they are holding it on and on and on. and meanwhile, i live near the union square, people are homeless, and there's no help for them. and they bought my building. the real estate people told us they were going to buy this building so they can convert it to condos or short term rentals and so forth. and if it's short-term rental housing, that much per unit. this is in a family zone. i will leave the copy to you guys. thank you so much. >> thank you, mr. shaw. next speaker, please.
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mr. weaver. >> my name is scott weaver with the san francisco tenants unit. thank you, supervisor peskin, sunny for making this legislation possible. in a sense, we shouldn't be here. it was the law in 1980 that corporate rentals were illegal. it was doubled down in 1998 that they were illegal. and somehow it got lost in the airbnb legislation. so this is our opportunity to get it right and to make corporate rentals illegal and to provide mechanisms for enforcing the illegal conduct, because what we are dealing with is actually a rogue industry. they didn't come here and take our rent-controlled units with permission. they took it in opposition to the very laws that the city has passed. [please stand by]
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>> this legislation is super important to me and thank you, mr. peskin. thank you, networks speaker,
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please. and by the way, i have a new stack of speaker cards. ryan thompson, paula millard, carrie blanchette, andrew simmerman, jeff jordan didn't tyler smittay. >> i would say veritose has many goals and one of the goal is to create small, quick improvements to convert temporary furnished rentals. one of the goals is they incentivize their employees financially to achieve the company's financial goals. so, basically, tenants are data in achieving these goals.
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so i think very much for your legislation on doing away with corporate rentals, as they're counting on every tech worker that is making millions of dollars to rent these apartments and meanwhile, we have long-tenants and when we're traveling to san francisco, it's an environmental issue creating gas emissions. thank you. >> hi, i work with the community housing. veritose is a trash organization company and they lack morals and dignity. but anyway, i just want to express my support for this
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legislation today and, you know, corporate rentals are ravaging are rent-controlled housing stock in the midst of a housing crisis in sanfrancisco. we hear a lot of lip service about the housing crisis we're in. it's good to see there's some legislation to actually fix the housing crisis that we're in. thank you. >> thank you, sir. next speaker, please. >> good afternoon and thank you for allowing me to speak. my the coo of veritose. i would strongly object to the previous speakers. it is our long term goal tit's d
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units. we're not in the business of renting intermediate length occupoccupancies. we have had to replummet because of the finding of lead and in addition, we have upgraded the electrical system which is no small feat and given the age of many in our portfolio, this is a necessary part of bringing these back to life. this is an important part of legislation and i thank you for the amendments that have been made to it a it. there are many legitimate uses for linked occupancy, so thank you for your consideration and i appreciate the opportunity to
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speak. >> thank you. next speaker, please. >> i'm ryan thompson. i work for express corporate housing. the first thing i want to say, e were support any legislation that bans the use of rent-controlled units. i'll keep this brief. i did want to comment on the proposed interim hard cap. we think it would be more effective to use a sort of percentage-based system maybe for buildings that are newer over some minimum unit count. just so that this rental type can still be provided in a way that can meet shifting market needs or demands. we're worried that a hard cap would prevent people that do have a legitimate need for this
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type of housing for getting it. the thousand-unit cap is lower than amounts in the city. we think going with a lower based system were be better. >> what mr. thompson said was interesting because one of the aforementioned lobbyists that contacted me represented a national trade organization like the corporate rental association of america. i met with them and they said what you said, hey, we don't want to do these in rent-controlled housing, so that part is music to my eared. ears. >> and we're a part of that organization, so thank you. >> thank you. >> next speaker, please. >> i'm corrine and i live at
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1029 paige. we rented out to a short-term basis to individuals, not corporations, such as travel nurses living there now, particularly during flu season, interns and, as well as people looking for permanent housing. i would like to continue to do that and i'm not sure that law will allow me to do that. so i don't go through a third party. i managed it myself. i do advertise on corporate housing by owner but they do not manage it for me. so i'm just telling you to be cautious and don't throw out all corporate housing and -- i shouldn't say corporate housing -- interim housing into one bucket. it does serve a need. i mean, we're on the verge of a global pandemic and we'll need travel nurses here. a lot of them can't rent from those larger corporations
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because i charge less money for my rental than the bigger players do. >> thank you for those comments. supervisor safye and i were having a sidebar about the need between now and next week or whenever there may be more hearings on this, to clarify the less than nine-unit definition and so i think i hear what you're saying and we can clarify that. >> it's a duplex but the building is from 1900. >> very helpful, thank you. >> thank you, supervisors. i'm paula mallard and i'm with synergy housing. synergy has spawned from oakwood global housing that existed for 60 years. representing corporate housing,
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i'm also somebody who has been affected by the limited demand -- limited supply, high demand in san francisco and also family in the east bay. so there are many, many items that impact that, not just furnished housing. what i'm here to say today, supervisor peskin, you addressed this in your opening remarks, at the end of the day, there's a huge demand for temporary housing and it is people that need temporary housing. it's not a company. it's not an entity, it's people and they're coming to san francisco with a new job, getting opportunity to try out housing to see if they'll live in san francisc san francisco f, many years. they then bring their families and invest their money into the local stores, grocery stores and restaurants and support that need. also, going back to people, just
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in synergy alone, we have 300 employees. i'm an employees and two service vendors, there's over 300 people and so i just wanted everybody to remember that at the end of the day, those people need housing, too. thank you. >> thank you. next speaker, please. >> i'm a district five voter and a member of the senior disability action and i'm here to support supervisor pesk -rbgs ordinance to regulate rentals. as a senior, i have major concerns over the way these formally moderate activities have suddenly exploded into a new outlet for ringing greater amounts of speculative cash out of ou our high our finite housi.
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we continue to be swept away. the people in san francisco have spoken in many ways. the ballots, surveys, town halls, emails to you, and our number one concern, as you know, is preservation and creation of permanent affordable housing. , not high priced, turn-over transient housing. anything that takes away from our goal goes against the public interest and so i feel it requires very careful tracking, close government supervision and the elimination of corporate ilos. thank you. >> thank you.
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>> i just want to make one comment that there's also a big difference between a corporate person and natural person and this actually defined this use as a use for natural persons, not corporate persons. and while i understand this business models vary, i can tell you the story in my district when i was on the board of supervisors, where united airlines was renting a number of, yes, rent-controlled use un, cycling in and out of different flight attendants and pilots and my response was, no, that's housing for people who need to live and work in sanfrancisco. you guys can rent a hotel and to their credit, they did. sorry. >> good afternoon. i'm kathy lipskim.
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we already have rent-control units being taken away by lmis, landlord move-s thi move-ins and threated. we can't not think to turn rent-controlled units into spaces for their executives. if anyone can afford hotel prices, it's these guys and the hotel industry can use shoring up. given the fall of the tourist industry, due to a dangerous pandemic flu, these corporate rentals should be strictly prohibited with the tightest possible language. thank you in your efforts to make them negligibleentities. this speaks to the just-build
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philosophy and everything will be ok, not. thank you. >> next speaker, please. >> i'm from housing right's committee and thank you very much for introducing this. we need permanent rental housing here in san francisco for workers of all incomes, for families with children and seniors looking for units they can afford and we need to say no to ca cannibalizing the rental stock and changing the law later. we also need to corporate rentals increases on rent-controlled tenants as landlords try to push them out to make increasingly amounts of money. we see landlords with patterns of harassment and using hearment
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harassment to displace tenants as their model. company like veri.your own compo stating its goal to convert units at 640 powell to furnish short-term renta rentals and wht about 430 baker, 635 stockton and 125 conrad? are these all furnished units. we need to stop pushing out long tern tetenantslong-term tenante.
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ants. >> i work for star city with co-living communities. the tenants are from backgrounds and professions, hos hospitalitd the arts. in some cases they're temporarily displaced by the wildfires. the average length of stay is 11 months. we have one project under construction that's in active reuse of a historic tenderloin bath house adding 5 55 middle housing units. we had 53% of the units will be below 54% in soma. we offer traditional landlords
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but long-term tenancy is encouraged. our lease terms are not finite and we rent to individuals seeking to live and stay in san francisco. the vast majority want to stay long-term and we offer lease terms because folks need it and they can't qualify or commit to a 12-month lease even if they wanted to. we've been working with supervisor peskin's office and though we understand we may not be the subject, intended subject of this legislation, we have proposed a select view clarifying amendments to the author and the staff to give our business the ability to operate in our hometown. the first is the definition be clarified to leases to tenant uses and the definition between 30 day expos30 days and three tr months. thank you. >> next speaker, please.
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>> hi, i'm a native of san francisco, went to george washington and i live in the city and went to school in the city and worked at almost every hotel over my career. i'm currently the general manager for furnished quarters we're a family-owned company and we're 20 years in business. we support the legislation that you are putting forward with the adherence of, we don't want to affect any marginal housing. we're only looking at -- pardon me, supporting a cap as a percentage on the buildings. we're to the moving into neighborhoods, taking up housing, taking up affordable housing. we're trying to welcome new people into the city. our guests would be the ballet dance, the nurse that's helping you, people relocating. it's a reflection of who the
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city is and these people do need to come and find their way in the city. i don't think many people can move into an apartment just upon arriving. we provide a service and act professionally. so we do support this, but we would like to see a percentage and maybe some clearer language into what type of housing the corporate rentals can be in. put we don'we don't want to affy losing their home and we don't practise that way. >> next speaker, please. >> good afternoon. i'm a tenant here in sanfrancisco and thank you for the opportunity to address you all. i wanted to make a couple of points that have already been made in part, but to drive home the idea of what it feels like to be a rent-controlled tenant, who is experiencing what we call rentoviction. it's not just a construction that goes on endlessly and the
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water turn-offs and electricity turn-offs. at the end of the day, if tenants want to contest the increased cost passed through to them, as a part of all of the renovations often done to facilitate the intermediate length occupancies, they have to go to rent board to try to fight those costs back and tenants have a difficult time doing that and are rarely successful. so it's not only the environment that's created. it's raising rents for tenants who are in rent-controlled units that would be otherwise protected by the annual cap. and just a couple of other points, i'm a medical student at ucsf and i've contributed to the care that people come here from across the country to seek the services that we have. there's a place for those tenants here and i hope that the supervisors will make an amendment that would allow for patients to come and stay. finally, just to the point about
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care providers who have to come to san francisco in order to administer care to these patientses, there's always a the patients, i will say that ucsf and anthem blue cross and a number of other people have plenty of money to buy a building. there are 76 for sale and i think they could probably afford one. there's a way to facilitate housing for those folks, but it does not have to come ough at te expense of protecting long-term tenancy for san francisco. >> next speaker and if there are others after miss nu, please line up to my left, your right. >> good afternoon. i'm peter cohen with community housing. our member organizations are in the business of providing long-term permanent, affordable housing so this issue of how our housing supply, very limited
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housing supply is used is very important to us and we've been giving feedback on the legislation. there's been a lot of innovation of the using stock. you've been around, live, work, we have had short-term rentalled, corporate rentals and these are innovative ways to provide housing for folks that are not, say, your traditional long-term residents. but this legislation is sensible in the sense that it's just a way to define and therefore be able to regulate one of the activities. some folks may want to shut this down entirely and others may want a narrow provision but you can't do anything until you're able to define it in the code and decide what the best regulatory policy is. arguably, short-term rentals was too late and should have been done earlier. i think a lot of us feel that use may be working fairly well, but a lot of rough and tumble to get there. so i think in this situation,
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your ilos are no particularly different. it's a use that needs to be managed. i what i found interesting at the planning commission, the operators are already using the term, intermediate length occupancy, so they've sort of, if you will, conceded to this, this needs to be a regulated use. it's interesting where you look the the prices of the listings, $5,000 a month. if you did the calculateses, it requires a salary of $180,000 a year. so what kind of housing is appropriate? i leave it to you folks to answer that. >> miss nu? >> i'm with the san francisco apartment association. we spent a lot of time with the office doing research on this type of housing and we've determined that it's probably in
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rent-controlled stock, less than 1% of the housing. we counsel people they cannot rent for less than 30 days and any rental after 30 days falls under the rent-control ordinance and we don't differentiate between corporate housing, ilo or regular housing. if it's rent control, it's rent control. so our goal is try to see if we can get a percentage of these units in rent-controlled stock in the bigger properties, golden gateway and others grandfathered in to continue to provide housing to the ballet, the theatre, visiting nurses, students, relocation for seismic work, relocation when ccdc had to do their rebuild and it's a necessary service that's provided whether it's in rent-controlled stock or non-rent-controlled stock. i understand the limitations, but i think we can work on a
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grandfathering of 1%, 3%, 5%, something like that, if that's feasible to the board. thank you. >> and more importantly, having looked at that a little bit, feasible for the city attorneys. so a little complicated -- >> i think the devil is in the details but we're willing to work on that to see what we can do to provide that capacity, because i hate to see good people seeking housing be displaced when it's been provided for years for them. like a lot of the professors at sf state stay at park merced and they're only there for a nine-month tenure. if they want to stay, they're under rent control. >> thank you. i'm sensitive to that issue. while we're having this conversation, i have to say i had a graduate student, intern
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last summer, who went and got some of these contracts. this is, by the way, in no means to your organization, but some of these online business models actually, illegally and in contravention of the eviction protection controls that exist under local law actually had staying beyond the ilo term as a just-cause for eviction in the contract. and i just want to put that out there because anybody who is doing that should stop doing that because it's illegal. >> we have to control over the creative tech industry. >> there is that, thank you. [ laughter ] >> next speaker, please. >> good afternoon, supervisors. i'm lisa aubrey and i'm a resident of district 5 and a long-time rent-control tenant.
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indulge me for a moment in an exercise. how many times a week do you busy supervisors go out to eat or engage the services of a restaurant or a cafe? i would waive wager you do so d. our local restaurants are struggling to stay in business. my partner is the director of operations for state bird provisions and the progress restaurant and they have a staff of over 120 employees. they're looking to expand restaurant spaces but a land on this local, thriving business is turn-over of their employees
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because their employees cannot find affordable housing. restaurant workers can make a decent living but cannot pay the rent. so i would ask you to consider that, the primary drag on these restaurants' financial viability, the constant turnover of their workforce and i support supervisor peskin's legislation and i ask you to please consider and help the local workers and the small local businesses protect our existing rent-controlled housing. we need your help. thank you. >> thank you. mr. turner. >> good afternoon, i'm brook turner with the coalition for better housing. supervisor peskin, i'm one of the people who worked with supervisor haliman, supervisor chang, you and many others of the years on the subject and i really do appreciate your efforts to address the needs of
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folks, including those of rental property owners who may be using this opportunity to rent their units. (please stand by) most of it is not going to
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corporate housing, whoever might be coming in and renn -- rents up ten buildings. most of them are coming to new tenants of san francisco. most are for people who wish to rent for less than a year. but most all of them are for at least six months. so you have this sweet spot where people say i'm going to go to san francisco, i'm going to try it, i'm going to make my way, but i can't find it to sign a lease for a year, so often they will do for six months. so those people we want to make sure they have a place to go as well. we appreciate your thoughtful amendments, and the idea of having some flexibility for the good actors and those who have acted responsibly in the past. thank you. >> thank you. are there any other members of the public who would like to testify on this item? seeing none, we will close public comment. if i can find my gavel.
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so i have distributed the two amendments that i discussed to my colleagues and would like to adopt those amendments and continue this item to our next meeting next week, moved by supervisor safai, and if there's no objection, we will take those amendments. next week i would like to consider further amendments to guide the planning commission relative to the c.u. criteria at the commission everything from geographic sensitivity, building typology and previous operating practices were discussed. i'm looking forward to hearing more from the community as well as the landlord community and my colleagues about what those c.u. considerations should look like in the intervening week.
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and with that, the item is amended and continued. madame clerk, can you read the next item? >> item 4 is a hearing on the implementation of the november 2018 ballot measure, proposition f, tenant right to counsel which guarantees any tenant a right to counsel in an eviction matter. >> supervisor preston. >> thank you, chair peskin. when we started the process of drafting proposition f, which was the ground breaking 2018 ballot measure to guarantee a right to counsel to any tenant in san francisco facing eviction from their home, we were guided by a simple principle, when renters from access to legal help, more will be able to stay in their homes and avoid unfair eviction. today we will hear initial data
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from the program's supplementation. and the story that these numbers tell is clear, providing tenants with an attorney stops unfair displacement and gives san francisco residents a fighting chance when facing eviction. in the last six months alone, over 700 tenants households have avoided eviction thanks to this program. the data supports the theory behind prop f. since implementing the right to counsel, evictions have decreased overall with a 10% drop from 2018 to 2019. of the tenants receiving full-scope legal representation, 67% achieved a successful outcome of being able to stay in their homes. this program stops evictions and prevents homelessness. the mayor's office of housing is here and will provide a broader overview of the data in their presentation shortly. but i just want to highlight a few important points at the out
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set. first, as predicted, evictions are dropping. fewer eviction cases are being filed and for the cases that are filed, fewer are resulting in tenants losing their housing. second, the data shows that full scope representation, that's an attorney throughout the eviction process, is one of the ground breaking aspects of proposition f, results in far more tenants being able to stay in their homes. 67% of those getting full-scope representation avoid displacement as compared with 38% of those receiving what's called limited-scope representation. third, the program overwhelmingly benefits lower-income tenants, and we'll hear more details on that, but 85% of those represented under proposition f are extremely low or low-income tenants, 9% are moderate-income tenants and just 6% are above moderate income.
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fourth, the demographic data is very important to look at. you'll hear more details, but i want to highlight one thing. district 5 has seen devastating rate of displacement, particularly in the african-american community. four of five african-american tenants who receive an eviction notice and get help through this prop f program end up staying in their homes, and 80% success rate. what we know from this data is guaranteeing a right to counsel is one of the most powerful tools to stop displacement of african-americans from san francisco. today's report is encouraging but not at all surprising. for 20 years prior to serving ads district 5 supervisor i worked as a tenant attorney defending tenants against ellis act and other abusive evictions, suing slumlords for substandard housing conditions and fighting the conversion of rent-controlled housing. i saw firsthand what a difference the presence of
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representation can be, not only to help tenants navigate the system but also to support tenants' emotional and psychological wellbeing during such a stressful time. while this initial snapshot proves that the promise of the right to counsel program is being met, it also makes clear we need to do better. proposition f requires full implementation, that means 100% full-scope representation by july 2019. and the reality is we are not there yet. for about a third of tenants who receive only limited-scope representation, outcomes are far worse. i believe universal programs need to be exactly that, universal. and our challenge ahead is taking the steps we need to take as a city to achieve that goal. given the success to date and the voter mandate of prop f, we must fully fund this program. it's not only cost effective but providing a universal right to counsel for all tenants facing eviction is the right thing to
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do at exactly what the voters required of the city in overwhelmingly passing proposition f in 2018. i also want to emphasize that what we do here with this program is crucial for tenants of san francisco, but it's also crucial for tenants across the country. our tenant right to counsel law is the strongest in the nation. we are the second city in the country to pass the law after new york city, and the first to require a universal program that provides full-scope representation for all tenants facing eviction. and since then, we have inspired other cities to follow suit including newark, new jersey, cleveland ohio, philadelphia pennsylvania and santa monica, california. other cities like los angeles are looking at similar legislation, and the states of massachusetts and connecticut are considering statewide right to counsel laws. as we assure we reach full implementation, san francisco should be proud to leading the way on the right to counsel for
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tenants, a program that will stop more evictions than anything we have done in a generation. finally i want to thank the mayor's office on housing and community development for their work implementing this program and for providing the background data in presentations that we will hear today, and in particular, ramirez and chiu for all their work on this. i want to thank the right to counsel providers, many of whom are here today, and in particular martina limb and kerry gold of the eviction defense collaborative, which has taken the lead on this program among our nonprofit providers. my understanding is e.d.c. is here today and is available for questions if there are any. so i look forward to hearing the mayor's office of housing community development presentation hearing from service providers and from the public with more details about the program and how together we can achieve full implementation. thank you. >> thank you, i'm director of
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community development for the mayor's office of housing and community development. and we have a powerpoint presentation if we can switch to that. i will try and quickly move through a powerpoint presentation. you have the information in your handouts. i know we have a number of providers here who are eager to tell you about the work they have done on behalf of this program. so we are going to talk a little bit about our broader eviction prevention strategy and then specifically talk about the structure of our right to counsel program which we launched in july 2019. as folks know, about 65% of of y how housing is rental housing. one out of three tenant households are severe housing programs. 30,000 units of our housing is considered subsidized to be permanently affordable. 60% of tenants live in rent-controlled buildings. that adds up to 139 million households that are low or moderate income. in this most recent year, we
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have had a little over 2600 eviction lawsuits filing and about 581 default judgments have been entered. the sheriff's department has been given 926 court orders to he convict just to give you an idea of what that looks like -- to evict, just to give you an idea of what that looks like. outreach can be provided by attorneys, sometimes by other peer counselors. we provide alternative dispute resolution, which we have found to be especially helpful in cases where individuals are living in subsidized housing often overseen by our nonprofit housing providers and direct financial assistance, ongoing emergency rental assistance and sometimes emergency rental assistance. so briefly, before we launch this program, there were four different kinds of supports that were offered through our eviction defense system, full
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scope representation, just as available, and there had to be priorities made, so not every client had to have their cases assessed to determine whether or not we could represent them with our limited resources, self-represented clients would receive assistance with the answer to the notice, and that was available to every single individual with no prioritization. at mandatory settlement conferences, we would always make available limited-scope representation at that conference only. and then for pro per clients, we did offer through the providers a variety of limited-scope representation, so beyond the answer, we were able to give some limited assistance. so how did that change when we initiated this process? again, we wanted to expand full-scope representation to the maximum amount possible so now it's available to all. it's not prioritized.
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it's done on a first come first serve level so there's no assessment of the case in terms of who has a stronger case or who may not have a stronger case. again as before, for all pro per client, we offer assistance with the answer through our providers. that's available to all, no prioritization, similar to what we had done previously. and at mandatory settlement conferences, limited-scope at the conference as well is available to every single household that attends, again, no prioritization. the difference here is that prior to this, we did offer some limited assistance to those pro per clients that needed it above and beyond the answer. we have not been able to do that because we wanted to shift the resources to full-scope legal representation. you can see on this chart, the takeaway from this chart i think you'll notice that 53% of all the folks receiving assistance received full-scope
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representation, and then now that we have launched it, we have managed to increase that from 53% to 67%, and that's the significant change between those two charts. as the supervisor mentioned, why did we do that? we can help more people and give them a better result. so for those individuals that received full scope, the success rate is 67%. you can see for those people that only receive assistance with the answer and that settlement conference, it's 38%. so it's a dramatic difference, we really want to stress that when some people have asked does it really make a difference if you offer assistance through all stages? it's undeniable. the number of cases we are talking about, full-scope representation, we managed through our providers about 1200 cases in the last full fiscal year, already in the first six months, we are almost where we were at through the entire year
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next year, showing that people have really benefited from our additional assistance. and here's a list of our many different legal service providers, the e.d.c. has been the legal partner. as you can see, we rely on many different organizations to provide assistance. and here's a snapshot of where we've come in terms of the overall dollar amounts that we've managed to increase. so in the fiscal year 2013, our department oversaw about $470,000 total. you can see every year it's increased, and most recently, in 18/19 following the passage of prop e, so currently we administer about $9.8 million. in the current fiscal year, we also are assisted with an additional $1.4 million that the department of homelessness and supportive housing also
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providing for additional full-scope legal representation, so that brings the whole pot to around $11.6 million citywide. interesting to note that as the amount of funding has gone up to provide full-scope legal representation, the number of unlawful detainers that have been filed has gone down. i can't say for sure that there is a correlation, direct correlation, between that, but you can draw your own conclusions based on these numbers. just for your own interest's sake, to see for right to counsel what the causes are, not surprisingly, the overwhelming cause for these eviction notices that be nonpayment of rent followed by nuisance, but nonpayment of rent not surprisingly is over 50%. so how many people have assisted themselves of any kind of assistance including assistance
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with the answer? we've served 1,644 households so far in the first six months. of those, 67% of everybody that received assistance received full-scope representation as supervisor preston mentioned, and one-third received less than full scope representation, so perhaps assistance with the answer only or representation at the settlement conference. for your own interest, 56% of all of the cases so far have been fault, 44% no fault. the no fault cases doesn't necessarily reflect the overall number of notices filed in this year. that number is a little bit larger because no-fault cases can sometimes extend from one year to another. so it may be a number -- we may be managing cases that were filed in a previous year. and 94% of all the cases, not surprisingly involved low and moderate income households.
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and slightly more in the fault cases and a little bit letter in the no-fault cases. no-fault cases also include ellis act eviction, owner move-ins and especially with the ellis act like when you are looking at an entire building, you may catch a number of higher-income households in those kinds of cases. again, 68% are extremely low-income. and for full-scope and if you look at all the cases in the system it's 71% are extremely low-income. we wanted to look at the racial equity in terms of who's being served by our attorneys. so african-americans comprise the largest number in fault cases. latinos comprise the largest number in no-fault cases. it's interesting also to note that the order is exactly reversed for fault and no-fault, again, sometimes hard to know
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exactly what that means. but we do know that for african-americans, a large number of our african-american clients live in subsidized housing and subsidized housing cases comprise more than half of the fault cases. so there may be some correlation there. similarly, with the large number of latinos in the no-fault cases, on a later slide you'll see a significant number of no-fault cases occur in the mission, especially with a large number of ellis act, so i think it reflects the housing typology and the geography of where some of our communities are living now. then here's the overall breakdown for full-scope representation, 18% african-american, 28% white, 23% latino, 21% a.p.i. and 20% for other. similar numbers in you include all forms of assistance. here's the breakdown for neighborhoods, tenderloin has
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the largest number of fault cases. you compare it to no-fault where the mission by far has the highest number of no-fault cases. the success rate as we mentioned before, 67% of closed cases in full scope result in households staying in their homes. if you break it down by race, the highest success rate is for african-american households. maybe those are subsidized housing, and we are often able to have a higher success rate working with our affordable housing providers. the lowest success rate has been for a.b.i. households which traditionally have been perhaps more often found in market-rate housing. and that does mean, of course, that 30% of our closed cases do result in the household moving out, the providers do their best, but they are not always able to keep people in the houses, but they did report to us that 78% of those cases
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resulted in those households having more time or more money than they would have been able to achieve without that kind of full representation. what have we learned through this process? we are not only talking about the attorneys but we are talking about the support staff including paralegals and social workers that are essential to put it all together to support \that's/these\thesis households. we work with law schools to support the pipeline. we had to do a lot of training with new attorneys. this required a huge ramp-up. so we need a lot of assistance providing that mentorship to the new attorneys. we, through the current program, have 47 attorney positions funded. of those funded positions, we have 42 positions filled, five positions going through the hiring process. average caseload is about 50 per attorney. and then looking at the overall numbers, if we were asked how many clients in one, in this
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fiscal year, do we think would receive less than full-scope representation based on the number of attorneys we have. we estimate a little over 1,000 cases would not be able to receive full-scope legal representation based on the need and demand that we have seen so far. we are also asked the funding, again, $9.8 million from our department, supports this as well as additional $1.8 million from the department of homelessness and supportive housing. the cost of an attorney comes to $220,000 which includes that attorney and paralegal time, social worker time, the management staff and overhead. and on the last side, we have a brief breakdown we were asked to give a snapshot of what the costs looked like. each organization sets this up a little bit differently. but this is sort of an average of what we see in terms of the actual costs to all the
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providers to support those 47 attorneys. so that is a quick snapshot of where we are six months through the program we are happy to answer any questions you might have. and i know that eviction defense collaborative as the lead agency and a number of other partners are also here to speak either during public comment or to respond to any questions that the committee members might have. >> thank you. and through the chair, just a couple questions, more to clarify than anything. one, i just wanted to let everyone know, and you can certainly confirm, that when we see fault and no-fault for folks who are not familiar with that terminology, that a fault eviction does not mean anyone's been found to be at fault, it means that the basis of the eviction is that the landlord is claiming that the tenant did
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something that warranted eviction. so in some of those cases may well be valid defenses and not instances where anyone was at fault. i just want to clarify that. >> yes. >> the other thing, just looking at your slide 10 for a second, which lays out the full scope representation, and the increase from fiscal year 2018 into '19 from 53% up to 67%, i just wanted to give a little more context of the -- what the year before looked like. and i understand that the department doesn't have the same exact level of detailed breakdown for 2017 as there is for '18 and '19. but my understanding from
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correspondence from your department during the prop f discussion is that before 2018 and the year before that one-third of cases were receiving full-scope representation. i just wanted to confirm that that is either accurate or in the ballpark. >> yes, i think that's right. what you don't see here is that we have allocated existing resources that were for less than full-scope representation, and we actually moved some of those dollars into this project. so, yes, i think you are correct in that. >> so we have effectively in less than two years, moved from a third of eviction cases having full-scope attorney throughout the case to two-thirds. >> yes, that's true. >> great. thanks. and then on the money allocations also just wanted to clarify that the -- let's see, i guess it's slide 15 if i'm not mistaken, where you laid out the
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cost. >> uh-huh. >> and so those figures there are -- there's eviction defense services and related services that would be everything as you described, the fully-loaded attorney, the attorney, the paralegal overhead, litigation expenses. there was also, and i know a number of folks in this room work on the outreach, counseling, the other things that are non-legal, so that would be a separate bucket of money not included in these figures, is that right? >> that's correct. that would be outside of this ask. >> and i want to note on that slide on 15, because there's quite a history, and i want to give credit where it's due but also note 2012 was the year we declared the intent to become a right to counsel city, legislation authored by then supervisor chiu, with a lot of folks who were involved in prop f also involved back then. but as you can see, the rhetoric
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of aspiring to get to full scope wasn't really reflected in the budget allocations. it was as you said i think a couple hundred thousand. >> right, i think about 470,000 in 2014. >> and at that time primarily focused on funding program to fill at a time pro bono representation -- to facilitate pro bono representation. >> right. >> and over the years, some increases, two supervisors led the charge in that '16/ '17 cycling to have the increase. >> there was a study done i think at that time with then public defender and supervisor campos to look at what the cost might be. and there were some dollars given, significant at the time,
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but nowhere close to where we are at now. >> from the department's perspective, i think you shared thoughts about success of the program, but you view this as far as investments in protecting housing, creating affordable or protecting folks who are affordbly housed, this as a -- affordbly affordbly -- afford ahoused. >> yes, keeping people where they are housed now, especially if they are in rent-controlled units is by far if most effective way. it takes upwards of $800,000 to create one new unit of affordable housing. so the difference is astronomical. there's no question about the importance of this kind of intervention. >> thank you.
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and just one last comment while you are up and before my colleagues ask their questions or we hear from the public, i just wanted to say that when writing proposition f and i authored the measure, and there were a lot of folks involved and talking about how are we going to implement that, what are we going to write into the measure, who is going to be responsible for implementing it? it was provided in the ballot measure in the first year that your department would be tasked with that. and i think that resulted from the confidence that a lot of providers in the city had in dealing with yourself and mr. ramirez over the years. and really a vote of confidence in continuing to have them lead that effort. so we obviously have a ways to go still, but i want to acknowledge the efforts that have gotten us this far. to thank you for all your work. >> thanks. we appreciate that.
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we are always open to input to further improving the system either within our department and with our partners. so we are happy to be able to assist. >> thank you. seeing no questions from the chair, i think we'll open it up for public comment. apologies in advance if i am mispronouncing your name. [calling speaker names] i'm sorry, i just noticed that cortney mcdonald with the supervisor haney's office is here. >> thank you, supervisor preston and chair peskin.
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and thank you so much for calling this hearing today. on behalf of supervisor haney, i'm here to express our strong support for the full implementation of the tenant right to counsel program consistent with the voter mandate to fully implement this program by 2019. since the program began, recesses of district 6 have really benefited -- residents of district 6 have really benefited. as i'm sure both of you experience every week we hear from far too many tenants who are at risk of eviction. i wanted to share one story of a tenant who was not able to get the full scope representation that she needed to be able to stay in her home and a formerly homeless veteran approached us, we connected her to the eviction defense collaborative. she was not able to get support throughout the entire process, she was only able to receive limited support filling out
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forms to respond to her unlawful detainer, which clearly wasn't enough, and she pleaded with our office for more help. we tried to work directly with her landlord to get extensions which only got her so far. and she was eventually evicted. she slipped back into homelessness and ended up transitioning into a navigation center down the street from where she was formerly housed. had she had a lawyer with her through the full process, the likelihood of her still being housed in that building would undoubtedly been much higher. we also speak to many tenants on treasure island in particular who are unclear if the program extends to them. many of them have also been evicted during our time, our short time in office here. so again just wanted to convey our office's support for the full implementation of this program. and it's really critical it be fully funded in this year's budget. thanks for your time. >> thank you.
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>> good afternoon. my name is adrian. i'm the executive director at open door legal. our mission is to pioneer universal access to civil legal representation in all areas of law. and we currently operate in districts 5, 10 and 11. just to give you a sense of the scale at which we are operating, this year we are projecting to do about 850 cases across 35 different areas of civil law. and we consider the full implementation of right to counsel to be part of our core mission. in fact we feel it is so central that all the members of our housing team came to testify today. we are thankful for the city for, and the mayor, for putting additional funding towards this, and more people are receiving eviction defense services than ever, as brian said. but the work is underfunded.
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we were funded to do 83 eviction cases this fiscal year. and since july, we have already handled over 165. by the end of june, we are projecting to handle about two and a half times more cases than we were funded to do. and despite the high volume, i'm really impressed by the team for their hard work on these cases. so far, we have kept about over 95 people in their homes. we have canceled over $465,000 in debt. we have obtained settlements over $495,000 and all for public investment in our tier c work as only $185,000. so obviously the volume is high. the work is important. and we look forward to continue doing that. thank you. >> thank you.
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>> good afternoon. my name is alex. i'm the senior housing attorney at open door legal. i supervisor the housing department during the rollout of the t.r.c. program. i was one of the first attorneys hired when t.r.c. funds became available in october 2018. we were blind-sided by the increase in the amount of work when t.r.c. rolled out in july 2019. throughout 2018, open door legal opened six or seven housing cases a month on average. in july 2019, we opened 30 cases with the same number of attorneys, which was two at the time. we did this because we fundamentally did not believe in turning anyone away who qualified for our help. and because we we we wanted to e we wanted to do everything possible to implement prop f. we opened 81 cases during the months of july, august and september 2019. of those 68 were referred from the a.d.c. or eligible to build
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through the grant we were receiving. because we had been accepting referrals from the e.d.c. before that date, there was no way we could have expected the massive boom. if we had known, we could have planned for it. it took us totally by surprise. although we are resilient and my team is fantastic, those three months took a toll on us. by the time i went on vacation in mid-october, my colleague and i were nearing the edge on a daily basis. the psychological strain was incredible, and the only thing that kept us going was our belief in completing this mission. i got sick at least twice a month which added to the stress and limited my time and increased my level of self care, but it made no difference. in so many ways, the implementation has been a huge success. but i want to, as many others have said, push for full implementation of the program so that all attorneys and all tenants can receive
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representation that is solid and good and thorough. thank you. >> thank you. >> hello. my name is delventhal. i'm the housing advocate at open door legal where i help underserved communities maintain their housing and assert their rights ads tenants in san francisco. open door legal opened its doors to me and welcomed me onto their team six months ago as a post-bar fellow. having attended law school in the city, i witnessed the extent of the housing insecurity in the bay area. i understood early on that fighting homelessness begins with evictions. i spent the vast majority of my law school career interning at san francisco-based nonprofits that specialize in eviction defense. looking to continue my fight against homelessness, i stopped my search after coming across open door legal's web page.
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one client testimonial in particular spoke to me: i have rights, people have rights, people need to know they have rights. with a place like this, you have people who can defend your rights. this is what the neighborhood needs. in my role, i review all appointments, help with intakes, do casework and discovery. our practice is a high-volume one, but it is very effective and very efficient. partially this is because of the amazing team that we have, partially because of our systems. this is all allowed us to operate at a high capacity without sacrificing the quality of service. at the end of the day, more funding is needed. thank you. >> thank you. i'm going to read a few more names. [calling speaker names]
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>> good afternoon. my name is kelcy and i'm the newest housing attorney at open door legal. i left my previous job on november 5 of last year and started at open door legal on november 6. i wanted to be a part of a team working toward a shared mission in the fight against poverty and inequality in our community. i also wanted to be on the front lines to help our city implement the's tenant right to counsel. it's been a steep learning curve. when i started my old job in big law, i was trained for three weeks before i touched work. but with the number of tenants facing eviction, i didn't have that luxury at open door legal. i was assigned a client my first day and soon i had a full caseload. my first trial was on january 6 and by what felt like the seat of my pants, i managed to avoid
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trial and help avoid a family of ten from losing their home. despite the high caseload, i felt incredibly supported by our lean but dedicated staff when i was at a firm i had a secretary, the occasional staff meeting, periodic trainings but in hindsight these trappings felt mostly like lip service to the idea of professional development. by contrast at open door, the level of communication and mentorship i have received has far exceeded my expectations. my professional growth and the collective growth of this team and community is essential to achieving our mission. we are striving to improve everything about our organization because our mandate of universal access doesn't change based on the amount of funding we get. it's a function of the need of our community. at the bottom of this lies the truth that there's not enough funding to implement prop f across all neighborhoods of the city. we hope with this hearing, we can start to change that. thank you. >> thank you.
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>> good afternoon. my name is paul. i operated a consulting business for nonprofit agencies in san francisco. i worked with a volunteer tenants right counselor at the san francisco's tenants union. i counseled for the late miguel wooding, the founder of it and came to know him. i worked hashed to persuade him to do an evaluation of e.d.c. services, we are talking 201, 202, 203. i could never per said suede him. unfortunately, and let me emphasize, being stranded in the caribbean after 4 4 -- after 9/, my landlord filed actions against me. my landlord lost every action. later in 2005, e.d.c. put me in
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touch with jason who has stepped upside down to be the president. he's a very good lawyer and hope he will do a good job here. i hate to say the money is not sufficient. i went to e.d.c. after becoming disabled in 2005, was head of the department, and within a couple months my landlord, october 2015, began to refuse to accept my rent. eventually filed an un unlawful detainer lawsuit against me. i went to e.d.c. for help. not only did they give me no help but they sabotaged by jury trial instructions and refused to do anything to correct it. they submitted the wrong form. you have to submit by judicial counsel mandate. very disappointed in the quality of services and complete lack of concern about tenants, about the impact of their malpractice on
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tenants. i have just a couple things to suggest. the first is, one -- [off mic] >> thank you, sir. next speaker, please. >> i'll follow up. thank you. >> good afternoon, members of the board. i'm steve, tenderloin housing clinic. i wanted to give you a different perspective on tenant rights counsel. have been a tenant attorney for over 32 years. we have been able to expand our staff through t.r.c. to seven attorneys plus support staff. and we focus pretty much entirely on no-fault, what we call no-fault evictions which are primarily ellis act and owner move-in. we have been doing them through funding from the city. we have been able to expand that through tenant right to counsel. the thing to keep in mind is i
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think one great thing about tenant right to counsel, it is first of all, it's not enough funding. we are already at 90% of our goal as far as handling all the ellis act cases that we have said we would achieve in this fiscal year, and we are only a little past halfway through the fit fist cal year and over 100% of our -- fiscal year and over 100% of our move-in goal. we see there is an eviction industry, and it's run primarily by landlord lawyers, lawyers who represent landlords and developers. and those people are the ones who are causing all these no-fault evictions. they advertise for them, they do trainings on them. they bring landlords into their offices in order to evict tenants. and the great thing about t.r.c. is that now we have a unified front against that and can,
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through, like a lot of owner move-in cases over the summer, a lot of them happened because of the right of school-age children to only be evicted after the school year, we saw a lot of cases come. a lot of them came through our office, so we could have a unified front, we knew what the eviction industry was doing to try to get -- [off mic] >> thank you. >> good afternoon. i'm a co-chair of democratic socialists of america's electoral arm. our organization alongside supervisor preston fought hard to make prop f a reality. we talked to our neighbors, canvassed, phone banked, fund-raised, we talked to lots of people in the city, we mobilized volunteers. we are proud of having a right to counsel law in san francisco. we know how important it is not just to provide a valuable resource and security measure
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for vulnerable tenants all over the city, but it's also a safeguard against the often aggressive tactics of land lords. in addition to that, it's prevents for people from becoming homeless in the city, and it's key to preventing the displacement of working class people and people of color from san francisco. to echo supervisor preston's call for the immediate full implementation process, as many of us know, there's more than enough wealth available in this city to pass this program. this program was the will of voters. thank you. >> supervisors, lauren petty. i'm up here for the second time this afternoon because for the second time, we have a situation where the voters spoke very
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clearly that the right to counsel program is what they wanted. in senior and disability action, we refer people to the prop f program. seniors and people with disabilities are a very high percentage of those who are threatened with eviction. they deserve full legal representation when they're threatened with eviction as supervisor preston said earlier, this is a universal right to counsel for tenants in eviction situations. as voters, we counted on city hall to adequately fund the program, making sure enough attorneys and staff are hired at competitive wages and adequate training was provided. we say that we count on city hall, i mean the mayor's office of housing and community development, the mayor's budget
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office and the board of supervisors. i urge everyone at city hall to make their highest priority the full funding of this program. both for humanitarian reasons and because it was mandated by the voters. thank you. >> thank you. and i'm going to read the rest of the cards. i see many of you lined up already. [calling speaker names] >> good afternoon, supervisors. my name is juliette brody, i'm a professor at sanford law school. i'm the director of the community law clinic. i've been in that role for the past 15 years. and in that capacity, i supervisor stanford law students
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in practice for low-income clients. my principle areas of expertise have been rent stabilization and eviction defense as well as civil access to justice. i have supervisorred representation of hundreds of tenants in san mateo county. i'm here because for about six months at the end of 2019 as prop f was coming online, i was lucky enough to have a back-to-back summer and sabbatical that enabled me to volunteer full-time with the team at open door legal. given my academic interests and access to justice and so-called civil gideon, i have been very interested in their universal access model. the alignment when prop f passed was just too good to be true, and being able to be embedded there while prop f was coming online was an incredible gift. i wanted to pick up on what supervisor preston said. san francisco is an enormous
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leader in this area. prop f is an enormously significant innovation, and the eyes. state and the country are looking to san francisco and the cities like it that have tried to implement a right to counsel to deal with the incredible devastation of the housing crisis. i was very proud to be a part of the incredible team at open door legal helping them to deal with the influx of new cases that came from prop f funding. i want to lend my voice as an expert in access to justice with civil gideon that until this program is fully funded, we can't really know how much lawyers can do and make full use of the leverage that supervisor preston referenced and the data show about how much lawyers can do. thank you. >> thank you. >> good afternoon. my name is cardy and i'm a housing attorney at open door
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legal. before becoming a housing attorney, i was a public defender. i've seen my share of excessive and cruel plea deals from prosecutors. but in my first week in housing court, i was shocked by the unconscionable settlement officers landlords made to vulnerable, frightened, destitute tenants. my first week a landlord attorney offered our client a move-out deal in which the impoverished tenant would have to pay $36,000 to the landlord over time. in under five minutes of confronting that landlord attorney, i was able to save this client $36,000 and a lifetime of stress, struggling to pay that back. that's just one story of one tenant in my first week as a tenant attorney. but in the average week, we serve many, many more. in january of this year, in just one week, at open door deal alone, we were able to prevent
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evictions for 43 people, with 40 of them able to remain in their homes. yes, 43 in one week with 40 staying in their homes. those included families of color who had lived in their homes for over a decade, people with disabilities, seniors, parents with sick children, single parents, families in public housing and also a family whose housing subsidy was taken away by the trump administration. while that week in january was one of our best weeks by far based on the numbers, it was also just another ordinary week. an ordinary week requires us to work beyond 40 hours. it feels like being a public defender deep in the trenches, working nights and weekends. but the hugs and tears of of relief we get from tenants at the end of the day, knowing our neighbors have roofs over their heads keeps us going. we see the difference we make in
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helping tenants from predatory -- [off mic] >> thank you. >> hi. i'm kerry gold. but right now i'm speaking for bill hirsch from the legal referral panel, the executive director. and from hespa. and hespa's request for funds for this program is going to be for $4 million, which will get us 20 more attorneys, which i believe should be the number of attorneys we need to fully staff right to counsel. as brian pointed out in his presentation, it is much cheaper
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to invest money in homelessness prevention than in trying to have to build a housing unit for a low-income person. i want to also address just briefly some of the comments from some of the practitioners, because none of the practitioners should have to be representing as many clients as they are. we are saying the funding is supposed to be funding for an attorney to do 50 cases. and we have established that if that is all the attorney is doing, they will not have to be working into the late, late hours of the night at their low nonprofit wages. so that's the other piece of it is it's hard to get lawyers to come to these jobs because the
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salaries are low in the nonprofits. and also because there's not a pipeline of law students who have an interest in this work. >> thank you. >> hi. good afternoon. my name is laura. i'm the executive director of legal assistance to the elderly here in san francisco. we provide free legal services to seniors and adults with disabilities in san francisco. we get over 1600 calls each year for help, about 60% of that is for help with housing. currently through the t.r.c. funding, we have five, the equivalent of five attorneys. we have additional attorneys who are working on housing and eviction defense, largely provided through funding we got for district 11. so they are focusing on district 11, that was secured by supervisor safai, thanks.
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so i've worked my entire legal career in eviction defense in san francisco, since 2005, i've been representing tenants in san francisco. and for a lot of us who have been here a long time, it's amazing to see such a group of dynamic, dedicated, smart attorneys working for tenants across the city. however we all see that there are not enough. in addition to not enough, there's not enough support from social workers, from paralegals, and additionally we need more attorneys, and we need to pay them more. we have one opening at our office. we had someone who was hired and then she did the math on her rent and loans and just rescinded and said she couldn't make it and took a job with a small firm doing public sector work. so that is what we are. and i would like to be a little unorthodox and skip the line here. we have some tenants who are in their 90s who have been waiting
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for about three hours. so if we could just have them come up, they are on the list. [off mic] these are some of the tenants we represent. these are district 5 residents. and this is a case where the landlord illegally took out the fireplace, made -- then claimed the whole housing was unstable, and then used the temporary relocation to try to evict a building with eight tenants in it. >> your time is expired. >> thank you. i think they were on our list. >> they are. they are next on the list. they have a 40-year at tenancy. >> thank you.
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>> [speaking foreign language] >> my wife and i live at 819 lombard street. from personal experience, we feel that legal assistance to the elderly is a very good, passionate and trust worthy organization. in april 2019, our landlord told us that they wanted to renovate the apartment building. they wanted me, my wife and all the other tenants to move out by the beginning of june 2019.
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my wife and i had already lived in the building for over 40 years. i am 92 years old, my wife is almost 90. we don't know any english. our income is very low, and the rental market is very expensive. we didn't know how to find affordable housing. we were extremely worried, and we couldn't eat or sleep well. it was very fortunate that legal assistance for the elderly and
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its staff attorney, ms. kim, provided free legal assistance for us, filed a complaint to the rent board, defended us in an unlawful detainer lawsuit. ms. kim represented us and expressed our concerns and demands. so now we no longer have to move out immediately. we are very thankful for the assistance from legal assistance to the elderly and its attorney, ms. hannah kim.
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if the landlord uses other reasons or excuses to evict us, we will definitely need legal assistance again from legal assistance to the elderly and attorney hannah kim. thank you. >> thank you. >> hello. my name is kim and i'm one of the social workers with legal assistance to the elderly and legal referral panel. in my two months in this position, all my clients fit into the description of disenfranchised and all are one judgment away from being homeless. the passage of prop f covered my position and helps more social workers in the future. social work is necessary as attorneys need time to work on the legal aspects and the social workers can work on the psychosocial needs of the client. thus far i'm aiding the clients in understanding their options and connecting them to resources to keep them housed. i connect our clients with wrap
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around services such as rental subsidy, reconnecting with mental and physical healthcare, substance abuse treatment, fiduciary services, intensive case management and many other social services. the goal is not only to keep our clients housed but for them to gain stability and all aspects of life. if a person doesn't have stability, they are not able to remain housed. thank you. >> thank you. next speaker. >> good afternoon, supervisors. my name is tom. i'm the litigation director at legal assistance to the elderly. and i've been defending seniors in unlawful detainer actions in san francisco since 1991. that's nearly 30 years of eviction defense for seniors, i've seen a lot of changes in this city, the biggest change i've seen package of proposition f. it's moved the needle more than anything else that has happened to the rent ordinance or state
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law or anything. it was always the hardest part of my job as the sole housing attorney at legal assistance to the elderly to turn down desperate seniors who needed full-scope attorney to defend them in an unlawful detainer action. now because of the implementation of proposition f, very few seniors are turned away. an example of the kind of need that we see is just last year in my district, district 5, a co-op member at the king harvey apartments was evicted for breach of her lease. she didn't have an attorney. she lost her case, lost her equity and lost her home. she came to our office a month after she had been evicted looking for help. we were able to wipe out her debt for her and masking the unlawful detainer judgment against her, but she is not going to get her home back. this is a case that we could have won had we had that opportunity when she was getting evicted back in march of 2019.
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now, supervisor preston's work in passing proposition f, we have five lawyers, we can take every case we get from the adult protective services. we have a great team with paralegals, a dynamite social workers. we have five nonu.d. attorneys that have experienced working at the eviction defense collaborative. it's better, but it is not enough. we need more funding so we can take all cases. prop f is a great idea, but it needs to be fully implemented. thank you. >> thank you. >> good afternoon. i'm supervising attorney, i've been doing eviction defense in san francisco for about five years. one of the things i want to echo with my fellow eviction defense
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attorneys are that there are not enough attorneys. but it's not just that there are not enough, there's not enough done to retain the attorneys that we do have. we have already talked about how long it takes to ramp up an attorney in order to be able to take a full caseload, but on top of that, we need social workers who can do work and paralegals to help the attorneys do more of the work that's necessary. hap we have a social services team, and we have paralegals, and it's helped greatly in the being able to get results where our clients get to stay. but we also need our attorneys to want to stay and do the work that they've been trained to do. the legal aid association of california released a study recently about the difficulties in keeping attorneys in the legal aid field, and it's simply that there's not enough support, there's not enough money, there's not enough draw given the debt that people are facing when they come out of law
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school. and so i want to see prop f fully funded, but i think that there needs to be recognition that it's not just about the pure number of attorneys that need to be added, but also funding to have the support the attorneys need for social workers and paralegals as well as funding for the mental health aspect that it does take a toll to do the work that we do. thank you. >> thank you. >> good evening, supervisors. i ended up in this country to find refuge from per cushion. as soon as i got here -- from persecution. as soon as i got here, i realized there was a housing crisis. i struggled to find housing until i maced to get
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subsidize -- until i managed to get subsidized housing in san francisco. as soon as i got housing, and there was a lot of issues that had to do with my national origin. i had -- it was getting to a point where i was being attacked all the time. so i decided to find help. so i went to the san francisco tenants union so know about my rights as a tenant, because i had a list. so they told me about my rights as a tenant, and i tried to enforce my rights. so my landlord, instead of going through the legal process, she decided to threaten me by calling the police on me to fully evict me. and then the allegations she made were not true. because of the allegations that were happening was actually she was threatening me because i was not going in san francisco
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because of my national origin. so then i went through the e.d.c. to find some, because she ended up giving me a written notice and a 30-day notice. so i went to the eviction defense collaborative and to be able to be referred to an attorney. the attorney that was with them had conflict of interest because they were representing them as well. so at that point they told me they were not going to give me full representation. [off mic] >> thank you. next speaker. >> thank you, supervisors. he is one of many people who have come looking for help and have fallen through the cracks. another tenant who wanted to be
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here today but hasn't been able to come because of how much of a crisis she is in at this point. 20-year tenancy, this couple came to the tenants need for help, went to a.d.c. for an attorney, were one of the 30% of people who haven't been able to get full-scope representation. then they were served with discovery. that means hundreds of questions asking what all the evidence is in their case. they have five days to answer including the weekend. and english is not their first language. and for one of them doesn't read or write english at all. if they don't answer these questions, then all of their answers could be struck, and they could be prevented from providing any evidence in their case. this is the kind of problem i used to see when i worked as a eviction defense lawyer when there were hardly any attorneys at all. i think on the graph you saw 2011, 2012, things are different now. many more people are not in the
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situation where they can't even present their case in court. but nobody should be in this situation right now. because we passed prop f. nobody should be in the situation of junior or of these other tenants who are facing answering discovery questions in a language that's not theirs when they are not lawyers and risking not being able to make their case at all. this is the time, this is a problem that we can fix with a drop in the bucket in terms of what the city's annual budget is, we can make sure every tenant in san francisco gets an attorney and that every defense is raised and that we stop losing unfair eviction cases and we keep as many people here as possible. thank you. >> thank you. >> my name is scott weaver from the san francisco tenants union. i was going to say something else until this elderly gentleman came up here, and i thought what would have happened if he didn't have
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representation, if he was in that 33%? and we all know what would happen. we know he would be on the street. and not long for this world. what if an 80-year-old man or woman were in that same situation? i think it's the same result. 75, maybe they are too young to die on the streets, maybe not. we heard the statistic brian gave of the high percentage of subsidized housing tenants who seek these services. what of those subsidized housing tenants are going to end up on the street because they don't have representation? because the city did not live up to the mandate of its own voters? and then what's the cost of all of these people being on the street? how much money are we going to
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spend on emergency services and homeless outreach and navigation centers? i submit to you it's a lot less than the cost of counsel that you are mandated to provide. thank you. >> thank you. next speaker. >> hello, supervisors. thank you. i was the one who was helping to get the signature for proposition f to get on the ballot. and so happy that we have passed this. and mayor london breed, please give them the money so we can continue the will of the people to protect and defend the tenants. i want to thank you, all of you beautiful people for defending the tenants. thank you. >> thank you. next speaker. >> from housing rights committee.
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some amazing nonprofit lawyers in this city, i have to say. but tenants are coming back to our office with prop f saying that there's no lawyer for them, including very low-income tenants. voters voted two times for this. we voted first for prop f and then we voted again for prop c to make sure that this was funded. this used to be fully funded so we have -- this needs to be fully funded so we have enough lawyerses, that we pay the lawyers enough. it is ridiculous that we expect starting lawyers to pay with their debt. these starting lawyers coming out of law school don't have 20-year rent-controlled apartments. [laughter] and i would say we actually need to expand this program.
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i think that this program should cover tenants when they go into hearings, because the outcomes of those tenants means whether they are going to be able to stay or not by the time they get to eviction court. i really do believe that lawyers are only one piece of this puzzle, but knowing you will have a lawyer when you get to court means that tenants are much more likely to stay and fight all the way to court. one thing i want to do is tell a personal story to illustrate this. seven years ago before this law, when my landlord tried to illegally raise my rent over 77%, and when the underfunded backlogged rent board couldn't hear our case in time, and my landlord moved to evict me and my household, we used a large part of our safings to pay for a private lawyer at $350 an hour. we ended upsetlying for 33
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fantastic -- we ended up settling for a 33% rent increase. [off mic] >> thank you. >> good afternoon. my name is martina, i'm the executive director of eviction defense collaborative. just kind of thinking about everything that we have heard today, we have heard stories from the lawyers and the hard work they are doing. we have heard stories from the tenants who haven't been able to get help. we have heard stories from the tenants who have been able to get help. i think the theme here is not does this work. the theme is not will providing full-scope representation have an effect -- be an effective tool for preventing homelessness. it is a fact. it has been proven with the data anecdotally, it has been proven. tenant right to counsel is an effective, efficient and
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economic solution to preventing homelessness. it is not the only solution, but it is definitely one that is within the means of san francisco. we have also heard about talkind about the lawyers and the amount of work they are doing as well as the cost per lawyer. brian had the chart earlier that had the average cost per position. i would urge you to compare those costs to the costs of what is paid for with the public defender's office. the work being being done is akin to that of a public defender. we have to take every case that is put before us. we do not get to determine whether or not someone meets criteria in terms of eligibility, in terms of the value of the case, the impact of the case. and yet nonprofit attorneys, nonprofit staff are being paid pennies on the dollar compared to individuals working within the government doing very similar work. so i urge you to consider
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properly funding tenant right to counsel. thank you. >> thank you. next speaker. >> hi. thank you for holding this meeting on this fabulous issue. today i'm proud to be standing before you. i'm proud to be a san francisco resident this afternoon. i'm proud to live in a city that is the second city in the united states to have a right to counsel law for anyone facing an eviction, and i guess i would even stronger with universal coverage with full-scope coverage. every afternoon that i counsel with the housing rights committee, the tears that i see,
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the stories that i hear, and i know while i say yes, you can -- you have a right to counsel and blah, blah, blah, i know how understaffed the organizations are. i no longer say, oh, you are going to have a lawyer for the whole thing, but rather i'll say, you'll get full case coverage if you get there like six weeks in advance, you have a better chance if you just walk in right away, and maybe it's a paralegal, i taught paralegal research, not that they're bad, but still. it's not an attorney. and 70% of the people outside are san francisco residents. and i just want you to know, because i also worked for a homeless outreach project that there are people that spend
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upwards of $365,000 a year waiting in emergency rooms. and that's not okay. and we got to have full implementation of this law and have it soon. thank you. >> thank you. next speaker. >> hello again, supervisors. didn't think i would be speaking twice today, but as a person who is living through the nightmare of the threat of an eviction, it's currently paused, but we have been fighting for two and a half years. because we have had legal representation, because we have had the wonderful services from the tenants' union and other counseling organizations, we are still in our affordable rent-controlled housing. and the voters spoke twice. we voted on this. it passed by a huge majority. i would encourage the mayor to
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please fully fund it, implement it, because thousands of people, our lives are impacted. thank you for all the work you're doing. >> thank you. any other speakers for public comment? seeing none, we will close public comment with thanks to everyone who came out to speak in support of this. i would just like to offer a few final thoughts on this. we have, as you have heard, we have made great strides toward fulfilling the promise of proposition f. two years ago just one-third of tenants facing eviction had full-scope legal representation. now as you have heard, we are up to two-thirds. but for 33%, for a third of the tenants who don't receive this, out comes are far worse. we need to make sure that no tenant faces eviction without full-scope legal representation in san francisco. i want to take a second to emphasize what a good investment
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this is as some of the speakers have addressed. so full representation really stops a lot of fraudulent evictions in their tracks. and by my calculation, if a fully-loaded attorney, as mr. chiu called it, which is an attorney inclusive of the support staff, overhead, litigation costs, paralegal, if that all together costs $220,000, and if an attorney serves according to his presentation 50 clients a year, and if we have a 67% success rate of keeping people in their homes, and we assume that success rate holds, then we are spending an estimated $650,067 per housing unit saved. let that sink in for a second. $6,567 per housing unit saved under this program. in a city in which it costs
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hundreds of thousands of dollars to build an affordable housing unit, this is a remarkable investment. in fact i would say it's the most cost effective affordable housing city in the program right now. finally, it's important to understand that this program applies to all rental housing in san francisco. this is a defining thing in prop f but public housing, subsidized housing, rent-controlled housing, you name it and prop f applies to all tenants if we can get the program fully funded. i want to thank all those who made prop f happen in the first place, especially democratic socialists of america, san francisco, the san francisco tenants' union, housing rights committee of san francisco, just cause and jim brosnahan, the right to civil counsel, the prop f team with john, jen snyder, nora and jim sterns, also my legislative aid kyle who did a lot of preparation for today's
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hearing. and also i want to thank the overwhelming majority of san franciscans who helped pass universal tenant right to counsel law in san francisco. i think our community should take great pride in having the vision to pass this measure. and also to the tenants who came here to tell their stories, i know some had to leave because it's been a long hearing, and to the folks who were here and the many more who were not able to be here and are struggling to stay in this increasingly unaffordable city, thank you for fighting back against displacement. we know it's not easy. thank you for having the courage to share your stories. we owe it to you to make sure that this successful program is fully funded. thank you. >> thank you, supervisor preston for this hearing. we struggle with housing and affordability every day, and i have to say, as tomorrow we will
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be voting at the full board on a new navigation center on the northeast corner of the city, and while i'm delighted and proud, it's very expensive. this is actually a much cheaper way to allow people to age in a place with dignity. so hats off to the whole prop f team, and i'm delighted that we are two-thirds of the way there. >> thank you supervisor preston for your hard work on this. i just want to call out in particular one of the groups that we have been working with in district 11, and that's open door legal. i know that they have put tremendous effort in already in a very short amount of time. and as you heard today in public testimony, they have already been working. we have another group that we funded as well to do tenant right to counsel work that was through a process we did it through the budget process last year. it was over half a million dollars. so we have almost a million
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dollars worth of legal funding happening in district 11 in particular. we saw a significant amount of owner move-in evictions and recently we have seen a few, a number of ellis act evictions. and so many of this is increasing tremendously. so we are just very fortunate for this legislation and also very fortunate that we were able to get money in the budget last year working with mayor breed and the many of the advocates that came out and advocated during the budget process. and i can tell you, having been on the ground already, we are already seeing the fruits of the labor. i bump into a lot of the people that have been represented. they said they would never have an opportunity to even fight their evictions or stay in their properties. and one of the women that actually gave testimony at our grand opening of open door legal was a tenant, but dealing with some other issues as well not related to landlords, so that
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was also really helpful. to thank you again. i appreciate it. >> so if there are no further comments, should we take a motion to file this item? we will do that without objection. madame clerk, could you please call the next item? >> item number five is a hearing on the expansion of the safe parking program, citywide and presentation of facts related to the increase of vehicular homelessness and potential cost to fund multiple sites >> before i turn this over to supervisor safai, i wanted to acknowledge his cosponsor, president yee, who stepped in earlier to let me know that as much as he would like to attend this hearing, he is off to make a presentation to the youth commission upstairs. so with that, i will hand it over to supervisor safai. supervisor safai, the floor is yores. >> thank you. good evening, everyone. you've been here a long time. thank you for those that waited
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well into the evening for this portion of the program. i'm just going to be brief in my remarks again. i was going to acknowledge president yee, my cosponsor, but more importantly i want to give mystery on how we -- history on how we ended up here today. we have seen a significant rise in the number of people living in their vehicles. the most visible manifestation of that is those living in r vs although there's a significant number living in vans and just regular cars as well. we had a response that initially talked about re-examining the no overnight parking signs. that was something that i would say that we were taken aback by the history behind that and learned a lot in this process. i really appreciate those in the community that have been working
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to educate. we then worked with supervisor brown, with the sfmta, did citywide legislation to facilitate this, and the next piece was finding a location. we asked for the upper yard to be considered. but before we did that, we put together a working group. we have the chair of what we are calling our vehicle triage working group here today, it's about 40 people that are part of that group and have been working consistently. we brought that together before we actually went out to the community to discuss the particular location. and it was in those meetings, and we had a few meetings prior to going out to the community to discuss potential sites that we were able to get unanimous support from the working group. we then had our community meeting in august of last year. i would say about 700 people showed you, balboa high school
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was fully packed. about a third of the people who came were in full support of the idea. about a third were reticent but open, and about a third were opposed. and i have to say that after we went through that process, we worked with the department of homelessness, support i have housing, we worked with public -- supportive housing, we worked with public works, all the different agencies to get this going. the site we chose is a site that we are using as a pilot. we wanted to frame in conversation in the context of a pilot, because we wanted to show that this could be successful. you are going to hear from the department of homelessness, supportive housing, they will tell you two-thirds of the increase in homelessness we have seen over the last few years have been those living in vehicles. so we knew this had been important, but we knew this had been a long time in the making, in over a decade or so. so i'm going to cut my remarks there and say after our
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community meeting, after the selection of our potential site, there was support for it. we have had it up and running for a couple months. it's fully operational, about 33 spots, a couple of them are for staff. we have 24-hour on-site security and/or staffing. we have lighting, we have bathroom facilities, and we'll get into all the details of fully-operational safe parking. but the idea today was to have a conversation of the need for and the desire to potentially expand this into other locations. president yee my cosponsor, has been working to find a location in his site. he's been open about that. i've had good conversations with supervisor walton and others that are looking or actively open. but again, we want to go through the right community process in allowing the district supervisors and their community organizations to select their appropriate sites as we expand this model and look for other
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opportunities, because there is definitely a need, and i think we are going to hear that today. so the first person i would like to bring up is dylan snyder from the department of homelessness and supportive housing. probably want to pare it down a little bit. i know there are people from the community who stayed, and we appreciate you staying through the longerrings. >> i'm the director of strategy and external affairs at the department of homelessness and supportive housing. before i begin, we are going to copresent today, i want to acknowledge your leadership, supervisor safai, and your continued support of the pilot, san francisco vehicle triage center program. i'm very proud to be representing h.s.h. at this hearing and presenting on our early learnings of the vehicle triage pilot, the v.t.c., which opened in december of last year. i was joined earlier by our
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director of outreach and temporary shelter, and she needed to attend another urgent meeting, and i'm joined by our manager of policy and legislative affairs. as the supervisor noted, according to the 2019 point in time count, there was a 19% increase in san francisco's unsheltered population. two-thirds was attributeable living in their vehicles. even before these numbers confirmed our experience working with unsheltered populations, h.s.h. has been committed to addressing this need through programs that reflect the values of the department and the city. i know we are tight on time but i think it's important to pause and acknowledge that and explain a little bit about the larger root causes that are driving the increase of unsheltered population that we are seeing, particularly in california and across the west coast. as supervisors are aware, we are in the midst of a national housing affordability crisis.
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according to the 2019 out of reach report, a full-time worker needs to earn an average hourly wage of $23, $35 in california, to afford a fair market, modest two bedroom rental home. this is against the backdrop that in san francisco we have seen average fair market rate one or two bedrooms increase by approximately 43%. even for renters who are earning significant income, the housing market is become increasingly out of reach. so that's what leads us to the position that we are in today. for those whom housing is unattainable or unavailable due to shortages, vehicles often become the next best option. several communities notably those along the west coast, have created safe parking programs to provide legal and safe locations for housing that are currently residing in their vehicles. programs do range from safe parking overnight with access to
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sanitary facilities and garbage to programs more like the vehicle triage center which is service-rich and provides additional services and case management. and while some programs are run by the local government, others rely on partnerships between government, nonprofit, safe organizations and philantropy. it's important to note that while safe parking programs to tackle the problem of public safety by providing a safe place for people to park, unless they are thoughtfully connected to the larger homelessness response system, they do not, they do not effectively move people towards resolving their homelessness. whereas pairing safe parking programs with problem-solving strategies such as flexible grants for vehicle repairs, gas cards, relocation assistance, these have been successful strategies used in san francisco, in california and are currently in practice. i'll speed through this part,
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but we were lucky to have dr. graham, a well-known researcher, whose work focuses on vehicle residency, homelessness and public policy, present findings to a stakeholder group which included the supervisor safai. thank you for your participation in that. like every pilot, our learnings begin with the process of making an idea reality. before we get to the program itself, i want to briefly recap where we've been. as h.s.h. has been committed to the growing needs of persons living in their vehicles, even before the 2019 pit count, we began a policy group in fall of 2017 working with city partners, the coalition who is here today and individuals with lived experiences of vehicular homelessness to vet ideas and challenges and look at best practices. in january of 2018, h.s.h. hosted a human-centered design lab with people with lived experiences to use early
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learnings and rapidly-designed responses. h.s.h. real estate and d.p.w. have been exploring potential sites to host safe parking. the results of this work several years ago led to the creation of the vehicle encampment resolution team, which is an arm of s.f. hot that specializes in vehicle outreach. we conducted surveys and learned more about the special needs of people living in their vehicles. thanks to the board of supervisors past legislation in april of 2018, h.s.h. was required to open a safe overnight parking pilot program. the legislation was led by supervisor safai and then supervisor vallie brown and cosponsored by many of their colleagues including president yee. now we get to where we are today. 2340, san jose avenue was identified as being available for temporary use and is being developed into affordable housing in late 2020. and we want to thank sfmta and
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the mission housing development corporation for their support in using this site as an interim use. once the site was confirmed as being an option, we began partnering with supervisor safai's office on engaging the community. and again, thank you for your tremendous leadership on that piece in particular. the community engagement process was significant and led to community members in d-11 saying things like i'm proud to live in d-11 where we welcome places that help people. i hope i can figure out a way to get involved once it opens. i see that members of that working group are here today, many more were here and had to leave, and we want to thank them all and the district 11 community for the support offered and the leadership they have shown. dylan snyder will continue from here. >> good evening, everyone. manager of policy and legislative affairs with h.s.h. i will take it from here. as abigail mentioned, we finished the community
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engagement process, and we then took the proposal for the vehicle triage center pilot program to the planning commission in august of 2019 where they approved the temporary usage of the site. this was followed closely by approval from the board of supervisors in september of 2019. and again recognizing and thanking supervisor safai for his leadership in stewarding the approval process. we then began construction on the site in october 2019. after that urban al kemy was selected as the nonprofit -- alchemy was selected as the nonprofit provider. they have been incredible partners. we feel very lucky to have them being the site provider and for jumping into this pilot feet-first with courage and tremendous expertise. and for running a program which you will hear shortly is going extremely well. the vehicle encampment resolution team began providing outreach for this site in late november and as part of h.s.h.'s
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commitment to the community, we prioritized outreach efforts leading up to the site's opening in district 11, working to outreach over 21 priority areas that were identified by community members and the supervisor's office. at this point i want to take a moment to acknowledge the work of vert, especially their team lead for their commitment in serving this population every day and for their tireless work over the last few months to ensure people residing in vehicles were aware, knew how to access it, and had a welcoming process to the site. the program opened in october 2019. this is a photo from the press conference that was held in december for the site's opening with mayor breed, supervisor safai, then supervisor brown, urban alchmy, sf hot, a future client, community working group members and many city partners and supporters. so now we get into the meat of
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this presentation, which i know you are all waiting for, which is about the site itself. the vehicle triage center, as you can see here from the site design, is located at 2340 san jose avenue. it's located in district 11 near the balboa bart station between san jose and geneva avenue. it offers approximately 30 spots for a mix of parking of rvs and vehicles. the site provides a safe place to store or to stay in your vehicle while guest access to homelessness response system. like the navigation center model, the v.t.c. offers low-barrier, high-services model available to people residing in their vehicles who are actively engaged with the homelessness response system as either housing referral status or problem-solving status clients. the pilot has a $1.5 million budget. we have 500,000 projected for one-time capital cost to make the site safe and secure and $1 million projected for a year
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of operating costs. i just want to note here that we are still in the process of reconciling this budget and that the $1.5 million that's reflected as of today's costs do not include outreach or case management costs. those are currently being provided through s.f. hot or other city services such as d.p.h.'s street medicine teams. and we want to also think the b.l.a. for their very hard work on this project. and we look forward to better familiarizing ourselves with their analysis and comparing it to our own budget reconciliation and analysis process at h.s.h. will undertake. next slide. the vehicle triage center has a number of providers that offer services on-site. as already acknowledged, some of these providers directly but we want to express our gratitude for all the providers' commitment and dedication. they are the true champions of this program, and we are honored to be able to speak on their behalf today. so for those familiar with
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h.s.h.'s system of care, the homelessness response system, these partners work together to ensure that the vehicle triage center operates with the best practices of navigation centers and coordinated entry access points, ensuring that services are designed specifically to meet the unique needs of people living in vehicles. so those providers include urban alchemy, the site provider who offers management and security, s.f. hot provides case management to guests on-site, and they assist with guests engaging with the homelessness response system. each person's circumstances are unique and hot case managers work to make sure each address their needs. this might look like getting document ready, working to resolve medical issues or navigating benefits or reconnecting with support systems. the vehicle encampment resolution team provides outreach and engaging with people residing in their
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vehicles citywide as well as managing intake for the vehicle triage center. dig any on wheels is a nonprofis provides showers and d.p.h. street medicine provides treatment weekly. they are also currently assisting guests to get their pets document ready for housing, making sure those pets that qualify are certified companion animals. a data update that we have from february 12 from the site, a quick note that the site reached capacity on january 31, so this update is about two weeks later. there were 26 vehicles on-site with 35 people. 14rvs, two school buses and ten vehicles, 17 pets, three cats and 14 dogs. guests from districts, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11.
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we estimate 90% of the guests on-site were identified as being housing referral status, meaning they are eligible and waiting for housing to come online. housing referral status clients are the most vulnerable in our system with the highest barriers to housing. this is a great opportunity for them to come online, have access to services and get ready for that next transition into housing. and while we are not prepared to present on outcomes just yet as we are still fairly early into the pilot, we do want to share very preliminary data that what we are seeing around early exits. the first is stable exits, exits into housing, relocating, pursuing other problem-solving solutions or engaging with other services within the system of care. the second are those who are voluntarily opting out of the program. as abigail discussed earlier, the vehicle triage center requires a high level of engagement with the homelessness response system, and sometimes this model is either more or
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less than what folks are able to work with at this point in time. any guests that elect to leave the site will always maintain their status within the system of care and are always invited back to the vehicle triage center or to other services within our system of care. and i will speed through this quickly. i think the supervisor already spoke to this, but currently on-site with the program model of the vehicle triage center, we have separate pedestrian and vehicle gates for entry and exit and offer 24/7 access for guests. we have security cameras, a diesel generator that powers the office, two solar-powered lights and one light powered by a generator. we have bathrooms and sanitation stations, black water pumps, which is septic tank pumps for rvs, we have office and confidential meeting space in the trailer, and we have electricity for up to 15rvs. one of the areas we have learned the most around is site design.
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and what i would like to share with you today is specifically that permanent utilities are needed on-site to serve both the people as well as the vehicles. and early learning that we had was around electricity. and we estimated that about half of those accessing the site would be staying on-site while the other half might be storing their vehicle. since the opening of the site we have seen everyone elected to stay on-site and reside in their vehicle, which tells us that future program models will need additional electric capacity to service those rvs. just one more. and then a few early learnings, and i will turn it over to you for questions. through the dedicated outreach of vert, we have noticed two distinct groups with different needs. the first exhibits high high acy and are assessed to be housing referral status. for this group, a high-services,
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low-barrier site is a wonderful fit. the second group, while still vulnerable, may not consider themselves to be homeless and may be interested in connecting to the system of care but do not require the same high-service levels on-site or case management that this program model offers. many of these folks might be employed, in school or have some level of income but cannot afford housing in the bay area going back to our earliest slide on the national housing affordability crisis. one early piece of feedback we have heard is we consider -- we could consider expanding the capacity of this model or something similar to serve up to two times the number of guests with a similar staffing model. and that would depend, of course, on the size and needs of that site. lastly, we are extremely grateful to our city nonprofit and community partners for coming to the table when new needs arise so we can problem solve together. we are currently working with partners to explore the environmental health challenges
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and tackle the logistics around inoperable vehicles and tow abatement programs. we look forward to continuing that work and other work that will arise, i'm sure. while it is too early to determine if the model is effective as is, and should be replicated or expanded, we are extremely proud of the great work that has been done and the impact that has been made, and we look forward to working and looking at all the various components of this program and seeing what can be recommended for future sites and in what scaleability. and again we want to thank our partners that have made this possible, with a special thanks again to supervisor safai and his staff, especially monica for their leadership and stewardship of this initiative. we look forward to continuing to work with your office and the board as we continue forward with next steps. thank you so much. we are happy to take any
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questions. >> thanks, dylan. we will call you back, because i know that there's a couple people that have been waiting for public comment. so we will call you back after that with the questions that we have. we can do public comment now, and then we will finish the rest of the presenters. we have steve from the vehicle triage group and kelly from the coalition on homelessness. but maybe we can do a couple people with public comment, and then we can have you present right after that. >> thank you. >> are you here for public comment and presentation? >> presentation actually. that's what i was told. i'll be succinct. >> , no, i want you to present. why don't we have the people do public comment, and we'll call you back in one second. so anyone here for public comment, please come forward. you have two minutes to speak. >> a little different to do public comment without hearing the presentations >> would you like to wait? >> i really would. >> that's fine.
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go ahead. is there anyone here that needs to leave that wants to do public comment? okay. great. so, steven, please. >> good afternoon, supervisors. thank you, supervisor safai. this is a great opportunity. i recalled a conversation that was had at city hall with supervisor haney saying that all the districts of san francisco need to take responsibility for this issue that has grown beyond its borders, as far as i'm considered. when i was presented with this issue by supervisor safai in the fall and asked what i thought about it, i thought this was the greatest idea ever. and we pulled the working group together, had meetings and come next week, we'll be into the first quarter of this pilot program.
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i do want to say a couple things. i'm hoping that supervisor yee is looking seriously into this, because on -- as we have discussed at this our working group meetings, it has about 45 vehicles where people are living in their vehicles on lake merced. it's unbelievable. not only on lake merced, it's throughout the city. and i think that using our pilot program to expand it throughout the city, i think would be awesome to get these people into some type of help and get into permanent housing, which is what our goal is. so i just wanted to bring up a couple things that we have talked about. one of the things we talked about is how the community is going to support our clients. one of the things that we have stressed, and it's been stressed all the way around, that these people who come to the v.t.c. program are anonymous, that we don't want to -- we don't want
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to spread their names or their situations, but we want to help them. so one of the things is one of our members has donated socks to the program. another member has donated dog food and dog supplies. and another member has donated blankets. one of the things i'm working on now is a food program that can come in and help these guests since they can't cook on the premises, and the other thing is that i'm doing is i'm looking with rec and park and the boys and girls club as we were given a program highlight last week of camp mendocino. if a child or youth person wants to go to camp for eight days, it's $850. if they belong to the boys and girls club, it's $125, and there are scholarships available for $25. and we are hoping if these youth that are in that v.t.c. program would like to take advantage of
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the scholarship program, our working group has brought forward that we would donate money to help these kids go to camp if that's doable. and i'm working with rec and park also with camp to see if we can get scholarships available for these people. so our goal, our ultimate goal in district 11 in our neighborhood is to make these people comfortable and get them to a better place than where they are at now. and i just wanted to say a footnote, i know at the beginning when we did have the community meetings and supervisor was right by saying one-third was for it, one-third didn't have any idea what was going on and the other third said we don't want these kind of people in our neighborhood. and i've spoken to hundreds, and i'm serious, i have spoken to hundreds of people who were questioning this program, and i've not had one person say i don't think that this is going to work. they've seen it work.
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it's been working for the last quarter, and we are happy to be a part of this community, helping those in need all the way around. thank you. >> thank you mr. courier. the next person we are going to have come up is ms. kelly cutler from the coalition of homelessness. they have been a part of our working group. >> good evening. yeah, i've been part of this process from the beginning, and it's been a really good community process. it's been really cool to be able to work with the folks in your district and they've been great, because a lot of things i haven't had to say because they are challenging and holding the city accountable in different ways that has been great. the different concerns about the program have, haven't been
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concerns with the program, because it's been going really pretty smoothly. and we haven't been hearing on our outreach. >> knock on wood. >> yeah. and really what we value a lot is what we hear from folks who, like on outreach and things like that. and so, yeah, so that's been a positive thing. at the same time, we need more. we need a lot more. we need more programs in different districts, because what we have been having to deal with is where we are seeing, where we are going to m.t.a., we are looking for more vans and parking restrictions on a weekly basis. we are dealing with folks who are coming to our office that their vehicles have been towed and that they have been targeted. and so with the amount of people that we have living in our vehicles, this is -- this is
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actually pretty lower-hanging fruit. it's -- i mean, places for people to be able to park and not worry that their temporary home is going to be taken away. so i would like to encourage you all when it comes to the enforcement and criminalization piece of it, we really need to be going in this direction of actual solutions rather than sweeps. that's it. >> thank you, ms. cutler. okay. now we will bring up the two people that are here for public comment. i think two of them had to leave. we had two individuals from urban alchemy, mike and derek, but i think we have flo kelly and brian edwards. i think. >> thank you, supervisor. i'm brian edwards with the coalition on homelessness. and i want to say that i congratulate you on your leadership and for getting this
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thing built, and i think it's great that it hasn't run into any big snafus since. but aside from the fact that we lost 13% of the capacity due to d.p.w., because of part of it wasn't level, we can't afford to do that for the next site can't be 30 slots. it's got to be 60 slots. i mean, people are getting their car towed every day. kelly and i have been here since 1:30 today waiting for this agenda item, but one of our comrades at the office also didn't get any work done, because people came to the coalition for help with tows. so if i'm living in my vehicle, and i need to move it every 72 hours and my battery dies, i'm not eligible for the $75 for that battery. but if i'm not eligible for a spot in the rv triage center, what do i do? i let the m.t.a. tow my vehicle and then i get added to the tent
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count? i don't understand this city's priorities when it comes to helping people stay in their homes. and a vehicle unfortunately right now is a home. there are 1200 people in the city that live in vehicles. we have 26 slots. and we are already using it as an excuse for enforcement. we need to be creative. we talk about problem solving all the time. that's a $75 problem. we've heard from h.s.h. that they might help the $200 tow fee to get it out of the yard. why not spring for the $75 for the battery? it's not just going to be rv triage centers that help these people. we actually have to be problem-solving, and it doesn't have to be just this one h.s.h. formula that's on the wall. we have to be disruptive, adaptive, all the things that san franciscans brag about. we really need to do this. thank you. >> thank you. next speaker. >> i'm flo kelly. and i volunteer with the coalition on homelessness.
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and i live in the ninth, supervisor district. i wanted to say that when talking to people in the bayview who are living in their holmes, i mean living -- who their home is their vehicle, they are being told that they have to leave because there is an actual option for them to go to the safe parking program. but we know that's not true. because there's only a space for 30 vehicles. okay. so. i really hope that the board of supervisors gets involved in m.t.a.'s rampant ability to just close off parking spaces. they've done it by the hundreds.
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hundreds of parking spaces are not available for overnight parking in places where i don't know why they are doing this. many of the places in bayview, where there's restricted parking, there's no residential, you know, there's no houses around where housed people are living. so i don't know who is complaining, because a lot of the businesses even don't seem to be that active. so we definitely need to expand this program. it certainly is extremely cost-effective, just like keeping people in their homes and not getting them evicted is extremely cost-effective. so thank you. >> good afternoon, supervisors. lisa. this isn't just in regards to the vehicle parking. my question is why are we
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depending on h.s.h. to solve everything when everything they touch doesn't get resolved? it's turned into chaos. again, we have outreach, go to outreach person. how many times do i have to tell you they have only 86 outreach people? it's everything you constantly are putting everything in h.s.h. hands. they do not have the resources. they do not have the people. they are promising housing for everybody. everything they touch, the navigation centers, are in destructive. the center you are going to start is one-third of program, a navigation center, the other two-thirds of that are for retail. are we going to stop giving these nonprofits, another nonprofit doing this, and not getting anything accomplished? it's disturbing. and they are here at the table all the time. and their continuum of care or their coordinated entry program doesn't work. and now you are putting them in
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charge of another program. who wants to take a shower three times a week? what's up with that? and where are you going to put them once they -- it's not making any sense? none of this whole day has made any sense. you are putting money way ahead of any public or even priorities. and common sense. you need to step up to the seat as the board of supervisors and do something and get off this corporate high horse of paying everybody money and giving the new homelessness is the nonprofits' new money. and it needs to stop. >> any other members of the public wish to comment on this item? seeing none, public comment is closed. mr. -- sorry. let's see here. we skipped one person. right. here we go. mr. menard from the budget
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legislative analyst, if you could just give us a quick summary of your report that you had for us today. great. >> good evening, supervisors. i'm nick menard from the budget legislative analyst office. i'm here to present to you our cost estimates for opening an additional vehicle triage center. so as you all know, the department of homelessness
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operating the vehicle triage center at san jose avenue. this site is an s.f.m.t.a. parking lot is is expected to be developed into affordable housing. to develop cost 'ems for opening another vehicle triage -- cost estimate for opening another vehicle triage center, we consulted with the department of public works as well as real estate to understand the current capital and operating costs of the current site and to understand the universe of potential other sites. i would like to thank dill land schnieder for -- dillan schnieder for her help. we show cost estimates for an additional center that's equal in size to the current one as well as one that's double in size and one that would be triple in size. i'll start with the capital costs, which are the costs to make the site ready. you can see they are itemized here on the slide.
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and those range from $55,000 to $1.3 million, depending on the size of the lot. of course actual capital costs will depend on the site conditions for the site that's ultimately chosen. but according to the real estate division, the other sites that have been identified as potential opportunity sites are also parking lots like the current site. though some would require additional construction, in some cases democrat legislative analyst. so these -- in some cases demolition. those costs would raise these costs. if additional construction is necessary. moving onto nonpersonnel costs. you can see here those range from $1.5 million to $2.7 million, depending on the size of the site. so for these kind of operating expenses, what we assume here is that sort of the conditions of the services on-site remain the
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same so that laundry and shower facilities are provided by mobile facilities several times per week and that bathrooms are a port-a-potty design. this slide shows the staff costs which you can see range from $1.3 million to $2.1 million, depending on the unusual of clients serve -- depending on the number of clients served. the mix of staff including people to manage and supervisor the lot as well as the homeless outreach team providing visiting and case management. we were also asked to look at other options for services, including on-site social services and other amenities such as bathroom and shower trailers and on-site meals. so you can see here that those costs or these optional services range from about $730,000 to $1.5 million. but i do want to say that they
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don't include other permits that would be necessary, for example, to prepare and consume meals or other utilities that would be required to support bathroom trailers or shower trailers. and i also want to emphasize these additional services are not yet endorsed by the department of homelessness, which is still evaluating the service models for our future site. so to summarize, to open an additional vehicle triage center, we believe the costs would range from between $3.2 million to more depending on the site. if additional services are included, the costs would increase to between $4 million and $7.6 million. so with that, i'm happy to answer any questions. >> no, i think that's good unless my colleagues have any. i want to ask dillan or abigail to come back up. maybe we can ask a few questions
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to h.s.h. i know that when we did the site visit to check and see how things were going, we saw the few spaces that were because of the grading, were off and so we were not able to use those. and i can't remember what the answer was, but are you intending to try to get the grading right to we can get a couple additional spots opened up? >> absolutely. that's a high priority for public works who developed the site to fix that as quickly as possible is my understanding. >> do we have a timeline on that? >> i don't. we would need to check with them. happy to get back to you. >> i just want to say, i know that we had -- let's just for the record, and i think coalition on homelessness would agree, and co-chair mr. courier would agree, we had a meeting in late august, we started to move in september. they did the work, october november, we were open in november. so we moved very expeditiously
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to get this site open. in the meantime, we also worked with the s.f.m.t.a. to relocate sites for existing operators. this was a site that prior to purchase and transfer to the mission housing development corporation, nonprofit for development of affordable housing on this site, it was used for muni operators. so we found this satellite site. so we worked with them as well. we did a lot of work. and all the people involved in this from h.s.h. to public works to our community partners, coalition on homelessness, our vehicle triage working group, my staff, monica, everyone was really involved in moving this as quickly as we could, and i think part of it was to show, as you said, ms. cutler, this seems to be low-hanging fruit. this is a very minimal in terms of it is still costly but it's minimal, but it's something we have that we can see some positive results from very quickly. so we are not criminalizing and
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forcing people to move and have their vehicles towed. as was shown in the presentation, the cost of housing has gotten so much that this is an option that's become more readily used. and this is not a san francisco phenomenon, let's say that for the record. go down to palo alto, all the way up to the east bay, and the professor, i know we didn't spend a lot of time on it, but the professor that came in, this is a phenomenon that is happening all over the country. so the two-thirds rise of homelessness in san francisco is not unique to san francisco. but what is unique to san francisco is we were behind in terms of moving forward in this model. this model is used differently in other locales. what we have tried to do here, and i think you sped through it in the presentation is we are not just allowing someone to park safely to avoid being towed, ticketed or criminalized or a victim of crime.
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we are also trying to have them be ready, and that's why i said 90% of the people that are in this facility in the safe parking are housing-ready. and so even though we only have currently 28 spots, and we need taupe up a few more once d.p.w. gets it done, we are rotating people in. so that would be a question. the other one is you heard from someone about getting the grants for batteries. can you talk a little bit about that? what your response to that is if we can get someone a $75 grant, do they have to be in safe parking? can we give access to that before they have gotten into vehicle parking or what is the thinking behind that? >> i think that's a great question from the coalition. i appreciate that very much. so the vehicle triage center is a pilot, and it's not our entire response to the two-thirds increase to the 19% increase.
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so our vehicle encampment resolution team is conducting outreach daily. it is important to note, as one of the commenters said, our resources for outreach are limited, but our team works tirelessly to outreach. and our team, our h.o.t. team is trained at an access point, which means they can conduct problem-solving conversations. they have access. >> people who have been sitting here all day, i'm going to cut you off. what i want is if the answer is we are not doing it, let's get back. >> thank you. the answer is yes, because if they are outreaching and engaging with our team, those individuals have access. >> all right. good. so the answer is yes. okay. so what's the commitment from h.s.a.? what are you all looking at in terms of expanding this model to other parts of the city? >> thank you, supervisor. so as you know, and we really appreciate the opportunity for this hearing, to report on early findings as we look at, as we
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digest the budget analyst report and our early learnings, we are working with the department of real estate who is present today, constantly looking and vetting new sites and then we need to make resources available if we want to expand this model. what we want to make sure we are doing is expanding this model but potentially other models that meet these different groups of people who are experiencing homelessness in their vehicles. we want to make sure we are not providing an extremely expensive model for people who don't want to engage with that level of service. >> so is that a yes? >> yes. >> you are committed to expanding more safe parking? >> absolutely. >> i'll call you back up. thanks, abigail. not trying to be rude in interpreting. i -- not trying to be rude in interrupting. >> good evening.
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>> i know you have looked at potential sites. i'm not asking you to name the sites, but i would like to see the universe and how many and the possibilities and have we started to engage with other supervisors in conversations and so on? >> well, that's a great question, supervisor, and thank you for giving me the opportunity to update you on that point, given the lateness of the hour, i'll be brief. we have been developing sites in conjunction with d.p.w. and h.s.h., as you know, the mayor's office started an initiative for 1,000 shelter beds. and as part of that initiative, we scoured the city for potential sites for both interim and permanent use. that effort led to more than 1,000 sites. and from that, we called that list looking for sites that would be potential safe parking sites. we also solicited suggestions
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from the supervisor's offices. this list is ever-changing, but currently there are 14 sites that are under consideration. one is in district 3. there are three in district 6, four in district 7, one each in districts 8 and 9, four in district 10. these sites are still under evaluation. and this evaluation is informed even from the conversations that we are having here today. i heard one gentleman say that the sites should be twice as big as the site is currently. we will take that feedback back. we will plug it into the list of sites under consideration. >> about 13 citywide spread out. >> over the districts i have mentioned >> name the districts again. one, three, six, eight? >> three, six, seven, eight, nine and 10 have potential
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sites. one, two, four, five, and 11 do knotts. >> 1, 2, 4, 5 and 11 do not? >> currently. >> all right. thank you. i appreciate you hanging in there. can h.s.h. come back up? the public comment is closed, sir. i'm sorry. we did that a long time ago. can you come back up, abigail? thank you. so given that we have 14 sites that are potential. we are looking at given the commitment of h.s.h., what is the overall feeling from h.s.h. in terms of let's say it like this. we did a ken success in the fall in the spring of last year. what was that rough estimate in terms of the number of vehicles on the street with people living in them? >> i can tell you that as of the january count this year, there were a count of 814 total peopl.
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>> okay. so based on that, based on looking at 14 sites, based on the fact we have 28 to positive, what does h.s.s. feel in terms of what's a good target number? i understand you have different models. i understand we have different ideas on how to deal with -- but specifically for safe parking, what do you think would be a good target number in terms of spaces citywide? >> i'm not ready to speak to that today, supervisor. what we need to understand as i've said, is the different tiers of people, and i hate to even use that expression, the different groups of of people experiencing homelessness in their vehicles and what their needs are, and evaluate the cost of this so that we can present possible solutions to the board. >> okay. it would be good. we'll probably have a follow-up. this will be continued to the call of the chair. we'll have a follow-up. i understand we got a lot of this information recently, it's
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in realtime, we know there are 814 at least. that's a good estimate. we know we have 30 spots. it would be good for h.s.h. to come back and say what they believe the right number is. a similar example is when we were having a conversation in the public service neighborhood committee, there was discovered that we used to have 60 subacute beds for the entire city and county of san francisco. we still have a significant need for subacute, whether it's in hospital or in the community, whether it's community care. we are down to about nine or ten in hospital. we need to have a target. so d.p.h. has given us a target. i think that 814 people living in vehicles, 814 vehicles being used for housing and only 28 spots, h.s.h. would come back prepared to say what they believe is the right target number is. >> i agree with your urgency,
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and i want to note that in addition to the 1,000 beds the mayor committed to, the mayor has committed to 2,000 additional placements, and this would be part of that commitment. so we look forward to reporting back to you on that. >> that would be good. the other thing is i would like to know, have you all decided a number, is there a commitment in terms of your budget what you are committing specifically to safe parking in the upcoming budget? what is h.s.h.'s commitment to safe parking in the upcoming budget? >> not at this time. >> might have to have this hearing sooner than i thought. how many members do you have on your vehicle encampment resolution team? >> we have a -- we have two people dedicated to vehicle encampment outreach. >> as we were talking about earlier, there's some overlap between hot, between -- >> correct. they are not the only pineapple outreaching to vehicles.
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some of the -- not the only people outreaching to vehicles. lots of people of the h.o.t. team touch issues around vehicles. >> i guess my last question is beside safe parking, is there other proposals that h.s.h. is looking at similar to the grant to help with batteries, is there other ideas or policies that you are looking at to help people that are vehicularly housed? >> supervisor, as you know from prior conversations, we look forward to presenting early learnings today and moving forward to our recommendations at a future date. i would be remiss if i didn't note that today we are talking about a small pilot, which is a very small portion of our entire homelessness response system. we do not have enough housing in san francisco to exit everybody from homelessness into permanent, supportive housing. and so we need to expand everything that we are doing. we need to expand safe parking,
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we need to expand shelter, and we need to expand creative problem-solving solutions and housing exits to homelessness. there is no one lever that is going to solve homelessness in san francisco, and we need to work on each aspect of our homelessness response system in coordination. so we are holding this as one piece of that work. so if i may take one more moment of your time, people reached out to by the vehicle team or homeless outreach team, this is not their only location to go. this may be the most viable location to them, and we really need to meet our unhoused population where they are, but certainly people are offered spaces in navigation centers, they can go through coordinated entry and experience problem-solving conversations like anybody experiencing homelessness. >> okay. great. thanks. if i have any other questions i'll call you back up. ms. cutler, i would like to ask you a question or two. and then we are going to wrap it up, chair.
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okay. i just wanted to ask you in particular, i mean so you have heard all the different presentations. we heard the budget and legislative analyst. i know you talked about some of the things you are experiencing. i heard you say that this has been a good process in my district. i appreciate that. and we really appreciate your help and involvement. i wanted to ask specifically from what you have seen so far or even prior to that, are there any other things that you wanted to say for the record in terms of barriers or other considerations we should be thinking about to have people allow them to have more accessibility for this vehicular process? those that are vehicularly-housed. >> really on point where we need the housing exits. that's key. you can get a ton of outreach workers, but if they have nothing to offer, it doesn't accomplish a whole lot.
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and so there's -- i was looking at the costs, and so often what we hear on outreach from folks is that they just want to be left alone, and a lot of folks are working. they have been able to manage to keep their vehicles, and so that's the battle that we tend -- that we focus so much on is to try and stop this -- them being targeted. and so this is -- if this is the first step -- we have been working on this for years, particularly with the vehicle ban since 2012. and since that time, this is the first step of actually creating an alternative. and there hasn't been any. it's small, but it's starting to go in the right direction, but i think there's other ways that we
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can explore that are a lot more cost effective. church parking lots, you know, or just areas. also looking at the areas where they have done the oversized vehicle ban to where we can -- yeah. but also when it comes to the problem solving where people can go, it's really tough when it's, for an outreach worker, she's got one and a half, where she's got -- two? she's got a tough job. because there's so few throughout the city. but where working harder on getting something where people don't lose their vehicle, because then they are forced, many folks at that point, that's their home, and they are then forced to sleep on the street or get on the shelter wait list that has 1,000 people on it.
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so i think it's just important that we stay honest about the numbers that we are talking about, the lack of resources and but that was a good point where it's like there's so many different aspects of when it comes to homelessness we need to look at. this is really -- seems to be going and helping folks that have really high need, which is, you know, which we really need to do. but it's limited. >> thank you. so i just want to close by saying, again, i just want to thank everyone, just we move very quickly, although i think it was a very deliberate process, and we had a lot of really good stakeholders. we had about 40 people in that working group initially, and it's open to the public. we have our captain, we have the bart, we have our bart police.
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they have two people on-site 24 hours a day. six people working every day, 24 hours a day. and active members from our working group. we have h.s.h., we have all the resources they bring to the table, public works, real estate, my staff, we are constantly, the outreach teams, and i have to say that i've had since the time that we did this, i've had a lot of people that came and were skeptical in the beginning and were absolutely opposed and frightened by the idea of it, but have come back since that time and said i just want to say i was completely wrong, we really appreciate what's been going on, it has added and enhanced the safety of the bart station itself with the lighting, the presence. but just in general, they have a much more positive -- and these are people i didn't even know were opposed to it, people i see frequently in our district and constituents and neighbors i
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work with all the time have been sharing stair story. and i'm sure -- sharing their story. i'm sure steven has had the same experience where people have said we were against this initially, and we are very happy with the way it is turning out. i don't want to under-- minimize the fact that so many people that have been engaged and were supportive of it have said they were very proud we have been able to step up and be the first part of san francisco. so i'm happy to hear that there's 14 other potential sites. i'm happy to hear that h.s.h. is thinking about it. i would like to say again think about what -- how much of your budget is going to be reflected. that's an open and public process. so those are questions you are going to be asked anyway so it's better for you to prepare. it would be fair then to say at least in the short term what you think a better number, target number is that is overall the
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homeless delivery system. i think it's also fair to point out that there's quite a few people that might not necessarily need to be there that long, similar to our homeward bound program, maybe they just need help with their vehicle and they want to continue on, they have vehicles other places, there are quite a few people working that are students, so we are trying to be creative with the other entities that might be impacted. i know san francisco state is trying to do something on a small scall. so i wanted to say all that. i want to thank everyone for their hard work on this. and we will continue this item. let's keep it open, continue to the call of the chair. i think we probably need to come back a little sooner than i thought. i know we just got the information from the b.l.a. this morning. thank you for putting in hard work, getting this information done, i know it's changing in realtime, and we will come back sooner than i anticipated so we will be prepared for the budget process, and hopefully we'll have some ideas where some other
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supervisors are interested in engaging and opening up some other sites. any other questions? i'm sorry. >> i have comments, i have questions. supervisor safai, thank you, one for your leadership around this issue early on and thank you for calling the hearing. and again, apologies on behalf of your cosponsor president yee who is still upstairs at the youth commission. three -- the five items on today's agenda are all in and around the issue of our time, the issue of housing, of homelessness, of affordability, of aging in place with dignity. and the representative of h.s.h., the department that is still in its relative infancy, talked about that flexibility. and the solutions for district
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11 are different than the solutions for districts 3 and 5. the one as we live through a rough patch in urban america under 45, the one thing that gives me solace and hope is the fact that our constituents are really decent, loving, compassionate people. and when you have elected representatives and community leaders that reach out, the community comes in and embraces it with one exception this evening, the same thing was the experience that i had around the navigation center that we are voting on tomorrow at the full board of supervisors on post street, and the same experience that i just read supervisor preston had with regard to a potential navigation center in the fifth district in the heart
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of our city. so i wanted to ring that note of optimism as we are all rolling in the same direction in different ways, but the people of the city and county of san francisco should be commended. and with that, supervisor safai has made a motion to continue this to the call of the chair. and we are adjourned. >> great. i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it
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stands, one nation under god, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. . >> this is a reminder to silence all electronic devices. fire commission regular meeting february 6, 2020 and the time is 50 3:00 p.m. february 26. item one, roll call. (roll call). >> item 2. general public comment. members of the public may address the commission for up on to three minutes on any matter within the commission's jurisdiction and does not appear on the agenda. speakers shall address their remarks to the commissioners as
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a whole. commissioners are not to enter into debate or discussion with the speaker. the lack of a response does not necessarily constitute agreement with or support of statements made during public comment. >> thank you, madam secretary. is there any member of the public that would like to speak? seeing none, public comment is closed. next item, please. >> item 3. approval of minutes. discussion and possible action to approve the meeting minutes from february 12, 2020. >> thank you. is there any public comment regarding the minutes of our last meeting? seeing none, public comment is closed. fellow commissioners, what say you? >> i move to approve. >> thank you. >> is there a second? >> yes, second. >> thank you. we have a motion by commissioner
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cleveland and second buy vice president feinstein. all in favor please signify by saying aye. thank you. >> item 4 presentation from the san francisco fire in safety education. presentation by firefighter dwayne eckerdt in connection with the sffisp. a program providing important safety information to school children in san francisco. >> thank you. please come forward. >> good evening. we all know you are very busy. this will be very