callers in the queue? chair. persons wanting to speak on the minutes. okay with no public comment, we'll go ahead and, we have a motion and a second, so, all in favor, i, i, i, i, i the

minutes are approved. okay. this places us on item. can i, can i just ask a question? if we have to do a roll call on every. no. okay. thank you. so item seven, executive director cherien mcspadden and the homeless oversight commission honors sarah locker. locker locker. sarah locker and soheil kamdar, recognition recipients for the month of september 2020. for. thank you. all right, so, sarah and soheil, come on up here, please. so a little later today, everyone is the commission is

going to hear about, the point in time count. and sarah and soheil are the brains behind the pit count, and we just really want to honor them today for their incredible work. and, sarah and soheil are part of the planning, performance and strategy team, which is a really important team embedded in the department that really helps us decide what best practices are, really tracks our data, really helps us understand what people experiencing homelessness are experiencing and what the various ways that they're experiencing it, who are demographics are, you know, and they really help us decide what direction we go in when we make decisions about policy. and so i just wanted to start by saying that. but really, really excited to honor the two of you today. the so as i said, sarah and soheil are nominated for the point in time count team within

the data and performance team, marion sanders, chief deputy director, was the nominator, and sarah and sohail managed the 2024 pit count with compassion, empathy and professionalism. a few key notable components to organizing the count are the planning methodology, development, logistics of the night of the count, survey, implementation, data analysis, report writing, website development and managing stakeholder expectations. so sarah and sohail were able to make some critical improvements to the point in time count analysis, specifically in the areas of methodology and reporting, notably their methodological improvements to counting vehicular homelessness allowed us to confirm the suspected rise in families living in their vehicles. they also reimagined how the results should be visualized, with an emphasis on improved transparency. to do so, the duo developed an interactive dashboard designed for all

stakeholders to take a deeper dive into the results. in the face of a very public, very high stakes project, sarah and sohail managed to remain calm and organized under incredible pressure, and that incredible pressure is really incredible. just saying. and then, sarah, in particular, you're the one who had to deal with that part. and you did it really well, and didn't take it personally. and i appreciate that, we are grateful to this team for not only for helping us meet our federal requirements and our deadlines, but also for your commitment and dedication to hsh and most importantly, to people experiencing homelessness. so, thank you so much for your work and congratulations on being our employees recognized for the month of september. thank you so your awards will come later. sorry. we have a little bit of a

vendor issue, but, anyway, congratulations. do either of you want to say anything? can i get a picture of you guys all together? so you guys. oh. thank you. thank you. this is really, really humbling. thank you so much to the commissioners, to our executive team for the nomination. it's an honor to work for the department here. and, i, i'm grateful every day for whatever small role that we can play in helping to resolve homelessness for the over 20,000 people in san francisco that experience it annually. it's really gratifying work. and i have so much admiration for all of our colleagues, especially those that are doing frontline work and support, and just want to thank everybody at hsh. it's a it's a really special group of

people, and it's really inspiring how much creativity and tenacity and commitment everybody here has. it makes the work really fulfilling, and i just want to thank my family briefly also for their support and especially a little shout out to my to my husband and to my two kids, margot and teddy. i am also super, super honored to be recognized. and, and i just want to, you know, a huge shout out to sarah for all of the support this year, the pit count is a really hard project, and sarah juggled that as well as leading and managing the data and performance team and all of the other really important work that happens on our team, that i think, you know, sometimes can can get overlooked, but really is truly important. you're not supposed to thank me, but i have to take it back now because i'll

give suhail additional thanks later. but but suhail really stepped into this project in particular. when it was already sort of taken off and dove in headfirst and just knocked it out of the park. i couldn't have done, like, nearly as much on this without suhail. i'm just so pleased to have had you and your partnership in this year's effort, and shout out to our data and performance colleagues. also, we have a great team. great this places us on item number eight, the director's report. i'll turn it over to director shireen mcspadden. okay. thank you, good morning, commissioners. i'm just going to wait a second for the

presentation to pop up on scree. and while we're doing that, i'm going to make a gentle reminder that if you would like to speak, following the presentation during public comment, please fill out one of these speaker cards. now, i got my brownie points from the commission secretary. the green cards are here. and just you can hand them to the commission secretary. they're not showing it. give me methadone. we're waiting for them to show up there. i don't see them on. wait, what's happening? for the for them to show it on the big

screen. we're waiting for the sfgovtv to put the presentation up on the screen. okay. hello oh, we got it, we got it, we got it. okay. we now have a presentation up on the screen. okay. all right. so good morning again. this the report i'm going to be presenting today includes data and programmatic updates on our key areas of service, as well as many of the topics requested by commissioners at

last month's meeting or in between meetings. so we're trying to cover everything. and, please bear with us. there was there were a lot of questions during the during the month. i'm going to move on in my updates on the data related to each component of the homelessness response system, and some corresponding programmatic updates. so in july, the san francisco homeless outreach team conducted over 3500 engagements and distributed nearly 9700 engagement tools and resources, including food, water and hygiene materials. in july 2024. next slide or yeah, next slide, in july 2024, sf hot made 262 shelter placements, 213 coordinated entry assessment point referrals, access point referrals. sorry for housing placements and sf hot co-hosted

an event at the gubbio project with the latino task force on august 8th. the latino task force recruited people in need of homeless services from the mission and sf hot provided services. there was also street medicine from the department of public health, the san francisco aids foundation, program, latino and mission action, formerly dolores street community services on hand to provide services to the community during the service event, sf hot connected with 19 people and helped four people move into shelter that day. and made plans to follow up with the people who did not get into shelter. and then, coordinated entry assessments increased slightly in july with 1182 assessments. this shows an increase from this time last year. so more programmatic updates in the area

of coordinated entry. we had a soft launch of the coordinated entry for survivors assessment tool. this tool prioritizes, prioritizes survivors of violence seeking services from the homelessness response system. the tool is a collaboration between asian women's shelter, sf safehouse, and saint vincent de paul's. reilly center. the safe house working group provided recommendations which inform the creation of the tool. the working group is led by survivors for survivors and includes city departments and service providers who meet monthly to improve housing and shelter access for survivors of violence in san francisco. they will be recruiting new members in the fall. hsh also hosted a leasing fair at the 8391 leavenworth, which is a supportive housing program for a transitional age. youth 27 youth attended the leasing fair and all vacancies at the hotel were filled. and then in on prevention in fiscal year 2324, homelessness prevention served

1530 households with a total of about $10.3 million in financial assistance. to prevent an episode of homelessness in the first month of 2425, homelessness prevention served 188 households with approximately $1.3 million. and then one of our key prevention tools is the san francisco emergency rental assistance program, or sf erap, that is a partnership between hsh and the mayor's office of housing and community development. in fiscal year 2324, we served 4339 households with an average of $6,246 in assistance. this led to a total of $27.1 million distributed in the first month of the new fiscal year. we provided rental assistance to 298 households, 80% of which identified as people of color

and 86% who earned 30% or less of area. median income. in 2324, there were 1070 problem solving resolutions, supported with over $3.2 million in flexible financial assistance to end people's homelessness. in just the first month of 2425, we have supported 85 resolutions, that's for 81 unique households with 272, over $272,000 in financial assistance. the majority of these problems, problem solving resolutions were for adult households, 76% of them, followed by families 18%, and then young adults at 6%. and then hsh funds over one over 13,500 units of housing across our system of care, including site based supportive housing,

scattered site supportive housing, rapid rehousing and the housing ladder program. the overall inventory is available on our website via the link included on the slide. the capacity of this housing system is critical to our ability to end homelessness in our community. since 2018, hsh has increased site based supportive housing by 23%, increased scattered site supportive housing by 306%, and increased rapid rehousing by 86%. we received a question from a commissioner in advance of the meeting about the case manager to client ratios in our permanent supportive housing portfolio. generally, hsh funds are supportive housing providers to staff a 1 to 25 ratio for adult housing, a 1 to 20 ratio for youth and family housing programs, and a 1 to 50 for step up housing programs. this increase in case management corresponded with an investment in case management wages. to help attract high quality staff to these critical positions. funding for these investments

fundings. funding for these investments was located was allocated in the fiscal year 22 to 24 budget and all permanent supportive housing support service agreements were modified to add these service enhancements. hsh regularly monitors our housing operators and their spending rate to ensure that these service enhancements are being executed. there have been times that because of understaffing, these ratios have slipped, but we're working with our providers to correct that issue. and then housing placements in 2324, hsh made 2477 placements to housing in the first month of month of fiscal year 24, 25 hsh made 155 placements, 115 were adults, 25 were families with children and 15 were young adults. hsh has launched the flexible housing

subsidy pool program for women, and the program will begin accepting referrals this month. the 2024 point in time count revealed that women constitute 32% of the city's homeless population, particularly vulnerable to violence and abuse. this housing program aims to establish a secure and supportive housing initiative for women facing homelessness, violence and uniquely challenging circumstances. the department is currently facilitating working groups to provide input on the implementation of new rapid rehousing subsidies, subsidies for families at least two work planning sessions will be conducted and the outcomes will be incorporated into our program design hsh is hosting trainings for permanent supportive housing providers. the corporation for supportive housing hosted a series of trainings for psh providers, which culminates this month with the training on crisis intervention and de-escalation. hsh also hosted a training on the money management program and another on behavioral health services

available available from the department of public health's permanent housing advanced clinical services team. the department also hosted a data roundtable focused on best practices in transitional aged youth, permanent supportive housing attendees at analyzed longitudinal data to get a better understanding of who is referred into permanent supportive housing, how long people are staying and how and when tenants are exiting. as we continue to expand supportive housing for young adults, we must continue to analyze this housing model to ensure it serves young tenants effectivel. at the last meeting, commissioners requested more information about our money management program. hsh currently funds three social services providers lutheran social services, conrad house and tenderloin housing clinic to provide money management or third party rent payment programs to tenants of hsh funded supportive housing. the

program offers tenants who opt in a money management service. service tenants can either bring their money to the provider's office, i.e. a check or a debit card, or have their ccap check sent directly to the money management provider. the program will then pay the rent on behalf of the tenant and any other bills that the tenant requests, and give the tenant the remaining funds. this program helps ensure that formerly homeless tenants are able to pay their top priority expenses, typically rent, before spending any of their income, which in turn helps stabilize their housing and ensure that they don't lose their housing for nonpayment of rent. the program currently has a capacity to serve up to 2090 supportive housing tenants. hsh recently increased funding for money management to expand the capacity of the program. starting in 2425, we will have the capacity to serve approximately 3240 households over the next two years. the expansion of money management services is one of the strategies the department is

pursuing to address chronic nonpayment of rent concerns across our supportive housing portfolio. tenants must voluntarily enroll in and enroll in the program, and due to changes in social security policy, tenants on social security are unable to divert ssi checks to the money management providers like cap does. this change has had a major impact in overall enrollment services. in addition to an increase in evictions due to nonpayment of rent, the department has engaged in years of advocacy to revisit this policy to make the service more effective. and i'm just going to say that might be somewhere that the commission could be helpful, that advocacy is really important. we've been working at it for years, and social security has not been an easy partner. so, and then as of 2020 4th august 2024, hsh has an 8.8. 7% vacancy rate in our site based supportive housing

portfolio. this 47%, this 47 fewer vacancies than in july, which had a 9.1% vacancy. of the 746 vacancies, 231 or 2.7 have moved move ins in process, 398 or 4.6 are off line 117 or 1.4% are available for referral. most. the most common reason for off line units is janitorial or maintenance holds, and that's 170 units, followed by recently vacated units, which is 137. it's important to note that units show up as off line in our data system, even when units are intentionally being held offline for significant site construction. for example, there are seven units held off line at the mission inn for the planned occupied rehab. additionally, there are three units off line at 335 turk for a planned rehab,

and there are more throughout the portfolio. that said, we are doubling down on the challenge of offline units and will be discussing a plan to bring the number of offline units down. and we're hoping to bring that plan to you in the next couple of months, between january and december 2023, hsh achieved a 32% decrease in our site based permanent supportive housing vacancy rate from 11.6% to 7.9% through a coordinated effort to fill vacant units in early 2024, we had a setback in achieving this goal because of the implementation of the unit level inventory tracker. there were several strategies that we used to achieve this 32% improvement that we continue to utilize as part of our vacancy reduction reduction strategy, we implemented a policy to lower requirements for the documents clients need to move into housing faster. hsh has changed the documentation policy for locally funded housing to require fewer documents upon

placement, and to give clients 90 days to submit. submit their documents created. we also created the hsh housing placement team to provide support to clients navigating the housing process based on best practices from the shelter in place hotel housing placement process. we issued guidance to providers outlining the length of time units can be offline for repairs. we rolled out the unit level inventory tracker to provide real time monitoring around vacancies and the length of time units are vacant. we continue to provide to improve the quality of permanent supportive housing buildings, to increase the rate at which clients accept referrals to vacant units. this work utilizes over $15 million in the 20 2223 and fiscal year 20 2324 budgets for general capital, improvements in permanent supportive housing, as well as $10 million for elevator modernization and single room occupancy buildings. in the launch of the housing quality standard inspections, we increased wages for frontline

supportive services and property management workers to both improve housing retention and to speed up the timeline to turn over vacated units. the street to home program has created an expedited housing process for clients moving directly from unsheltered homelessness into supportive housing, and we updated service outcome objectives across the contract agreements in our site based portfolio to support meeting the 7% goal. the housing the hsh housing placement team moved 1907 households into permanent supportive housing in the 20 2324 fiscal year and in the new fiscal year, we are seeing the vacancy rate begin to drop down to 8.7%, which is just about average average, and getting closer to our goal of 7%. one critical practice that we've adopted is proactive referrals as a strategy to reduce vacancies and shorten the time that each unit spends offline between tenants. proactive referrals leverage improved data to assign clients to a

navigator. two weeks before we expect a unit to become available. this allows the navigator to work with the client to gather all application materials in advance, bringing the time that units remain unmatched to a bare minimum. over the course of piloting this approach, we more than doubled the number of clients who were document ready within two weeks of referral. this faster placement will improve trust and get clients housed much faster. and then, in addition to improving the placement process, hsh is planning to move forward additional reforms and strategies specifically focused on reducing the number of units offline, including. the department will launch a concerted effort to move all housing referral status. people staying in shelters to permanent supportive housing. this effort will decrease vacancies and increase available shelter beds. two hsh will educate housing providers about the us department of housing and community development, hud. sorry hud designation of

dedicated plus to make sure those programs are no longer requesting proof of chronic homelessness. further, hsh will continue working with hud to convert all continuum of care units to dedicated plus. hsh will start working with providers to limit the percentage of units that can be offline to 3% of their building units. currently, it is closer to 4.5% to better, to better monitor offline units. hsh will work on separating units that need serious rehab from units that only need janitorial and minor repairs. hsh will develop policy to limit the number of weeks that a unit can be set aside by providers for internal transfers, hsh and providers will improve data quality in the unit level inventory tracker so that units are properly labeled in the system, properly labeled in the system and buildings with 4% or higher offline units for over 30 days will trigger an immediate site visit by an hsh

program manager. hsh just submitted our required annual eviction and exit report for fiscal year 23, 24. the report shows a continued decrease in evictions from supportive housing, with 106 households, or 1.17% evicted across 152 sites serving 9041 households. over the past three years, we have seen a sustained decrease in eviction and unlawful detainers for tenants in supportive housing. the report also showed an increase in the issuance of eviction notices. this increase in eviction notices has not resulted in an increase in unlawful detainers or evictions. the process of issuing a notice of eviction can be a helpful tool for property managers to use to engage a tenant earlier in the process, and to develop strategies with them to prevent

additional tenancy issues and untimely evictions. this data show that while 82% of all eviction notices last year were for nonpayment of rent, only 20% of actual evictions were for nonpayment. 63% of evictions last year were due to lease violations. this data indicates that when the data indicate that when the property manager and tenant engage early in the process, nonpayment of rent issues can be largely resolved before reaching the point of eviction. however, lease violations outside of nonpayment have been harder to resolve. the significant increase in eviction notices from 2223 to 2324 corresponds with an increase in nonpayment of rent across the permanent supportive housing portfolio during and following the covid 19 pandemic. eviction notices remain an effective tool providers can employ to bring tenants to the table to mitigate

issues and retain housing. in 2023, hsh issued guidance to housing providers related to nonpayment of rent, which emphasized engagement with tenants prior to issuance of an eviction notice, including rent reminders, payment plans, money management referrals, rent relief applications. and that's generally sfa, rap and benefits advocacy. and then moving on to shelter inventory across shelter our shelter system on august 26th, hsh had 3283 units of shelter capacity and an overall 93% occupancy rate. this is the same occupancy occupancy rate as last month. we continue to monitor the shelter occupancy rate closely. it is important to note that since 2018, the department has expanded shelter capacity across the city by 72%. a commissioner had asked about the case management to client ratio and shelters. with the new

investments in shelter services and enhanced case management, we now have a 1 to 15 case manager to client ratio for families and a 1 to 25 ratio for adults. at our last commission meeting, commissioners asked for more details about the accessibility of the shelter system and inventory set asides. hsh maintains a standard that 5% of our beds across the system meet ada standards. obviously, this may or may not be enough, so we're looking to reevaluate reevaluate the standard to better meet the needs of our community. this has been a concern since i came to the department. we recently hired our first ada coordinator and are in the process of doing a site by site evaluation of accessibility. hsh will have more details to report once we've completed these evaluations. and then for pets and shelter access all hsh shelter programs accommodate support and service animals. most states allow pets with the

exception of those with smaller spaces. the only three sites which do not allow pets are hospitality house, a woman's place, and larkin, and then set asides. we have 842 beds and 58 units set aside for the adult shelter reservation system. county adult assistance program and the department of health's restore program. journey home covid overflow and calworks. the reason we share the units for hsh journey home and hsh covid overflow is because journey home stays are typically only for one night, and the covid overflow units are not consistently in use, and then dolores street shelter. last month, the commission asked about how many people are turned away from the dolores street walk up shelter, while while neither h. s hsh nor the provider mission action collect formal data on this mission action reports

anecdotally that they believe, on average, they turn away 3 to 5 individuals each week for the walk in general dorms. and then san francisco police department shelter allocations on weekdays and after hours week, on weekends and after hours weekdays, when most of our partners are not making shelter placements, we set aside some beds for use by the police department. typically this is 3 to 5 beds per day. however it depends on bed availability and other needs across the system. the police department has utilized 25 to 30% of their bed nights over the past three months. and then adult and family shelter waitlists. this is data on the adult and family shelter waiting list as of june 2024. for families. as of august 20th, there were 531 families on the shelter waiting list. of these families, 74 are current, currently staying in hsh supported family emergency

shelter or hotels while they wait for placement into the family shelter. into family shelter with individual rooms and then for adults. as of august 20th, we had 152 people on the waitlist. 553 people joined the waitlist in july 2024. average time on the waitlist was 11 days. for people who accepted placement down from 12 days in june, and 165 people were placed into shelter from the waitlist in july. we anticipate the number of families in shelter to go down as we roll out the new housing subsidies, as part of the mayor's safer families initiative. last month, the commissioners requested the shelter wait waiting list and placement data. over time. the next several slides provide this data. since february, we have seen the number of adult adults joining this waiting list grow from 439 people to over 550. this growth reflects the implementation and improvements

of the adult shelter reservation system. july saw the greatest number of people get placed into shelter from the waiting list, with 106 165 adults getting placed into shelter. aside from entering a shelter, individuals may exit the list due to being unresponsive, declining shelter, or otherwise becoming unhoused. these increases were expected and reflect the ramp up of the adult reservation system. last month, the last month, the commissioners requested the shelter waiting list and placement data. over time, the next several slides provide this data. did i go back? i'm sorry. back one. yeah the total sorry. it's like a lot of slides, so. are we on that slide? yeah. next slide. there we go. the total

number of people active on the adult shelter waiting list has also more than doubled since then, with 275 people on the waiting list in july, 164% increase from february 2024. we're now also able to report this information for families waiting for shelter. in july, we had 126 families join the family shelter waitlist, down from the june high of 135. in july, there were 17 families moved off of the shelter waiting list and moved into private room shelters. non-congregate and not hotels. aside from entering a shelter, families may exit the list due to being unresponsive, declining shelter, or otherwise becoming housed. the family shelter waiting. the family shelter waiting list has been growing over the past several months, with 481 families

currently on the family shelter list. this reflects the growing need of homelessness of homeless families in our community. this increase is the reason the city is investing over $50 million over the next two years. in family shelter and housing expansion. and then the issue of households encamped in vehicles on winston and more recently on zoo road, has been a significant topic here at the commission and in the press. so we wanted to provide you all with an update. as you know, hsh has been reaching out to these families consistently and has made offers of shelter, housing, public benefits, and health services over the past several months. hsh helped 23 households move off of winston and into long term housing. these clients were able to access a variety of housing resources, ranging from rapid rehousing to project based psh and scattered site psh. other households declined offers of housing assistance assistance when the encampment moved to zoo

road, we continued to outreach to the community. many of the households had been who had been previously offered housing assistance from hsh, and had had declined the offers given the parking enforcement and the kind of match of rapid rehousing and units, households were more inclined to accept the offers for households eligible for rental subsidies. we offered an expedited move in process into pre-identified housing units. these two factors have led to an increase in acceptance of housing assistance by the households on zoo road. as of the end of august, 27 households with 69 unique family members were assessed and referred to permanent housing programs, 25 rapid rehousing, and two permanent supportive housing, 23% 23 of these households have moved into their new homes, two were referred to permanent supportive housing and are waiting on placements, and two households declined hshs offer

of housing assistance. these households represent a mix of families with children and adults. for households receiving rapid rehousing subsidies, the household pays approximately 30% of their income toward the rent and the subsidy makes up the difference. i really want to thank the hsh staff, the homeless outreach team, compass family, family services, catholic charities, episcopal community services, and parkmerced who have been working together to smoothly transition these households from their rvs to new homes just in time for the new school year. this work includes outreach, eligibility assessment, subsidy administration, unit viewing, viewing, lease signings, moving and support, furniture purchases, purchases, utility activation, landlord engagement and ongoing social services. and then just some other updates. so for the legislative update coming up this fall, hsh has

several items before the board of supervisors. their ground leases for young adult ps eight sites at 42 otis and 1174 folsom. folsom won grant agreement amendment for homelessness prevention assistance and a new agreement for property management services at 1174 folsom behested payment waiver or six month continuance to support hsh and the mayor's office engaging philanthropic support for homeless services and accept and expend for a new homekey grant for 685 ellis. amendments to the shelter standards of care based on recommendations from the shelter monitoring committee. and we also have two hearings anticipated at the board. one on recovery oriented supportive housing and one on the impact and outcomes of the city's different street response teams. so just covering recovery oriented supportive housing supervisor matt dorsey has introduced introduced an

ordinance to require an expansion of recovery focused, permanent supportive housing. the legislation would prohibit the city from expanding its portfolio of traditional supportive housing, unless 25% of the city's permanent supportive housing qualifies as recovery housing, the board of supervisors could waive these requirements by resolution if it is in the public interest, the legislation would be a deviation from the housing first principles, which have generally guided the operation of permanent supportive housing in san francisco. however, these provisions would not apply in instances where funding requirements disallow the operation of, such as recovery housing. the legislation also requires the control the controller to do annual reporting on the percentage of psh units which qualify as recovery housing. hsh and other departments would submit data to the controller to do so. hsh would also have to adopt standards and policies relating to the implementation of

recovery housing. the legislation defines recovery housing as permanent supportive housing, which serves those with substance use disorder and emphasizes abstinence from illegal substance use. the legislation contrasts recovery housing with drug tolerant housing that follows housing first principles and does not evict residents solely for illicit drug or alcohol use. so for housing first standards, most of the city's psh stock could be considered drug tolerant housing. in this particular legislation. importantly, all state funded psh must be operated consistently with housing first policies. per state law, which states that alcohol and drug use without other lease violations shall not be a reason for eviction. while state funded psh would not be subject to the provisions of this legislation, any unrestricted funding would have to be used to create recovery housing until it comprises 25 of the city's psh stock. and then just some

updates from other advisory bodies. there are two open seats on the local homeless coordinating board that the commission must consider appointing soon. the next meeting is september ninth. the shelter monitoring committee last met on june 19th. two of the shelter monitoring committees 12 seats, seats one and five, remain unfilled. the next meeting is scheduled for september 18th. the shelter grievance advisory committee has five vacant seats and will hold their next meeting on september 17th. they are working on and will issue suggestions, including those on harm reduction information, to make updates to the shelter training manual. and then equity office updates. the last session of the four series racial equity trainings for hsh staff was completed in august, with a total of 212 attendees across series four and with a cumulative attendance of 968 across hsh teams and the addressing racism learning series for hsh staff members,

hsh is the first department in the city to complete racial equity training series for its internal staff. the racial equity leaders retreat, hosted by the office of racial equity with the san francisco human rights commission, celebrated our progress of the phase of phase one of the racial equity action plan. as we begin the conversations and the collective work of phase two racial, the phase two racial equity action plan focused on external partners and closely aligns to the hsh home by the bay strategic plan. and i just want to give a shout out to our equity office for their amazing work. we have literally two people right now in the office, and the last training that we had was really wonderful because it took what we learned from the previous trainings and the stage setting that the office did, so that everybody has the same understandings of the concepts of racial equity and really pushed staff to think about how that work fits into each area of

their own work. and so i really appreciate that work and, look forward to having the report, anthony, give you the report in the next coming months. and as always, we are hiring. we have 286 fte and 53 vacancies with 53 active recruitments. and that includes positions that are filled, exempt positions where we are recruiting for a permanent role. and then i also didn't get a chance to introduce our new deputy director of programs, dariush khan, because he was on vacation last month. but i wanted to formally introduce dar as our new deputy director of programs. i talked a little bit last month about his extensive background. i know some of you have worked with him in the past, he's done a lot of work in homelessness, a lot of work with the department of public works, just a lot of policy work on homelessness in general, not just in san francisco, but he's really hit

the ground running. and when you hear some in particular, i'd say that where it showed up in this report, when you hear some of the things that we're doing around the vacancies and moving people out of shelter and into permanent housing, i mean, he immediately took a look at that and said, like, we've got to figure out how to make this move. and so i'm really happy to have dar on board, and hopefully you'll get a chance to go up and introduce yourselves to him. thank you. welcome is it our turn now? it's your turn now. great thank you so much, director mcspadden. really, some eye opening data in here. and i know our commissioners will have some questions, but i'd like to open it up for public comment, let's go ahead and remind everybody to fill out a green speakers card. and, i've asked, commission secretary bradshaw to give a lot. two minutes per speaker. so if people are interested in speaking on the

director's report for public comment, now is the time. please come on up. okay. good morning. commissioners marty regan, co-chair of hesper. hesper stands in solidarity with the supportive housing provider association in our concerns regarding supervisor dorsey's recovering housing recovery. housing ordinance, we are deeply concerned that it does not appear to incorporate public health best practices, nor does it specify lease enforcement or eviction protection policies. we are also extremely concerned about the seemingly arbitrary 25% inventory threshold, which could significantly disrupt or halt future housing for people exiting homelessness. we urge the commissioners to formally request additional research as as well as accept proposed amendments from hsh and hesper. to be clear, we do not oppose sober housing. we oppose the way the supervisor is proposing it and the impacts it will have on tenants and future housing. we also urge the commissioners to recommend that the city take a

holistic and system systems level approach to homelessness instead of sweeping folks and trashing their personal property or spending city funds on one way bus tickets. how about adequately funding additional shelter beds instead of implementing draconian drug war approaches to recovery housing, which will increase evictions? how about providing a range of sober only and housing first options instead of withholding critical general funds? how about funding erap to prevent folks from returning to homelessness? we implore the city to continue implementing home by the bay and keep election year politics out of homelessness interventions. thank you, thank you. so i'll call the next three names gary, gabriel, medina, lucas chamberlain, and miguel cabrera. please step up. to good morning, commissioners. my name is gabriel medina. i'm the

executive director for la raza community resource center, we do some work with the city, with the emergency rental assistance. and the applications were 54 year old organization serving new immigrant parents. i wanted to talk about. first of all, thank you for your service for the families. we appreciate those families getting housed, i wanted to talk about some of the communication that came out of that. i think we could have probably helped a lot of the families sooner. we saw august 1st. a lot of the stories about how these families have been being moved, you know, from winston and to the zoo. and we were shocked that it was like such a high concentration, 100% immigrant latino families. and we're talking about like, we like like 50 children that we that we observed working with. and so i want to thank my staff, marisa villagomez, who will give a lot of testimony about some of the services she provided. i think one of the communication breakdowns that we found, while a lot of these folks were moved,

is that there's a lot of communication breakdowns with these families. i think, you know, you have to understand that these families have not just cultural barriers, not just language barriers, but also barriers with fear of the government, not just public charge, but also if they have any sensitive status issues. it's very important for them to be able to trust community agencies. we also have a legal immigration department, so we're able to send our attorneys on site to go and make sure to talk to them with our promotoras and our on our staff, also, i want to just combat the narrative that they refused housing. i think that's a very negative narrative to put out there. it makes it seem like they don't want services. they really do. they really do. i think once they were able to connect more culturally, competently, they would accept more services. but there's still more families unhoused. we've seen the waitlist for adults, and then the really big increase in single family housing, you know, we've had the mission. you know, has reduced latino population from 60% to 37% since covid.

we've had a 55% increase in latino homelessness. we need more services for these families. thank you. thank you. lucas chamberlain. good morning. my name is lucas chamberlain. i live in at lake merced. for the past five years. i pay my taxes. i worked during the pandemic as an essential worker. i keep my area clean. i made sure whoever comes by that area to clean up after themselves and i tried. i looked, i was looking for housing, the city came by. there's restrictions. i got injured recently and, fortunately, i wasn't able to work. and in order to get housing, i had to have a job, getting ready to have a surgery

soon due to the injury and i am trying my best to get out of this situation. rent is so expensive in san francisco. i love san francisco. i don't want to move anywhere else, and i've been living here for seven years. but, i just don't know what else to do next. this is very stressful and it's putting a toll on my body. i removing us from i mean, passing a law. i don't think it's a good idea. i think they should hold back. and it's just we're not doing anything. we're just working hard or just trying to survive. and where else can? what else can we do? where can we go, live in the streets or not? a good thing. and i think they should find a place for us to park.

melgar promised us a place, and we have not received it. and i just think this is all about political gain and just don't care about us. that's pretty much it. so i ask for your help. please give us a place to park and remove the restrictions. thank you. thank you, miguel cabrera. and then after maritza villagomez, lucas, ella and elena bender. good morning, dear. commissioners, my name is miguel cabrera. i, you know, i work at the coalition on homelessness. yeah. so today i come in to testify and so i am really disappointed in what the mayor do. and all the body works in the city. what they do is sweep the people. is inhumane. it is disrespectful. what they

are doing. because when we don't offer a shelter, we don't offer housing and sleeping people is not okay. so we need to do something about this, this issue and we need to stop in the mayor to do this. sweeps so second thing i want to mention is about the arv's and the families. so guys, what are we doing with the children's we oppressing and repressing the children's when we moving, when we take care out of the arv's to one family we don't take, we take it out of the army. but what we do to the children's, what we do to the parents, we create more trauma, more instability, and we not solving the problem. so we have to do something right now. and stopping the mayor to stop in the streets and stopping to create this repression against the families and arv's and cars and everywhere where the families congregate. and we need

to provide permanent housing. now, this is the solution. and any circumstances, housing, housing, housing is the solution. thank you. thank you. maritza villagomez. good morning. my name is maritza villagomez. i'm a case manager, family advocate at la raza community resource center at la raza crc. we provide social services and immigration wraparound support to primarily monolingual spanish speakers. i want to start by saying that i'm very happy that the families on zoo road received a housing subsidy, and that the process was expedited. however, other families who lived on winston drive remain unhoused and with no safe parking sites, they continue to be vulnerable and hard to reach by service providers like us. the family shelter system is not an option. you so clearly stated today. it

is imperative that safe parking sites are prioritized and that a moratorium on parking citations and towing is passed immediately. on monday, august the 5th, we provided our first on site outreach to the families on zoo road. we did an initial assessment to determine needs and schedule follow up with the families. we also provided diapers, emergency food boxes, hygiene kits, the basic needs including affordable housing, medi-cal clothing, food, employment, diapers and transportation were the top needs, as well as immigration support. we did a second outreach on friday. the ninth to speak with the residents that were not present at the on the first time we spoke with 17 households and all but three of those are monolingual spanish speakers. the other three households are brazilian and speak portuguese. they were all forced to move from winston drive, with many living there pre-pandemic, and considered that their community. we asked if the city had provided any sort of outreach while living on winston drive or zoo road.

everyone said no. the first outreach happened on the eighth, when the police accompanied parking enforcement and the rvs were tagged and one rv towed. communication continues to be a concern. cultural and language competency is critical to help minimize miscommunication with vulnerable communities experiencing multiple barriers, including language, immigration status, public charge concerns, economic instability, and trauma. thank you for your time. thank you. lucas. hi, y'all. i'm lucas silla, organizer with the coalition on homelessness. i want to emphasize a couple of things i want to emphasize. one, that the zoo road encampment only existed because the director of rec and parks, phil ginsberg, directed residents there. so in their eyes, that is a city sanctioned site, or at least a spot in which a city official, a high ranking one at that, who has been in city

government for 30 years now, directed them to go. i also want to touch on what gabriel said as well about trust with government offices and departments. i think it's really key that we make clear that not only was hsh doing outreach and outreach, you know, is there is direct outreach and then there is flyering. i don't know if those are being conflated, and i think that residents are a little confused on that. but when you have sfmta and sfpd showing up with tow trucks hours before hsh arrives to give housing placements on august 9th, friday, august 9th, that is counterintuitive. it is not only unnecessary, it is nonsensical. now folks have been scattered multiple, multiple people left that place. folks are scattered now and it only makes the outreach process harder and even for us as advocates as well, to retain contact with these folks. but it erodes trust with community and government. and again, i i'm glad that folks are

harping on the fact that they are not service resistant. this has been a conversation for four years about safe parking, and i know that hsh does not have control entirely over safe parking, but i think that two things need to be emphasized. one, we i'm urging, you know, folks who have marginal positions of power to urge the mayor's office to exert the power that she holds, and that office holds over finding and implementing safe parking. and also in coordinating communication across department. that is so key and so key to these families retaining support and getting housing. thank you. thank you, elena bender and then sheba, ben, ben dbi, mercedes banker, and zachary franek. good morning, director mcspadden and commissioners, i'm eliana bender, the policy manager for

glide and also a member of the end poverty toes coalition. we are grateful that about half of the households who were in rvs on winston drive were able to be connected with housing. however, as others have said, we are still very concerned about the other households who were displaced from winston drive and either did not relocate to zoo road or left zoo road before hsh started offering housing. these other households have been destabilized and are scattered, making it more difficult for service organizations to reach them or organize further. hsh outreach. this situation is unfortunately predictable fallout from the current practice of displacing rv residents, rather than providing them with housing or a safe parking site. the households who were on winston and did not receive housing should still have the chance to access subsidies, and we should still work towards a safe parking site

on the west side and other sites in other parts of the city, as deeply affordable housing remains out of reach to so many in san francisco. many are turning to rvs as a form of shelter and housing. we must address this growing population, including tailoring approaches for a diverse population ranging from families to seniors and speaking different languages, displacing and sweeping these households does not get them closer to housing. towing their rvs only pushes them deeper into precarity and crisis, often leading to literal street homelessness. with shelters at capacity and with waiting lists, we should do everything we can to stabilize those living in vehicles, including with safe parking sites. thank you. thank you sheba and seba. good morning commissioners. my name is sheba. i'm a policy associate at glide in our center for social justice and a member of the end poverty coalition. i'm here in solidarity with the monolingual

spanish and portuguese speaking rv residents formerly on winston drive and buckingham way. our coalition is very grateful to the amount of work hsh has put into getting rv residents connected to community and city services, as well as allocating subsidies to get some of these rv families housed. but as anxiously anticipated, many of these rv families previously on winston drive have scattered to other locations in the city, making it more difficult for community advocates to reach them and to connect them to city services. these hardworking rv residents are seeking housing supports and a safe place to raise their children, yet they continue to face parking restrictions, citations and increased harassment. in a recent article, a city official was quoted saying rvs are bad health hazard because of things like mold and deteriorating roofs, essentially acknowledging that homelessness is a public health crisis. the needs and

approach leading with support services, not law enforcement. this year's point in time count showed a 37% increase in the amount of families, or sorry, in the amount of people who are housed and of those families who are unhoused. 90% are currently living in rvs as a commission, it is your responsibility and your duty to hold hsh accountable to providing housing supports to all families experiencing homelessness, especially those from racially marginalized communities. i urge you all to encourage hsh to tap into their racial equity work to create a thorough housing plan for families, especially families of color, and to be open to creating an alternative shelter option where rvs and rv residents can park safely and without fear of displacement. thank you. thank you. mercedes pennock. mercedes pennock. okay,

zachary rennert. good morning, commissioners. director mcspadden. my name is zach frenette. i'm the director of policy and public affairs at episcopal community services, where san francisco based regional homelessness service provider and also a member of the supportive housing providers network, acting today in both a professional capacity as well as a personal one. as someone who has lived experience with homelessness and is in recovery, x believes that we should end housing choice and creating a diverse array of housing options for those who want them, including long term affordable abstinence based housing for those who choose it. that being said, we do have concerns with the proposed recovery housing legislation as it is written. without diving into too much detail, i will say that we support the coalition sponsored and hsa sponsored amendments,

but in particular, we're concerned our principal concerns are the 25% mandate, which feels arbitrary, and also, i don't think we need to encumber our ability to build more housing first pch to build recovery housing. i don't think that's necessary or the right thing to do. and i think we can walk and chew gum at the same time. secondly the characterization of housing first as drug tolerant, i think is stigmatizing and harmful and also not reflective of the fact that the vast majority of housing in the free market, affordable housing, public housing, psh is drug tolerant by that definition, i myself have signed many market rate leases in my life, and there has never been a stipulation that i submit to drug tests or be sober. so i thank you for your time and your consideration on this matter. thank you, jordan davis, charlotte and jennifer friedenbach. so there's a lot

here. so i want power for this. first off, with the director's report about money management. as far as i know, social security's policy is basically like they can require recipients to have money manager, but that only happens when, it's manifestly clear that the person can't take care of themselves. but unfortunately, there's a legacy in this city of providers basically coercing people onto a payment plans. in fact, randy shaw back in 2014, and i have receipts on this, basically said that money management should be required for ssi recipients. there's also an ssi recipient in the richardson apartments that is claiming that i believe that's a home shop, that they're being required to have money management, even though they don't need it. and also, i think that there needs to be a uniform rent payment policy, which i've

been talking with sda about, that would allow us to pay rent by check or, remotely and only save money management for those who need it. as for scattered site, i'm glad that there's a 306% expansion, but i think it's just a really going to be a there's just so little that it would happen. i'd also want to point out that i wrote an article on street sheets about psh vacancies. some of these vacancies might be in legacy sites, and i wish we had more data on that. as for evictions, i think that there's a while evictions may be going down. there's also still the issue of people who are constructively evicted and that's not recorded. so i don't know if i can trust the data until we get more information, but that might be just a bug of the legislation. and of course, like, fuck dorsey's legislation, it's bullshit. there's plenty of people who do coke and mansions in the marina, and it's just fucked up. and i'm in recovery

from alcohol myself, and there's a lot i could say about that, but my time is up. thank you. charlotte. good morning to everybody. and who honored the commissioners. i am glad to be here today. i thought i was going to speak about myself today, but after listening to the people today, we do need to close shelters. and i'm going to tell you why profiling. i didn't come from the streets. i am a family woman. i do have a betrayal. we do have children. but what i found out in the shelters, if you're in, come from the streets. they profile you. they think everybody is the same. i've never had drugs before. i've been called a crackhead. i've been called a whore, a bitch. this is what goes on in shelters. and this is very sad because they profile you, because they felt you come from the streets and you're not worth anything anymore, which is very sad. so that's why i said

shelters should be closed, because we actually have people in the shelters that are running it that are prisoners, that came from prison. their mentality has not changed. you have people over us that don't even know how to take care of themselves less, don't take care of us. what i've learned is you're sitting here on this board because we have to trust you to take care of us. but what you're what i'm what to me is missing here. each one of us are individuals. we all have family. but in shelters, you are isolated from your family. that's the biggest support that you have. for me to say. i cannot have my son or my granddaughter or my fiancee to come to visit me. we need to get back to reality. you go into your homes and you enjoy them, and you know what it is to have family. and when they say we are a guest at a shelter, it's not the hilton, it's not the marriott. and it sure is not the hyatt. we are not guests. i was told three weeks ago, i have no rights. why is it i have no rights? because i'm in a

shelter. i have not committed a crime. so i'm looking at this and saying, where is humanity? where are we? because we are as strong as our weakest link. and you got us at the bottom, but you can bring us up to the top because you have the resources to help us help ourselves. don't take care of us. we are not helpless. we just lost a job because of covid. we lost our homes and it divided us. but you have valuable resources of human beings that are sitting there doing nothing that can work. why aren't we? i feel like this one solution. you have plenty of buildings in this place that are empty. why don't you make us responsible? if we really want a home, let us take care of our own. because when something is yours, you value it. but when you give me something, it means nothing to me. but if i work for something, i want to protect it. i want to save because i want it for my time is up. but thank you so much. yes, please put us. let us do something for ourselves. you don't need to take care of us. we're not helpless. thank

you so much, jennifer. tiktok really powerful. i don't want to follow you again, jennifer. freedom coalition on homelessness. our our shelter waitlist for families is blowing up. we have over 500 families on the waitlist. you know, when you hear erica kish, who's the director of compass talk about when she first started the job, which is even earlier than me. families were never homeless for a long period of time. you know, they would enter homelessness and get out of homelessness within three months. what science shows is, if you're a family and the kids are homeless for more than nine months, the damage is permanent. that adverse childhood event affects their development and affects them for the rest of their live. i want to talk a little bit about the rvs and kind of it's been broken down a little, a bit about what happened there. and i do want to appreciate hci's efforts. and also, you know, and

we all know that we don't have enough resources to solve this humanitarian crisis. we don't we know that shireen has been very straightforward on that, which i appreciate it. when you look at the numbers, it's very clear from whatever angle you look. so then it's not okay to then blame homeless people when it's a systemic failure. and when we do that, we're doing all of us a disservice in this struggle to address this humanitarian crisis. it's just not okay. so i don't want to ever read articles with, you know, employees from hsh quoting that families were offered services and refused, or homeless people on the streets are refusing. et cetera. because we know what the reality is. sure, there was a family that was offered move in costs and they didn't have an apartment and they couldn't afford the rent. so obviously they said no to the move in costs, hoping that somebody else could actually use that help. so that

is not what refusing services lands to the rest of the public. they think they were offered housing when they weren't. thank you. thank you. jessica hernandez, virginia taylor and cody keane. hello everyone, i'm here, just to speak on behalf of, the rv community, as you may know, we have spoken about this issue for a while now. it's been four years now, and so far we have had some solutions. but the solutions that have been provided are not permanent, which can lead to people, exiting to become homeless once again, which is an issue because we should be focusing on solutions that are permanent and that are compassionate and really understand the needs of the community, i'm still here urging for a safe parking site. this issue will be an ongoing

issue no matter how many times sfmta's wakes up every morning to harass people if they move them from winston, they'll move somewhere else. they'll be the city's problem. and it's not a problem. it's the city's is the city's job to provide for the community. and that's why everyone is elected. because we believe that the people elected will do something for the community. so please, please, don't forget that there is a community out there that needs you a lot. and please think about the possible outcomes that if, you know, we find a safe parking site, maybe this problem will be over. maybe i won't be here coming to, you know, talk to you guys anymore. maybe i'll be here to talk about other issues. i don't know, we can move on and move forward and create solutions that are stabl, dignified and permanent. and yeah, thank you so much. thank you. virginia taylor. hi. hi.

i'm virginia taylor, a former housing lawyer and the current senior policy advisor at safe and sound. safe and sound is the lead agency for the san francisco family support alliance, a network of 40 family support agencies. as your slide showed, a family homelessness in san francisco has reached alarming levels. these families, those though less visible than adults in tents, outnumber adults nearly 2 to 1 on the city's waitlist. as your slide showed three 531 families compared to 275 adults in july. and your slides didn't even include the average wait time for families. it's troubling that 90% of these homeless families counted in this year's point in time homeless count were living in vehicles. imagine children trying to do homework in the cramped space of a car or rv. however living in vehicles is the only available and sometimes best option for our

families. we need more legal and safe parking. the legal and safe parking is needed because it also disproportionately affects immigrant and newcomer families. our families report that language barriers lack of work authorization and ineligibility for standard subsidized housing make it even harder for them to find safe and stable housing. many live in multigenerational households to cover childcare. audition. parents living in vehicles are scared to get resources because they're scared that cps is going to take their children away. we need culturally responsive solutions that address their unique needs. just a second. the childcare center for youth wellness, which is part of safe and sound, has shown that aces these adverse childhood effects affect children. and so we need urgent action because children's futures depend on it. thank you. cody keeney. i say this name wrong. good morning commissioners. my name is cody

keene and i'm here on behalf of the supportive housing providers network, i'm here to speak about the ordinance, we are deeply concerned about it, to be clear, permanent, supportive housing providers agree that the city needs to develop more recovery housing options. but this ordinance is not the way to go about it, a lot of people have spoken about the 25% threshold, but there is no analysis to back up. why that 25% is the target that we need to reach, and our view it would make more sense to pilot a program where we can figure out critical needs for the tenants, including whether or not they want housing located inside the tl and soma, or if they feel they need to be in neighborhoods removed from high degrees of substance use. we can also analyze cost, staffing

needs, and most importantly, outcomes for the residents because that is what is most important about it. but that is lacking in any of the, language in the ordinance. and i also want to point out that the ordinance would drastically undermine the city by the bay's plan to house more people, and it would create barriers to folks who do not necessarily want to enter recovery housing, and, the city, also sets aside a percentage for recovery housing already. and hsh already has a plan in place for, creating more recovery housing, and we should explore that before we support an ordinance that would drastically sabotage the

existing permanent supportive housing portfolio. thank you. thank you so much. hope kamer, ian james, stephen banuelos. hi. commissioners. directors hope mayor, policy director at compass family services i wanted to start by thanking hsh, specifically cricket miller, for moving quickly to house a portion of the families living in rvs on zoo road into parkmerced. compass was so enthusiastic to be part of that solution, and it was a really profound thing to see that we can do batch move ins for literally unsheltered families to prove that it's something that we can do. i also want to thank cricket for convening the family providers for the opportunity to give feedback on the safer families plan investments. but to be clear, those are 130 time limited subsidies and 80 additional extremely light touch case management hotel rooms against a wait list, a growing waitlist of

531 families. so fundamentally, just not enough resources. compass and hesper remain deeply concerned about the many families experiencing vehicular homelessness citywide. it is really difficult to reconcile the idea that any city department would push families with even a modicum of stability into experiences of literally being unsheltered when the waitlist is above 500. and so i hope we can come together, do some cross-department collaboration to really stop that from happening, because it's really quite heartbreaking. thanks so much. thank you. ian james. do good morning. my name is ian james. i currently work at glide as a community engagement manager, but i've been organizing with the community of rv residents near lake merced for over four years now, i do want to start by thanking hsh and the community

partners like la raza for working so quickly to house the households who we were able to connect with services, and i wasn't sure what else i wanted to say, but i think it's really important to be here today, because there are so many other households that i am frightened are going to be forgotten. families and adults who are struggling to survive in their rvs. and because they weren't on the road for the right for hours on a specific day, did not get connected to any services. and i remember when i started coming to city hall with this campaign, we would have dozens of households come families, mothers bring their children to speak here at these committees and at the mta committee, and i don't see that community here now as present. and that's not because everybody got help. it's because people have been displaced. it's because they don't have the stability to make their time down here. and it's also because a lot of people have given up on receiving any kind of help from the city, and

they've learned only to expect displacement and punishment. so i just want to ask you not to forget about those households who are still living around lake merced, the households living in rvs across san francisco, and to continue working to house and to help as many people as we can. thank you. thank you. steven banuelos. greeting commissioner steven banuelos here, commissioner, myself with the san francisco behavioral health commission. we actually meet here every third evening of every. third week in the evening. anyway, i just want to extend an invitation to begin some communication between your commission and ours, since it's fairly obvious that many of the same citizens of san francisco that you serve, we also serve, many of the services that come from behavioral health services

are for the people that live in your programs. so i just want to extend that invitation. i'll have our secretary, amber gray, contact your commission secretary so we can just begin some dialog, see where it goes, but it's just something you're relatively new. it's just something, though, that we both share. so i just wanted to put that out there. thank you. thank you so much for coming. are we done? okay, so, at this time, we'll move to remote public comment. a total of ten minutes. yes oh. do we have some people that didn't fill out a card that did want to speak? okay, leah, would you like to go ahead? yes, please. go ahead. yes this is an appropriate time. thank you. as she marked 13. oh, okay. it's

okay. that's all right. we'll change that. that's okay. it's my first time making public comment here. and i went on the advice of some people, and i misunderstood. no problem, okay. yeah, i am here in support of the, anything that protects homeless people's property. being that they are already in such a horrible position, and i just wanted to share with the commission here as a san francisco resident, what i see and what i see with these sweeps and the sense of urgency i feel and i really hope that you all also feel an extreme sense of urgency. so, i'm going to share my experiences until i run out of time or i finish these are just some excerpts from various sweeps i have attended this past month, so the emotional wreckage from this week has sunk in me in

a deep ocean trench, asphyxiating hypoxic biohazardous waste dumped by our government, watching a homeless sweep, displacing suffering people would have been emotionally taxing alone telling a man he is important. he is a human being and being met with. at one point, i was encountering you still are listening to people's pain, holding people's pain, laughing with people in pain. next excerpt under watchful eyes, i kneel to ask her and ask if she'd like pepper spray for protection. her eyes light up. yes she would. i hand her the diminutive weapon i had unclipped from my keychain moments before. how about me? i want protection, laughs a dpw woman employee. the three of them, her and two men, three white jumpsuits with shovels and trash cans laughing. are you homeless too? i want to yell. are you statistically guaranteed to get raped out on these streets too? but i've seen fighting with them gets us nowhere, so i simply shrug and leave. next excerpt. the spanish speaking couple are efficient and quick. two full train cars hitched together, one leading the way, the other pushing from

behind. don't come back or i'll cite you, sfpd yells after them. what kind of tyranny do we live under? when sfpd warns you can't exist on public land as a member of the public, or you risk citation and eventual arrest when the doors on all the homes are locked, where do you go, if not public land into the gutter, diverted into the bay under the water, invisible to the homeless? to the homesteaders drowning alone, waterlogged lungs weeping one last time. thank you. thank you so much. we have a caller in the queue. okay. it looks like we have one more. i'm sorry, i think i indicated the wrong number for my item. please go ahead. and, diane ruiz, thank you. thank you, my name is diane ruiz, and i'm here on behalf of the race and equity in all planning coalition rep s.f. and we're here in solidarity with the coalition on homelessness and all the community expertise of the speakers that you've just heard today, i had the honor to speak at the press conference right before this hearing, so

definitely, you know, be aware of the eyes of the city are on this commission today, i'm here to talk about how mayor breed is criminalizing her own people for being poor in san francisco, african americans are five times more likely to experience homelessness. similarly, latinos are twice as likely as white counterparts to experience homelessness. black and brown san franciscans are bearing the brunt of the city's unhoused crisis. they are bearing the brunt of the city's policies, focusing on developer giveaways instead of affordable housing. they have borne the brunt of racist policies like redlining, redevelopment and gentrification, with the supreme court ruling in mayor breed and governor newsom's orders. it's a crime to be poor in san francisco, homelessness means an increased exposure to law enforcement, and this disproportionately hits people of color. we've created a pipeline from poverty to prison, but what we need are house keys,

not handcuffs. increased sweeps means increased warrant checks. this, again leads to increased jailing of black and brown community members. we need homes, not jails. as the election season is heating up, the same old song and dance is taking place. our house neighbors are being used as scapegoats, just like it's being done nationally with immigrants under trump. we should be criminalizing slum lords like trump and not our unhoused neighbors who are essential workers, families, school children, people who had no safety net when they became ill, when they got evicted, when they got priced out. our communities have the solutions to end homelessness. we need the serious investment in housing as a public resource. all we need is for city to give us a real chance. thank you. thank you so much. karen adams. that's it. there's hi, commissioners. my

name is karen adams and i'm the director of programs with homeless youth alliance. i'm really heartened by all the comments today, for those of you that don't know, we work with youth experiencing homelessness in the haight ashbury, the haight ashbury has become a has become and is an international destination for youth who come seeking refuge from abusive families, alienating foster care and group home situations and juvenile justice system involvement, albeit not a service rich neighborhood by any stretch of the imagination, we continue to make thousands of contacts with youth and young people experiencing homelessness in that neighborhood. we have significant concerns about dorsey's recovery. housing legislation, and san francisco's horrific and unnecessary implementation of grants passed in regards to the proposed recovery. housing findings from the recent california statewide study of people experiencing homelessness encompass. encompassing more than 3200 adults, the largest and most representative sample of homeless individuals since the

1990s, found that 50% have not used any drugs in the last six months, and we know people also report using drugs to cope with the trauma of being homeless. it's often not that they have a substance use issue, but prior to becoming homeless, it's that homeless induced this situation. also, people experiencing homelessness use substances to help them stay awake at night to protect themselves and their property from assault and theft. this includes young people experiencing homelessness, especially, in regards to the implementation implementation of grants pass. i know i only have a little bit of time, but i just really want to emphasize that sweeping young people off the street is unacceptable. the shelter offers shelter options and housing options available in the city for young people are often situated in neighborhoods they have identified. they do not feel safe, they do not feel supported, and they do not feel their voices at the table. the impact on youth organizations over the last month is tremendous. we are spending our time mitigating crises and not

able to handle and manage people working and moving on with their lives. this the supplies that we're giving out, the costs, the cost and impact on our infrastructure, of our organizations is incredible. we have to find a different solution. thank you. so much. and i think to charles pitts want to also speak. yeah, i guess i had something to say about the director's report. it seems like there needs to be a process or someone hired or a team hired to mediate between property management and the tenants. it just seems like the protections are excessively weak. are not available. the grievance policy. 149 mason they have two grievance policies, and it seems like mail cart and he

refuses to talk to the tenant, you know, like me. and i'm just i'm just addressing issues of the property. and, we need we need someone who has been formally trained to investigate issues, there's been several incidences, and i can't get any type of response regarding how these issues have been resolved or handled. it just seems like it just seems like problems happen and they just get swept under the rug, my other situation with the, director's report. can we get a breakdown of lease violations? are these violence damage of property, just like mental health disorders that, case management and property management should have handled. but ultimately,

they don't even have the training or even empathy to deal with these things, also, i think, like we need some type of database of policies and procedures. i keep asking about policies and procedures, and it feels like i'm getting stonewalled. from 149 mason, thank you. there'll be more time for general public comment late. thank you. we have some callers in the queue. go ahead, caller, we hear you. you have two minutes. hello? can you hear me? yes. we can hear you. hi. my name is colleen. i'm a volunteer with the coalition on homelessness, and i would like to comment, about gavin newsom london bridge. sharon mcfadden. that they have a responsibility to represent the voice of the people in the county of san francisco, the city of san

francisco, and in california. so this includes the homeless. but right now they are not, they don't hear the voice of the homeless for some reason. maybe it's because they've never experienced the same thing that homeless people experience. but in this process of this systematic, there are systematic approach to homelessness. a lot of homeless people are being harmed. individuals are being harmed. a good example of this is when gavin newsom sent all these highway patrol out to, you know, to, sweep up the homeless across california. and then another example is when london breed in august had an aggressive crackdown response where she had, provided a bus tickets, one way bus tickets to a bunch of homeless, basically saying, you're not welcome here and bussing them out, this has got to stop because in this process, a lot of these homeless, have a lot of their personal property being destroyed. their ids are being

destroyed, their birth certificates are being destroyed. these are us citizen, okay? their medical, items are being destroyed. okay. this is this has gotten out of hand. and it's now time, i think, to give gavin newsom and london breed a one way bus ticket out of california and say, hey, guess what? you're not welcome here anymore. we want leaders who are going to represent everybody's voice. so this november is giving us the opportunity to actually put people in leadership positions that hear everybody's voice. and this includes the homeless. thank you, thank you. do we have any other callers in the queue? there are no callers in the queue. wonderful. okay. so i'm going to call on the commissioners who have requested to speak in order. and we'll start with commissioner guerrer. and your mic. yeah how's that. all right. so lots to say here. and because, yeah, this is

obviously a very flooded meeting. so i think it's important that we take the time. and the one thing i appreciate about the report is that, you know, it's opening up opportunity for some transparency in order to engage the public, which is what we are here to do, so first of all, i wanted to talk about in the report the ratio, the case management ratio and the pay increase, i mean, i'm going to speak for myself, but i would argue that that would not draw in people with more experience in quality service. i think that would draw in somebody that wants more money because i think that a provider that cares about their clients would say, this is not going to give me the capacity to, like, provide quality care. and also there's just a lot of movement within provider organizations to commit to better wellness for their staff. in late stage capitalism. and i think that people who understand that would see a

posting like this and know that that's a red flag. i mean, i know i would, so, so i would argue that that won't necessarily bring in, people with more expertise. and i also would argue that it won't retain them either, so that's like my comment on that piece, i did have a question about the recent vacant units. was it 137? is that did i get that number righ? well i'd have to go back. okay. no worries. no worries. i guess i just wanted to know, the ones that are off line specifically. okay. okay. so as far as, like, the increase in evictions, is this in any way linked to a spike in voluntary departure? do you know? so it's been a decrease in evictions? okay. we've had a decrease in evictions. we've had an increase in notices, and basically what

we've said is that the increase is due to nonpayment of rent. gotcha. but we haven't seen, an increase in evictions due to nonpayment of rent, mainly because we see that as that notice, as a tool. got it to start working with people on that nonpayment issue. the evictions really are for lease violations. and there was a question from the public about whether we could break those down. got it. we're going to see if we can do that. but that's that's where we've seen the evictions. great. okay. and so in that note then i guess with the eviction notices has there been a spike in voluntary departure? because i guess my concern is that if these notices are are leading to people leaving because of fear of receiving an eviction on their record, i don't i don't know. and so i think we can look and see if we know that. but people voluntarily depart for various reasons and, you know, it would

be very hard to tie it, possibly probably to as causal, at least to a notice of impending eviction, because we don't know why people leave all the time, but we can we can look and see if we can give more information there. that makes sense. yeah, that makes sense. i mean, somebody might not necessarily like articulate if that is even if that is the case, why they are leaving, okay. and then i just wanted to comment on the recovery ordinance, i mean, you know, i was nominated to sit on this commission because of my expertise. and, i mean, we've said we have a commitment to centering people with lived experience and people in the community that are providers and take their input. so i would just without repeating everything that mani said, say we should probably listen to ccpa, you know, so i'm just going to say that if that's not what we're here to do, and yeah,

i mean, there's scientific and expert backed research on why this recovery ordinance is not the effective approach. and i don't see the point of any of this if we just are proposing decisions that completely oppose that research. so i urge the department and would love to urge the board of supervisors to take that input, so that's my next point. and then just a couple more things. one is i would like to recommend to the department to change the language around refusal of services to something that is culturally competent. and i don't say culturally sensitive because it's not about that. it's about like really competency. right? like it's about, again, listening to the public and representing the needs of the community that we provide, that we're responsible

to provide service to, representing their experience in a, in an honest and transparent way, so that would be a recommendation of mine as well. okay. and then as far as like merced, like i just want to articulate that, you know, this is if it's not obvious, like, this is no different than the sweeps that we're seeing of like, tents. and what that means is that the city is shamelessly sweeping children, you know, and i think that that is what i heard from the public as well, that i think is pretty disturbing. and i actually was on abc seven news talking about the inhumanity of this. and i love that they cut all of my lines, but focused on the department saying how they are reaching. they are taking things from expertise, and they are responding in a way that is supposedly expert, despite everyone in the public saying that's not true. so as far as like media coverage, i'll say i tried, but obviously there's a lot working against that

advocacy. so so yeah, and you know, i think that i just want to name on that note that it does feel unfortunate. i feel like in 2020, like we really, like, started working on rebuilding trust between the department and the community. and i think that there were a lot of efforts that were made that have recently just kind of completely gone out the window, and that makes me really sad. i think that, you know, it's really this is like, if this is not evidence that this kind of police enforcement response to the sweeps, like merced, is really just such an example of how far we've swang, swung in the opposite direction of where we were in 2020 when the murder of george floyd happened, and a lot of promises were made to the city. and here we are pushing policing first, which is so far in opposition of what that advocacy was supposed to be about and what city leaders committed to at that time. i find that really disturbing. so,

those are my recommendations. and comments. thank you. thank you, commissioner guerrero. commissioner albright, thank you very much. i wanted to mention that for disclosure purposes that one of the members of the public, is from safe and sound organization, that i am currently consulting with. no action was requested, and therefore, i don't believe i have any recusal. responsibilities, but did want to disclose that i was a former ceo of safe and sound, i wanted to appreciate the public's concern on all the matters raised today. my comments are, are in the form of questions. more on, director mcspadden on page 12. you talked about the housing program updates and you specifically. it's not on the slide, but you specifically noted, the significant numbers of females that are part of the

community of unhoused, as well as those experiencing interpersonal violence or domestic violence and, this is something that the family violence council spends a great deal of time focusing on. and if we think about going forward and i don't know when that data could be available, but i'd be very interested in knowing what longitudinal, even monthly or yearly reports would look like around how we are addressing, communities that are subject to domestic violence, interpersonal violence, and how we're going to support them. i think there's some real opportunities for collaboration with other departments and community organizations that are part of the family violence council. yes, and i think we could do that. we can come up with, a report for you. thanks so much. i appreciate that. and then the second is a question around

slide 21. and it's around evictions. and exits. and it is specifically what we were talking about in terms of the nonpayment of rent, and i it is a question you said it's related to covid 19. when i was visiting with vice chair evans earlier, some of our supportive housing, this came up in terms of, tenants, guests who under the eviction moratorium during covid, were in a place of not paying rent. now that the laws have changed, that this concern around nonpayment of rent is coming. and how do we create information and partner with guests around payment? i'm assuming that's what this is about, but could you provide just a little bit more information around that? yeah, that's what it was about. i mean, during covid, the you know, people were not going to be evicted if they didn't pay rent. and so the nonpayment of

rent happened a lot across our portfolio and our providers are working very hard to change the behavior. now that, you know, now that that no, that moratorium is no longer there, but it's a hard behavior change, especially for people who didn't have don't have a lot of money to begin with. and, you know, we heavily encouraged our providers to use the sf wrap program to, you know, to make sure that they could backfill rent where they could. we're continuing to work with them in partnership with the mayor's office of housing and community development to try to try to support them, in applying for erap for people who are still have outstanding rent, but in the delta between their what they should have and what we have to give them and what they're owed. like those are three different, very different figures. and so we're doing our best to work with them and try

to restore what we can. and i would assume that many other jurisdictions that did eviction moratorium payments during covid are experiencing the same data. i would assume. so, i don't know. you know, that we've had a lot of san francisco is a little different from a lot of other jurisdictions. and so i'm not really sure how it worked out in other communities, but it's definitely been an ongoing problem. and, you know, our providers obviously rely on that. people are paying a third of their income. and while that may not be a lot, it adds up over, you know, over buildings and over 152 buildings. it definitely adds up. i understand, i was just wondering if there was opportunities of sharing practices amongst jurisdictions, but thanks so much. i appreciate the answers. thanks. commissioner dufty, thank you. so first i want to say how grateful i am. so many people have come out today, when i came on to the commission and

we had our first meeting, i think there were maybe three people that participated in public comment and it was kind of a slow process, but i really want to thank everyone for coming out. i think it's extremely important. and the voters of san francisco established this commission. it was not something that was supported by some folks in city hall. and so i think that we have a responsibility to conduct business well and to be responsive. and there are some very serious challenges that have been made today on a happy note, i want to acknowledge someone who i've shared space with darcy hahn and say how happy i am that i know you've been at the department for a while now, but to see you moving into a leadership position and i know that you are dogged and determined, and so we will get more units online and your expertise over your career in san francisco and here in city government. so i just want to celebrate you for a moment and say that i'm very happy to be a colleague of yours, and i'm happy for the work that you're

going to do for us. so thank you, i also want to say, i don't know who invented the word drug tolerant housing. it's somebody i really don't want to know, but i kind of want to know. you know, it's really disturbing. and, director mcspadden, i just want to say that this discussion today, it makes me very proud of your leadership that so many folks from different organizations, members of the public are aware of the work that you and the team have done. and so this is not criticizing you or the department. there are tectonic plates that are moving around right now as it relates to homelessness and the willingness of some people seeking office to pander to people who just want homeless folks to disappear without really understanding things. and so, i do want to ask that one of the speakers talked about the importance of inter-departmental coordination and certainly that

it was painful to hear that folks had been scattered. and then, you know, our team came there at that point. so i just want to know, like, are you are you getting coordinated or is that something that we as commissioners should advocate more? because, you know, some of the departments that play here, whether it's the mta or the police department, i mean that that's not where the solutions really lie. so, yeah, that's a very good question. and i you've probably heard me say before that san francisco is small as it is, it's always hard to coordinate. and so, yes, we are working at coordination. i think that there are times that we coordinate really, really well. and there are times when, it feels like it's not as coordinated. and so we're i am constantly working at that. i mean, part of what we were planning with the strategic plan was really making sure that

every department who touches homelessness understands its piece and that we're working really closely together to make sure that we are, offering services with dignity, that we are communicating. i mean, that obviously doesn't always happen, but that is actually what we strive for. and so, you know, we do have a lot of meetings, particularly with some departments, about how we can work better together, i would say, like department of public health is one of them. and the behavioral health division in particular. but, you know, we need to continue hammering on the other doors to really make sure that we're working in coordination. okay. and i do think that that we as commissioners can talk to members of the board of supervisors and sort of encourage that. it would be much, much better if hsh was in a leadership position in terms of understanding how to do this in a manner that is humane and really much more effective. and

i was, in fact, going to ask if we could maybe have doctor collins from behavioral health come and talk to us about her department and some of the research and work. i was a strong advocate for wet housing for many years ago. it's a program in in seattle which actually provides access to alcohol for people who are chronically alcohol addicted and in a way that is safe. and many people i had visited, i think i've been three times to the program that, that, they have tremendous success. and some folks actually do go into recovery, even though they're living in housing that allows them to access alcohol. but the reality is for some people that they did relapse. and i think that that's something that we have to recognize. and frankly, there's a reason that salvation army has had trouble filling their beds because it's very cut

and fast. you know, either you abstain or you're out of the program. and i think that that's not a really informed way to work. that's not how any of us succeed. i go on diets all the time, and i'm not successful in them. and so, you know, i understand that it's not a linear process that we're in, but i do, i do feel very challenged and hope to raise my voice in concert with the organizations and individuals here today so that we it is it is the city's challenge is to house 531 families. the city's challenge is not to push people from one corner to the other. thank you. thank you, commissioner laguana. thank you, first i'd say, commissioner dufty, i think, i agree with everything you said, except one thing. i think you have been successful with your diets. you

all right? you look very good to me. so i am 69, so i'll take that. okay. you know, first i would like to thank everybody that came out as well. to speak and share their stories, many of them quite powerful. many of their suggestions, and, and, feedback, i think important suggestions and important feedback, i second commissioner dufty, that one of the important roles of this commission is to provide a forum for the public to speak up on, on homeless policy. and so by showing up, you're you're helping this commission fulfill that duty. and that responsibility. so thank you. thank you for coming, and i know all of us are

listening and thinking very hard about what can we do, what is within our power, what is our responsibility? and how do we help as many people as possible? it's just an extraordinary challenge, you know, i going back to the director's report, i did want to note that outreach was at a year long high, i want to thank you, director mcspadden, and thank the staff as well, for all the work that's being done. clearly, we have more opportunities and things that can be refined there. but just in terms of sheer number of people reached, it's good to see that number going up. and i hope we can continue to keep it as as high as possible. you know, i did have one thought about the housing vacancies, this came up recently. people have been

talking about the total number of vacancies, which this month is 746. last month was 793. one thought i had was when we took the way we are currently characterizing our inventory, the recently the biggest change month over month was in the recently vacated, units. there was a 42% increase from 96 to 137, and one thought i had is i wonder if we shouldn't break out that number, and i'm talking about in the offline category. sorry, i should have clarified that. one thought i had is whether we shouldn't break that out of the offline number, because it seems to me that if a unit just became vacant within the 30 days prior to, you know,

when the report was issued, is that truly offline? and it sort of it gives a misleading impression here, i think, because every other number, property hold went from 59 to 42 holds for transfers went from 43 to 33. corner hold went from 18 to 16, and maintenance went from 182 to 170. every other number improved. all that has happened is more units have have come online and become available. but it gives this impression because the offline number is exactly the same. 398 last month, 398 this month gives the impression that we're not making progress. and when i look a little deeper into that, it does seem that we're making progress. and so that. so yeah, we're happy to take a look at how we present the numbers. and, as i said in my report, we're also going to be bringing some some of our suggestions, and thoughts about

how to continue to bring those numbers down, especially on the offline units. so we will be doing that. and the next in the ensuing months, like whether it's next month or the month after. yeah. and the slide on. look at that. yes. and the slide on on. that was very helpful. and i appreciate all the thought that has gone into that. and obviously, that's key to increasing the utilization of our resources is, is key to making sure that we're getting the most, and i did also just want to highlight that availability for referral. also declined significantly 30% month over month. it was 166 last month. it is now only 117 this month. again suggests that, the department is doing a good job at making progress on better utilization of our existing assets, i did ask previously and would ask again that we put the

last month's number on vacancies for ftes for the department. yeah, i don't know why that fell off. what? what was it? 100. yeah, i think it would. it would just help people to understand the challenges that the department has as being fairly understaffed relative to what's been allocated in the budget, and i did want to note that there we backtracked a little bit. it looks like we're, the number of vacancies for ftes went up a little bit, about 4 or 5 people. i think it was, so there's challenges there, during the public comment, some folks commented on the reasons people give for refusing services, maybe is not necessarily contained within the fact that it is a refusal, in other words,

that somebody mentioned, that somebody might refuse services because they didn't feel they could afford the services that were being offered. and so i don't want to burden the department or staff with too much bureaucracy, but i'm wondering if there be, whether we already capture or whether there's a possibility of capturing, a reason for refusal because it seems to me that if we had a better understanding of why people were refusing services, that might give us some visibility into what we can constructively do to increase that acceptance rate in the future. so i think we can do the same thing. we'll take a look at the data and add more information for you if we can. okay, great. i wanted to thank the gentleman from the behavioral health commission that came in. that was very well

received. and i want to second, commissioner duffy's. duffy's request. that, i think it'd be wonderful if doctor kunz could come in and speak with us. i agree that there's a lot of overlap with the work of this commission and the work of the behavioral health commission. so that was, well received. and then finally, i just want to, you know, i think i'm, i'm just speaking for myself and my own thoughts here, but one of the public commenters commented on, the scale of need versus the scale of resources that we have and that there's a mismatch there and that there's not enough resources to address address the scale of need. and as i think about this, coming at this from a business perspective

and being aware of what's happening in the business environment, we're looking at, potentially declining tax revenues, a lot of challenges from where we're going to get resources from. one of the things that i think this commission and i would encourage the public as well, to think about is how do we improve outcomes? because i think, it may prove challenging to significantly expand the amount of resources we have. so we may have to do more with the resources we currently have. and heaven forbid, we may have to do more with less. so that really puts a it what that does essentially is it it encourages

us, encourages us as a commission and as a community to really think about how do we improve outcomes so that we are maximizing the resources that we have, and we are helping as many people as we can as effectively as we can, and so the last thing that i will say is, is somebody mentioned with respect to the proposed sober ordinance, sober living ordinance, there are some questions about outcomes. what was the basis for the 25% number? how did we get here, i think that's a fair question. i think that, with that and with every other policy approach that we're taking to anything involving in this space, we need to really be aggressively thinking about outcomes and what is the basis and what is the support for why we're choosing something and to really focus on

on the end result. because i do think we're facing some some headwinds here with the resources that are available. so it's going to really take some very careful listening from the community, very careful thought from our leaders, and i think some very careful work from this commission as well. and with that, i thank you. thank you, commissioner diane williams. yes. thank you, first of all, i wanted to thank, miss mcspadden for the report every month. it's very enlightening, thank my fellow commissioners and also thank the public when i first started on this commission, i wanted to learn. and it's indeed it's a very quick learning process. and i also want to thank the staff of hsh. you do incredible work. and month after

month, just the amount of it and the need just staggers. it just staggers me. so thank you, i'm just going to echo some of my commissioners requests and thoughts. first, commissioner being being last to speak, i think i have that privilege, commissioner albright's concern about 32% of our unhoused population being women and being at risk, is something that i would like to put a little bit more attention on, as she asked, maybe we could separate that as a category and really work on safety because with women also comes besides their own personal safety comes possibility of children, on house children, etc. so that it just it's a personal focus of specifically of mine, that's one, and then supervisor, dorsey's ordinance,

i'd like to find out a little bit more about that. this was just kind of thrown out here. i know nothing about it, and then most of the people that i heard speak against it, but this is a population that spoke that also provides, services many and are or are, so, so i think it's a skewed, what how can i say sample probably from the public. i'd like to hear more about it. i don't know enough of why. and how, what your thoughts are, what the department thoughts are on that, how it can be implemented. so people could have recovery on demand, because one of the things i hear out there is that recovery on demand isn't always available right away. for someone who, you know,

and i know it's very trite, but to compare it to, to go on a diet, you know, i want my weight watchers app right then at demand when i decide i'm going to start today. so, it just i'd like a little bit more information on that. and then lastly, the coordination with behavioral health commission that was very interesting to me. and just asking the departments to coordinate more, with, you know, mental health, behavioral health, just health in general would be very important. and echoing commissioner laguna's concerns that the budget, the pie might be shrinking for all indication of taxes going down, in the next few years. so i think coordination and pulling

resources and a little bit more reality on public's, part, both the people who think we should just get rid of all everybody that's, you know, unhoused and the people that think we have to provide everything and, you know, no limit on the numbers. so both sides need to have an understanding of the pie might be shrinking in the years to come. that's those are my comments. thank you. thank you commissioner. so just real quick. the first question you had was about whether we could do a little bit of a deeper dive into how we respond to, people fleeing violence and domestic violence in particular. we can definitely do a report on that. we do our our department does a lot of work in that area, and we're happy to bring that to you, i think the second is we did and i know you're super busy right now, but we did send something yesterday with some

departments kind of suggestions and responses to supervisor haney's initial proposal legislation. so i'm happy to talk to you about that offline, but take a look at it and let us know what you think i will do. but we did do that. thank you. i believe it went yesterday. we'll send it. oh, i thought we. yeah. i don't think it's been sent yet. okay. we'll send it today. okay. thank you. i thought we sent it yesterday. i apologize for that, but we will read it today. thank you, and then. and then i think the third, about coordination. yeah, the coordination with department of public health. we do a lot of work with them. we've actually instituted, regular quarterly, quarterly leadership meetings with them in person. we also, our staffs are working very closely together on a range of things. during, you know, in between those quarters where the leadership team meets and we're happy to kind of further explain

what that looks like. and if and if it's, if it seems appropriate, happy to invite the director of behavioral health to come and do a presentation with us. and, you know, and then, director or, secretary barrasso can help figure out how we link with the behavioral health commission. so. great. thank you. yeah. just one last very quick thing regarding, commissioner laguardia's, request to. well, not request you talked about the how many units are left that are in transition. they're not offline. it's just someone just left and they may be getting cleaned. not huge janitorial or, construction. just they just need to get. so maybe we could have something that just says in transit. and those are not considered offline. they're just in transit. yeah. we'll take another look at that and see how

we can present it so that we can thank you, thank you, thank you so much. so i recognize that we're two hours into this item, which is great because we did have an hour of public comment, i do have a handful of questions and comments myself, but i will be efficient, i wanted to thank you for a lot of the responsive information in this report to conversations that we've had previously in regards in regards to the housing vacancies, i look forward to a future presentation. it sounds like maybe as early as october, about looking at the housing vacancies in more detail and how these new actions that are presented on page 17 will result in reduction of those vacancies. i wanted to just clarify where it says, the action of move all clients with housing referral status, staying in shelters to permanent supportive housing. can you just clarify what would that mean? would you take somebody out of a non-congregate setting and put

them into a, sro room, or how would that work? you mean from shelter to permanent? yeah, i'm just looking at what the language on, page 17. it's really just that that has not been a focus of ours. like during covid. we really weren't working on that. and now we really need to look at our shelter system again and figure out how the flow, how to recreate flow so that, that people aren't just staying in shelter for long periods of time and to commissioner laguna's point, we, you know, we need to use the system we currently have. we don't have a lot of expectations for greater resources, and that's a whole separate conversation that we're going to be having internally, but also that we will want to bring here. great, but it's really about the it's really about creating flow again. and i appreciated the responses to my questions in advance. that we will be able to see some data by the property level, the number of vacancies and how long

they've been offline, so to give a sense of what the average or the median and the longest length of time that a unit is offline. so we have a sense of that process flow. i think when we originally had a housing presentation, it focused on the flow from the client's perspective through the housing process. but we didn't look at it from the unit process like once the unit is vacated, what are the timelines and expectations around getting those units back across the portfolio of available units? correct. exactly. so thank you. i really appreciate that. so in regards to the vehicular housed, i just want to, share my disappointment. what what appears to have been a failure of cross-departmental coordination in, in early august in regards to the families and residents of rvs that were, you know, at lake merced, winston and zoo road. these are families that came and, and people that spoke to us more than a year

ago. and it was really disappointing to me to hear that we had a situation where dpw and sfpd were showing up with tow trucks prior to offers being made, that to me, seemed like just the epitome of colossal failure on our part. we traumatized these families. this is not a trauma informed approach. we need to have the department embracing, an approach of caring and ensuring that folks are not traumatized by our processes. and if that was because of a miscommunication with sfpd or dpw, i just want to acknowledge that that was a failure and that we need to figure out how to address that. i wanted to know if you had any thoughts or comments on that. no. i mean, my only comment is really that, as i said before, that we strive for good coordination and sometimes we have really good coordination and sometimes it doesn't quite materialize in the way that we expect. i'm also

just so struck by the timing when the mayor was issuing press releases and the sfpd department head was issuing notices about sweeps and arresting people experiencing homelessness, it seemed extremely performative. in a two week period that we had, just like the intention was cruelty, and the intention was to get media headlines showing how just horribly awful the city was being to folks and, and that's, you know, language that's been fed by this mayor with tough love and making people feel uncomfortable and shame. shame shame on her for using that language. when we know that these families have been asking for a safe parking site for more than a year, i do want to say i'm happy to hear that we have. it sounds like 46 families and adults that groups of rv, 46 total households that were housed through the past

year from from that area. but as i recall, the initial estimates of the number of vehicles in that area was over 100. so i know that there's still a lot of people that have been scattered and displaced, and there's still a great need, and i have encouraged the advocates to raise up names of people that have fallen through the cracks so that we can provide them to the director's office to make sure that those people are getting a second look for an offer of resources, in regards to the sober living, i heard a lot of people acknowledging that, you know, people experiencing homelessness are not one group of people. and that there are subsets of that population that really crave having sober, sober living spaces. i think the question is about how do we go about providing that? and also what are the potential consequences of providing that only at the detriment of other resources? i find that the proposal that

supervisor dorsey has put forth is extremely divisive and pits providers against each other, and it's completely unnecessary, because if you talk to voters and commissioner laguana was talking about, what is it about how we're going to convince the public about the need for more resources? sober living and sober spaces are incredibly popular with voters, and so why not work on increasing the pie rather than pitting providers against each other and carving up the pie? it just doesn't make any sense to me that we aren't using what is an incredibly popular idea with voters to ask for more resources, because this population did not create the affordable housing crisis, the homeless population is a victim of the failed policies of the city over decades, and it is not just because of a budget crunch, because of that, the appropriate

for us to actually take our eye off the ball of increasing the pie for these people that are very much in need because of no, no, no fault of their own. so i also wanted to acknowledge that we received from the, thc shop steward, union shop steward, some very compelling information that showed their current case manager to client ratios were between 40 and as high as over 100 per per client, and this seems completely out of compliance with the city's, the department's stated, approach. and so i just wanted to make sure that we had very clear idea of like when that is happening and there is a posted job listing that's continuing to advertise, ratios that are higher than departmental policy

as late as last week, as i, as i recall, it may be still up there today that advertises for, a person that may have to take on a larger portfolio than the stated goals. can we get some clarity on what the. when you say you're doing contract review, like why has like i brought that up last month, why is that notice? why is that posting still up in the way in the form that it is? so as i said in my report, we have very specific ratios for the very for the different types of programs that we have. i did ask my staff to, to look into that and we will if it hasn't happened already, if it hasn't been pulled down already, we will check in with the provider to find out why they posted that. i mean, some, you know, some organizations have programs outside of our funding, some don't. but but we will check in. and if it's if it's our funding and it's one of our programs, we need to make sure that they're

in compliance with the ratios. thank you. i'll be monitoring that for next meeting. and i just want to say that, you know, it gives me real concern that if a case manager with over 100 clients is now dealing with a bunch of them with eviction notices for nonpayment of rent, like how many people are going to not get that assistance and are going to fall through the cracks and fall out of the system. i really don't want to see any spikes in evictions. if these, you know, large scale, over a thousand eviction notices, if that, if that is a deliberate attempt to evict people from these buildings, i or displace them without constructive, you know, constructively, evict them, i will be extremely disappointed. so i want to make sure that we're really closely monitoring that well, and we gave providers increased funding. and because they very clearly asked for these lowered ratios and more funding to attract case managers who are have really good

clinical skills, and we are very committed to making sure that our providers are following those rules. so thank you. i appreciate your follow through on that. the last area that i wanted to talk about was the police referrals to shelter. so the slide says that the police department is being offered 2 to 5 beds per it sounds like for the overnight, the evenings and the weekends okay. but there's not actually providing those offers during the daytime. is that right. so like if some if sfpd and dpw are going through and doing an encampment resolution on their own, a small encampment resolution per the mayor's directive, are they making those offers? yeah. i'm going to have emily come. please speak to this. good morning, commissioners. emily cohen, deputy director for communications. so the police,

the 5 to 7 beds. that or excuse me, 3 to 5 beds that are reported in our report are the after hours and weekend allocation to the police. they are minimally, minimally used about a quarter of the time. they are used when h soc goes out and conducts a encampment resolution. we lead with sf hot. we have the homeless outreach team out there offering services and they are making offers with a different allocation of beds. they are not using sfpd beds in those offers. they are using either h soc or homeless outreach team. allocated beds. so those are sort of larger encampment resolutions. we are out there giving notice. we are out there offering services and we are out there, making those connections to shelter for operations conducted by other departments outside of hsh. i

can't comment on i don't know the details of their exact operations. it is my understanding that they are making offers. but again, we are not a part of those operations. yeah, so i think you would be misinformed if you thought that that was the case. i live and work in a particular neighborhood, the haight ashbury that is, one of, you know, the mayor previously represented as a supervisor. she you know, clearly has paid attention and had made has made remarks about our, our, our district in her debates, i just wanted to call your attention to a couple of operations that were reported to me by merchants and neighbors, and i did follow up with the providers that work in that are, as well as some of the people experiencing homelessness. so, on in an incident on july 29th, around 7:30 a.m, a 21 year old youth experiencing homelessness who would like to remain anonymous, gave this statement

to her provider. me and my mom were sitting on foldable, foldable chairs, smoking and talking. me and my mom have severe disabilities. we need to sit in the chairs. many police officers came up to us and they told me and my mom, we are starting to do sit lie laws because london breed ordered it. are you going to comply? they waited a few seconds and then dpw came up and sprayed me and my mom with the hose, a power washer. my mom tried to go in her car and i went behind her car with my cat. my mom was trying to roll up the windows and they sprayed the inside of my mom's car. all of mom's blankets got wet. all of mom's dogs got wet, and the dogs got eye infections from what they were spraying. they, the dpw workers came over to me and i said, i am pregnant. you can't do this to me. they said, you're not pregnant. you're not even showing dpw sprayed inside my

cats carrier and sprayed me. i had to run to my friend's house on ashbury. officer tsang came over to me and apologized for the way that dpw and other officers treated us and said, this is not what he meant to happen. so i want to be clear. there was a follow up, report on this last friday, august 30th, by one of our neighbors that there was a sheriff's van, sfpd and dpw vehicles, and they were coming through. he spoke to the officer on site, and it was very clear that they were not making offers of shelter, that they were simply moving people along and they were picking they were doing warrant checks to pick people up and put them in jail. so i want to be clear that i, i do not believe outreach workers are at these operations. i believe these are roving teams

of sfpd and dpw that have a clear mandate from the mayor's office to do something which is completely counterproductive to what we are trying to accomplish here, which is to help people get indoors. so there was a lot of speakers that talked about eroding trust in government. and i think when you come with an approach of cruelty, you're going to set us back from our ability to actually gain people's trust, to accept services and to come inside. so if it's no surprise that the mayor now is claiming that there's increased levels of refusal, it's only for her to look in the mirror. all right. we'll close that item. this takes us to old business and so

i was going to ask, how much time do we need for the item? ten. the point in time count. so it's a 15 minute presentation plus what's needed for public comment and your questions. okay. great comments. i think that will work. everybody can go to one. yep. okay. great. and i think we need to vacate it one. so we just want to make sure we will make sure i'll probably limit public comment to a minute and a half for the, item for maybe like a minute for general public comment on an item, a minute and a half for the, item for 13. thank you, thank you. great. so we have a presentation now. item ten, discussion item on the point in time count presentation overview. the key

results of the pit count pit survey and youth supplemental survey. 15 minutes. and i'll watch the clock. come on up. good morning. good morning. yes okay, i'll do my best with 15 minutes. honorable commissioners, thank you for having me. it's a pleasure to be here today. my name is sarah loker. i use she her pronouns, and i'm the manager of data and performance at the department of homelessness and supportive housing, today, i'm pleased to present some summary findings from our 2024 homeless point in time count or pit count for short, just to walk through briefly what we'll be going through today. we'll begin with a brief refresher on what the point in time count is and summary trends. some of these

you've seen in our preliminary data release already, then we'll be walking through some new information from the full report that was released on our website last month, including demographics, geographic distribution, survey findings, and supplemental data. okay just to begin, about the point in time count, we'll do a brief review again. so we'll go to the next slide. so what is the point in time count? hud requires that all continuum of care grantees conduct a point in time count of all sheltered and unsheltered persons experiencing homelessness, at least once every other year. the data must be captured as of a single night in the last ten days of january this year, it took place on january 30th, 2024, and pit counts have been conducted across the nation in accordance with federal standards for about 20 years, so this data can help us understand local and national trends in homelessness over time, there are some limitations to the count that i'll note a

few, it's challenging to identify all people experiencing unsheltered homelessness, particularly the data. does reflect a snapshot on a single night, so it doesn't necessarily reflect the full needs for all of the community over the course of a full year, and certain living situations that are eligible in san francisco as and as homeless are not included in the count. these include people living in hotels and motels, couch surfing, doubled up, or an institutional settings like jails and hospitals. next slide please. okay, as a reminder, there are three main components of the point in time count. the shelter count identifies people that are staying in emergency shelters, transitional housing, and safe havens. on the night of the pit count. the unsheltered count is based on a visual observation of people experiencing homelessness outdoors, in tents or in vehicles. the survey is

conducted with a sample of the population in the weeks following the unsheltered point in time count, and that helps us better understand population demographics and characteristics. and we also have a special youth count wherein we partner closely with youth providers to specifically identify youth during the unsheltered count and during the survey process with supplemental youth specific questions. next slide please. some improvements or changes. i wanted to highlight in terms of 2024 methodology, as we've spoken about a bit earlier in 2024, we partnered with compass family services and catholic charities to better count unsheltered families and specifically people living in vehicles as well. we introduced a supplemental vehicle count that took place at sunrise so that enumerators could have better visibility into vehicles. this also allowed for increased engagement, so we were able to better identify if

people sleeping in vehicles were adults or families with children, finally, we improved on a pilot from last pit count in 2022, where we used a call list to verify the living situation of homeless families, in particular on the night of the pit, knowing that this is a particularly challenging population to identify some additional resources. so from a reporting perspective, we also have published some new dashboards for the first time. this year on our website. this helps us share the point in time count results and survey data in a new interactive format. so i encourage everybody here to please take some time and explore those new tools. we'll be going over some information here. there is a lot that's captured. and so we encourage folks to be able to explore that online. it's published on our website now along with the full pit report materials and these slides and more. so i'll begin

by going over some of the summary trends on the high level numbers. in san francisco, total homelessness of both sheltered and unsheltered, people experiencing homelessness increased by 7% from 2022 count to 2024. so this was an increase from 7754 people identified in 2022 to 8323, in a similar time period. nationally, we saw an increase of 12% nationwide in total homelessness from 2022 to 2023. we are still waiting for hud to release the 2024 figures. unsheltered homelessness experienced a 1% decrease from 2022, and a 16% decrease since 2019. we observed 4354 people experiencing unsheltered homelessness on the night of the pit. this is a we segment or we

identify the unsheltered count relative to observations of people on the street or in tents versus those that were identified in vehicles. we saw 13% fewer people observed on the streets or in tents since 2022, and this number is the lowest that it's been in ten years. the number of people living in vehicles, however, increased by 37% from 2022, but was a 20% decrease since 2019. sheltered homelessness so people experiencing homelessness in san francisco are more likely to be sheltered than ever before. 3969 people were sleeping in shelter or transitional housing on the night of the point in time count. this is an 18% increase since 2022, and a 39% increase since 2019. these increases correspond with a 28% increase

in that time period. in shelter bed capacity, and improved utilization of those beds. i'm going to move into a couple of key subpopulations that hud calls out for pit reporting. so chronic homelessness this year, there were 2989 people experiencing chronic homelessness. this is an 11% increase since 2022, but a slight decrease from 2019. the proportion of the total homeless population that was identified as chronically homeless remained the same since 2022, and that is 35% of the total homeless population. families. the number of sheltered families increased by 53% from 2022 to 2024. this corresponds with a 13% increase in our family shelter capacity

during that time period. as well as improved shelter bed utilization. as mentioned earlier, we had new targeted efforts that helped us identify unsheltered families. so we found 130 unsheltered families in 2024, 90% of whom were identified as living in vehicle. in response to this data and other indicators of increased family homelessness, the city has invested $50 million in the fiscal year 24 to 26 budget towards the safer families initiative to expand family shelter and rapid rehousing. as we've discussed for the youth count, total youth homelessness increased by 7% from 2022 to 2024. from 1118 youth to 1196 youth. however the homeless youth population has been on a downward trend for about the past decade. so since 2013, the

number of unaccompanied homeless youth decreased by over 40%. unsheltered youth decreased 9% from 2022 to 2024, and youth are more likely to be in shelter than ever before, with 32% of youth sheltered in 2024. our last top level subpopulation is veterans. lastly, total veteran homelessness decreased by 3% since 2022. however, veterans were less likely to be sheltered in 2024, with 19% of homeless veterans sheltered compared to 33% in 2022. this corresponds with a few recent closures in veteran shelters and transitional housing programs, though i believe the va is actively working to expand veteran dedicated shelter resources in san francisco and has released an rfp. before we move into demographics and some

of the additional indicators, i want to highlight that while the pit count is a valuable snapshot of homelessness, it doesn't capture how dynamically people enter and exit homelessness over time, hsh has housed clients at a faster pace than ever before, housing over 7500 clients between the 2022 and 2024 point in time counts. despite this progress, we estimate that three people become newly homeless. for every one person that the department is able to house. this inflow underscores the complexity of our work. moving into demographics, this is where we're starting to present some new data from the full report, so recent updates to hud reporting requirements have provided more detailed breakouts of the pit count by age than we have for from previous years. so these new brackets between ages 25 and 65 and up are newly introduced people experiencing

homelessness are most likely to be between 35 and 44 years old. this distribution is similar to what we see in our administrative data, and we look forward to monitoring this in future years at this level of detail. related to gender and sexual orientation in 2024, hud updated and expanded gender identity options to be more inclusive. we continue to see that women comprise roughly a third of the homeless population and men about two thirds in 2024. however, we see an increase in the proportion of the population who identify as transgender or gender nonconforming at 9%, compared to 4% in 2022. similar to prior years, 28% of the population identifies as lgbtq, and this trend has been pretty consisten. since 2015, hsh has made some i'm sorry. yes hsh has made some

significant investments in the ending transgender homelessness initiative, which has resulted in expanded shelter and flexible housing subsidy pool resources for the transgender population. so we're looking forward to making more progress with those resource expansions. okay. race and ethnicity. compared to the general population in san francisco. so when comparing the racial and ethnic distribution of the homeless population to san francisco's general population, we continue to see clear disparities. black san franciscans are much more likely to be homeless, representing 25% of the homeless population. but just 5% of san francisco's general population. in recent counts, we've also seen overrepresentation of latino or hispanic people, who represent 34% of the 2024 point in time count. but just 16% of the general population american indian, alaska native or

indigenous and native hawaiian or pacific islander populations also appear overrepresented in the homeless population. asian and asian americans remain much less likely to experience homelessness in san francisco, i will i just wanted to mention i think we're getting close to 15 minutes. okay, i will do my best, i'll briefly mention then just that hud did make significant changes to the data capture, but of race and ethnicity in 2024, which does limit our ability to directly compare to prior years, we have many more slides trying to do so, though, and trying to make sense of this information, which i will spare you, today, let's move forward. let's go. one more slide, geographic distribution. so very briefly, the unsheltered, homelessness

population has shifted a bit as a geographically as vehicles make up a larger proportion of unsheltered homelessness. and street and tent homelessness decreased, there's been a shift from the city center to district ten. unsheltered homelessness decreased in districts five and six by 20, and 23%, respectively. these districts account for more than half of the total unsheltered population living in tents or streets. district ten saw the largest increase since 2022 and accounted for more than half of all observations of people living in vehicles. okay, the pit survey, about the pit survey, this is used again to estimate demographics and household characteristics of the unsheltered population, primarily. we also use this opportunity to ask some questions that are not otherwise captured in our administrative data to help us better understand the unhoused population. in 2024, we received 956 survey responses, which is

similar to prior years. so we'll highlight a few findings today. sorry, but i encourage you to please explore more of this information on our dashboards. okay. in past years, we've asked a question related to residency prior to becoming homeless and in prior years, 69 to 72% of clients have reported living in san francisco before becoming homeless in 2024, we made a slight phrasing update to this question where we asked where clients were last housed and 59% of respondents indicated that they were last housed in san francisco, which is a drop from prior years. clients were more likely to report that they were last housed in another california county than in prior years. homelessness, we believe, is caused by a structural lack of affordable housing. but there are often individual level factors that can contribute to or precipitate homelessness.

when asked to identify their primary cause of homelessness from a list of 16 options, the top four causes identified have been consistent since 2019. these include losing a job, alcohol or drug use, evictions, and an argument with a friend or family member. next slide pleas, 58% of respondents are either employed or looking for work, up from 49% in 2022. the top cited barriers include a lack of a permanent address, drug or alcohol use, a disability or a lack of transportation, we did note also in 2024 that we saw a sharp increase in the rate of respondents who indicated they first experienced homelessness in childhood at 27%, compared to rates ranging from 15 to 18%, since 2015. so for compared to longer term trends, in the

interest of time, i'll just speak very briefly to some supplemental data. we do, we do acknowledge that the broader definition or landscape of homelessness may not be captured, per hud's federal definition. so we use this opportunity to collect some information about individuals that may be experiencing homelessness in other living situations. around the night of the pit, so in 2024, we found an additional 980 individuals who are otherwise homeless but staying in hospitals, residential treatment centers or jails on the night of the point in time count, this is down 44% since 2019. we saw a slight increase in the jail population, but a slight decrease in residential treatment centers primarily and this may in part just be due to the challenges that we have identifying all residential treatment centers and surveying them. we also include some information from sf usd to identify the number of

homeless or inadequately housed students that they have identified as of the beginning of this school year, per their mckinney-vento reporting requirements. in 2024, this figure was 2493 students, that were that were inadequately housed, representing a 21% increase since the fall of 2021, preceding the 2022 point in time count. and the majority of these students identified were identified as living in doubled up or hotel motel situations. so they likely would not be represented in our point in time count, finally, i just want to briefly acknowledge what an enormous effort has gone into executing the point in time count. it takes a small army. i want to thank our consultants, asr, the many, many staff at hsh and at partner agencies that are cited here who've put in long hours and hard work to make this count safe and as accurate as

possible. and especially to my colleague sohail kamdar, who, served as the project manager for this initiative. this year and really was remarkable to work with, and i have nothing but endless good things to say about so thank you very much. thank you, thank you. that was great. and about 20 minutes. thank you so much. so, let's open it up to public comment first and then to questions from the commissioners, i've asked a commission secretary, battis out to provide one minute on this item for public comment. if there is anything that you cannot say in one minute that you would like us to know, please also consider sending us an email or provide written comment to the secretary. do we have any public comment? so it's marty regan, jordan davis, mercedes bannock. mark marty saying for the next item. how

about anyone that might want to speak on this item about the pit count? if you want to just line up to the left. and then we can. okay. do we have anyone that wants to speak in the room on the pit count? okay. seeing none no callers in the queue. okay, great. that's fabulous, commissioners, i don't see anyone on the roster. commissioner dufty, i just want to say. i just want to say it was a great can we get commissioner dufty's mic? i just want to say it was a great report. it seems unfair that you get honored and then have to deliver this, but it was a great report and i did ask the commission secretary if we could get copies of the presentation. so it was wonderful. thank you. great commissioner guerrero. yeah, i a great report and congratulations on both of you

being recognized. i think that, is extremely thorough. i had a really good experience. i appreciated being brought in and got to work with some of the team that was just great and see some of the advances, advancements in kind of the systematic parts of it, and some developments that i thought were really great, like taking in feedback from previous years from what i know. so just congratulate the director on your team, on just having like, some really brilliant minds behind the department, and i don't want to ever take that for granted, including with my feedback. so, obviously some of the topics in the meeting are emotional for me, but, yeah. and then i wanted to say thank you so much for including the data around trans housing, you know, that's a piece that's been advocated for long before my time. by some black trans elders and community members who have had lived, experience and really had to fought and banged on the

doors of city hall for many years. but i did have the honor of really kind of starting some of these initiatives with the department, with the director and like, there's just been such an honor to me to see this, like seeing the trans flexible housing pool is enormous. you know, i have many loved ones that have worked on, on establishing the flexible housing pool. so to see that intersect with the trans programing that we created, is beyond like my wildest dreams. so thank you so much to the director for always kind of like, you know, supporting that initiative and also bringing in black trans leadership. at the time that we started working on these projects together, and yeah, really supporting the community, taking in feedback and, you know, yeah, it's a huge advancement and like, and one of the first of its kind in probably the world, so i don't want to take that for granted. so thank you so much for

including that data in your report and beautiful report. thank you. commissioner laguana, yes. so i wanted to add my thanks to sarah for all her work and congratulations as well, well learned. and i think a actually, i think it was timely that you gave a report right after because it clarified why you received that award, i did have a question for the director. i, i know we had some challenges getting the report out as expeditiously as we wanted, because there was issues around, getting the data to be as, as clear and stress testing some of the, the data points against each other, which weren't always lined up, i guess one question i have with respect to the commission, the

commission's oversight authority, i have to ask and if i'm putting you on the spot, feel free to say so. or decline or do whatever is appropriate, but do we have thoughts about vendor selection going into two years from now, and, you know, do we think that this was a successful relationship or is something that can be coached into a more successful outcome or is this a case where we need to think about what our options are? now? that's a great question, i always feel like i'm on the spot when i'm here, so it's fine. yeah, it's part of the part of the role just one more time. but yes, so we will be issuing an rfp for, to select a vendor and we will have a lot of opportunities to put in that rfp exactly what we need so that we have the best success possible, and the cleanest data when we get it back so that we can issue, as, you know, as soon

as possible. and we really need it to be less work for our staff, because they do, as you can see, so much work to, to get the reports ready and to really dig into what's important for the public to know. and so that's what we'll be looking for is a partner who can help us get there. great. and presumably you've compiled best practices, lessons learned. ready to go on that? yeah okay. great. great. thank you so much. so we're going to close item ten and move to item 11. the consent calenda. the consent calendar is considered routine matters by the homeless oversight commission and will be acted upon by a single vote of the commission unless one of the commission members requests a discussion, at that time, the matter will be removed from the consent calendar and considered a separate item and will be called for by a separate vote. are there any items that you would like to sever from the

consent agenda? that we would now like to take public comment for those in the room who wish to speak on the housing presentation, not housing presentation. this item. no comments for the consent agenda for online or in the room. no callers in the queue. wonderful so, we move the item, we can go ahead. please make a motion to approve. second. all in favor or roll call, please. commissioners, please respond with i or nay. vice chair evans i commissioner albright, i commissioner ohlone and williams. i commissioner dufty i commissioner guerrero i commissioner laguana i the consent calendar has been approved. great. okay. so we're now on to item 12, item 12 is a item that requires a vote of the commission. i'm going to invite,

i believe, elizabeth houston up to present this item. good morning, vice chair evans. commissioners and director mcspadden. my name is elizabeth houston. i use she her pronouns, and i'm the manager of the supportive housing programs at hsh. i am here to request approval for a new grant agreement with abode property management for an approximately 1.45 million annual property management budget and 1.5 million for one time start up costs that include establishing on site support services, offices and programing space. a front desk area, security cameras, making some units ada accessible, welcome baskets and other start up costs. abode property management brings extensive experience in providing housing and services to people experiencing homelessness across seven counties, including san francisco. in san francisco, abode operates both site based

and scattered site housing programs and that includes managing a supportive housing building that's dedicated to serving women and managing the largest building that serves families with children. the per month unit cost for property management is approximately $2,900, which is in line with buildings of a similar size and type. through this agreement, abode will provide property management for a new supportive housing building that will serve young adults aged 18 to 29, with a focus specifically on serving youth who identify as transgender, gender nonconforming and intersex. the recently constructed building includes 42 studio units, 41 of which will provide supportive housing and one staff unit. this program is part of the city's ending trans homelessness initiative, and was designed in partnership with the office of transgender initiatives and other community stakeholders. abode will work in close coordination with the on site support services provider, which is lyric, whose agreement was

approved at the august horch meeting. i respectfully request your approval and will take any questions. okay. do we have any, public comment on this item? seeing none. commissioners, do you have any questions? yeah. go ahead. can you list the community engagement that advised on the, trans, housing like design of the contract? yeah. actually, in the memo, i did not bring my copy of the memo up here with me in the hawke memo, the memo for this item, it does list several of the community stakeholders that were part of the ending trans homelessness planning process. okay. thank you. my question is, oh, commissioner deanna. deanna aslanian williams, you can ask first. okay. i was just going to ask, can we clarify when residents would actually be moving in? yes. so the agreement

the projected agreement start date is november first. we're anticipating approximately a three month start up period for the preparing the building for occupancy, and so we changed the timelines. so we project move ins will start in march and take approximately two months. thank you. and i see that this is made possible with 81% of prop c funds. commissioner deanna, as a quick question, you said something about the cost per month. could you repeat that, please? i wasn't clear, yes. so the approximate per unit monthly cost of operating the building is $2,900 per unit. so each unit will cost 2900 a month to operate. yes okay. is that in line with, it is in line with similar sized buildings. so the cost of operating a building

varies significantly depending on the number of units in the building and the type of building that it is, and because we are requiring 24 over seven staffing, when you have that 24 over seven staffing pattern, it gets spread across fewer units in smaller buildings and increases the per unit cost. got it. and these are studios. yes. these are studio units with kitchenettes per unit. one person primarily. most units will have one person. it is possible that some could could have households of two. thank you, thank you, seeing no additional requests to speak, can we have a motion on this item? move approval. do i have a second? second. thanks. great. can we have a roll call, please just. sorry. i know you went down, and this is just a question regarding the cost, you

know, i'm in real estate, and i help people, you know, get apartments. and in san francisco right now, i have a house guest that's here studying for her master's in staying with me until she finds a place. so she's actively looking, and i send her some nice places that one can have. and i know there's no services that's wrap around. but for about $2,000 a month, you can have a pretty nice studio market rate. not no subsidies, nothing. just i'm just want to understand why it costs so much. is it the services? is it the building? is it the real estate? is it maintenance? hi, commissioners. salvador mejia, director of housing, the cost associated with these units includes the property management. that is

done on site. so, for example, you know, you have people cleaning the common spaces. you have people that are making sure that the units are turning around quickly, there is cost associated with the social services that we provide. the staffing 24 seven as my colleague was explaining to you. so there is a lot of cost associated with it's not just, you know, housing that you have in the market. there are services that are property management that are it's a different you know, it's a different setting, different matrix. different matrix. yes okay. but but just to clarify the social services are not part of this contract. no. correct i was just talking about in general. but you know, you also just wanted to make sure that the commissioner was giving the 2900 is just for housing, property management and maintenance. the property management, including also like, you know, insurance. and so there are several you know, we can provide all the information that is associated with the cost

of operating every single unit. i think that that's a worthwhile discussion for later meeting, you know, to really get into the details. yeah, we can provide the breakdown because i think to commissioner laguna's point, if we're in the position where we're trying to do more with less or more with the same, that's an area that we can probe, right? so again, we had a motion and a second, let's have the roll call. yeah. and then something that my colleague was just reminding me that, you know, there are many requirements that are actually imposed by the city of san francisco in terms of at the level of insurance that providers must have at these buildings. so it is it is, once again, we're happy to provide a breakdown only being driven by insurance costs that would be helpful to understand, correct. so commissioners, we can we can come back. we can with a breakdown. we can come back with a perfect thank you, thank you, thank you. there are costs associated with, providing homelessness services that are different from the private

market sometimes. but i hear you, it's really important for you to know what those are, so we'll take care of that. thank you. thank you so much. thank you, roll call, please. vice chair evans, i, commissioner albright, i commissioner aslanyan williams, i commissioner dufty. high commissioner guerrero i commissioner laguana i the item is approved. okay. so this takes us to item 14 general public comment. i actually would like to put that at the end of the meeting without any objection, and move on to item 15. would that be all right with everybody? okay. all right with me. so let's go ahead to item 15. this is the thing there. sorry. did i skip over item 13 i apologize did not mean to do that. let's go to item 13 before we do do that. so item 13 is an item for action. it's a review

and possible vote of a draft ad hoc statement regarding homeless vital records and property loss. commissioner laguana, do you want to just give a tee up of what this is? thank you, thank you. sure at a high level, this was something that chair evans or vice chair evans and i worked together on, to remind, departments of the importance of vital records, records, items necessary for employment, items of medical necessity, survival gear and food, and water, the importance of these items, when there is an encampment resolution and ensuring that we're not accidentally making the problem worse by separating people from these items, in cases where it's just simply a matter of they were rushed and they forgot to check for their prescriptions or forgot to check for, their, identification or

birth certificate or whatever it is that they may need to continue progress towards stabilization, which, of course, is what we're all hoping for is an increase in stabilizing stabilization level, so we i think a little context here and then actually a question vice chair evans, that i just thought about just now, so as we initially drafted this, we originally intended it as a very readable letter. that could be forwarded to the various departments and would hopefully have a lot of utility to both staff and department heads or at worst, just be a useful reminde, late. i think it was last night. yesterday i became aware of it

last night, the city attorney let us know that it has to be formulated as a. he said they recommended. he didn't say. has to. he said recommended. just to be clear. but, what i do have a proposal on that. can we just hear the end of the sentence? go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. yeah they don't know what's happening yet. no problem. you know, he indicated that the format for commissioners to speak with the public and departments, the preferred format is a resolution. so it's a lot of whereas whereas whereas whereas and then at the end it shall be resolved. so i guess one question i have about this is the document that, is in our packet and that was distributed to the staff and was notice to the public is different than the

document we got last night. correct. and commission secretary baltazar informed me that there was not enough time to make the switch out. go ahead, commissioner albright. you have a suggestion. keep keep on going. i might have a suggestion, so i don't think there's actually, any prohibition on us taking a vote today contingent on this being reformatted into the whereas language. so basically would be essentially the same content, the same message, but with the whereas format. and i think we could do that without any concerns. i think another way we could do it. what i'm trying to think through is public notice, but with the exception of that, it could be a very simple resolution, which says where whereas x, y, and z, therefore, be it resolved that the homeless

oversight commission adopts the statement on homelessness and vital records attached hereto, and it's just an attachment, my only question is this was not, under the public meeting laws. it probably is then not noticed properly. it should be noted. it would. it should have been in order for us to have done that, we would notice it as a resolution to approve a draft statement regarding homelessnes, vital records and property loss. so, as i'm saying, it out loud, i don't think that we have the correct notice to make that kind of action to adopt a resolution now so we can bring back the document in its final form at the next meeting. but i would still like to take public comment today if that's acceptable to everyone on the on this item because it was

agendized. i think we have to take public comment regardless, right. because it is an item. correct? i, i have some comments on the draft and i don't know if you want it before or after public comment. go ahead. thank you. i appreciate the work that was done to put this together. i do know that many of the people involved in encampment resolutions are adults, but to the extent that adults are going to school or have young people in their lives, i would request that language be changed under vital records to include school records. i would request that under the items necessary for employment, we say also necessary for education and include school records and under items of medical necessity. i would suggest that we include diapers and other baby, related supports that families use.

excellent suggestions, you know, the city attorney very helpfully drafted a whereas form form formatted document for us, i just was looking at it briefly on the phone last night. i did, taking a closer look at it this morning. i did want to say, and you and i had had talked about this encouraging versus. yes. yes. so i'd like to make that change. to the well, i think we're going to put a different version of this document together for the next meeting. it sounds like you and i'll have time to work on it together. if that's the case, then great. but that's that all sounds good. in that case, i do want to open it up for public comment on item 13. and i don't know, commissioner barroso, did you still have names that you wanted to call based on the green tags?

thank you. and the commission secretary informed me that we can't do one minute and 30s. so it has to be 1 minute or 2 minutes, what do people feel like? should we do two minutes? sounds good. jordan davis, excuse me. mercedes banach and lucas ella. okay. thank you for writing this letter. i think it's really awful what's going on? i mean, like, it's one thing that we're doing sweeps, but i've been hearing that basically cops are taking away people's identification. they're taking away people's medication. they're taking away a lot of things that are, and dpw is definitely complicit in that. so i just want to say that this is a big problem right here, and this is why we need the fucking defund the police, because they're not set up to deal with homelessness, and there's only set up to harm us. and i just

think it's really fucked up that they continue to steal people's belongings, even if it could, say, fit in a wallet. like if you have to have your stuff taken away. it's one thing to take away, like, say, a tent, like it's another thing to like, say, take away identification that could fit into someone's fucking wallet. my god, this fucking police are just misbehaving here. and frankly, i don't care what happens to cops and dpw should have their union rights taken away, so fuck them and to all the people who support sweeps and to all the people who support this right wing supreme court, i can't believe that i saw like, literally like people who claim to be progressives supporting the six conservative justices. i mean, is that what you want? because i think it's bullshit. and to those who support sweeps, i yield my time. fuck you. next commenter mercedes banach. okay,

lucas, ella. hey, y'all. so i've identified myself from the coalition on homelessness, but i am a human rights organizer there, and i'm one of the point people going to sweeps, and so i've been to dozens and dozens in this city and have seen time and time again, dpw not following their own policies around bagging and tagging and, you know, discussing with folks on the street that they're not allowed to have bulky items, even though that's not anywhere in their procedure or policies. and i just want to thank the commission for letting this come to hawk, because, you know, though, sock operations are under department of emergency management, purview, there is not a commission to go to talk about that. and i really want to thank commissioner laguana and commissioner evans for, you know, presenting this in whatever form it comes out to

be. and i hope that, you know, this is given to other departments in a way that really ensures that, yes, these survival gear and needs are met of folks because i think we've all correctly identified that when we take people's housing paperwork away from them and throw it into the trash crusher in front of them, along with their pets, you know, supplies and food, it only further marginalizes and disenfranchizes them and puts boots them farther down the list of, folks who are able to get housing. so thank you. and, yeah, i yield my time. marty ragan. good afternoon commissioners marty regan, orchestra youth services co-chair of hispa. thank you for your compassion, dedication to justice for our unhoused san francisco residents. as you

know, sweeping folks and trashing their personal property is dehumanizing, heartless, and dangerous as our outreach staff and the street medicine team loses contact with these vulnerable people, they scatter in fear and desperation, lose contact with their safety networks, are knocked down by further, knocked down farther by losing their vital documents and personal items, and gather citations that they can't pay and face jail time simply for being without a home. grants pass did not give cities a permission structure to treat the most vulnerable people as less than human. our city is failing these folks, and frankly, all residents, by diverting critical housing and shelter funds into short term, dead end dpw sweeps that do not solve homelessness. long after the november elections, homeless service providers will still be here caring for the most vulnerable residents on our streets and trying to mitigate the awful consequences of sweeps and property destruction. thank you. thank you. river beck. good

morning everybody. thank you for your time. my name is river beck. i work with the coalition on homelessness. i appreciate you taking this action to your commission. we also discussed earlier at this meeting working on interdepartmental communication and shared goals. i would say that this is the perfect example of an action or a best practice that the city could be employing to use as a method to get these departments to work together. if we can't get departments to allow ssh and sock to allow folks to maintain their identity documents, documents necessary for maintaining housing and humanity, how exactly are we going to get them housing? so i would say this is a perfect example of an action that the city can use to get departments to work together around. if we can't allow people to maintain their documents during a sweep,

how are we going to get them housing? so let's use this as a pilot. thank you for your time. thank you. other commenters, miguel cabrera. and jennifer friedenbach. hi, jennifer friedenbach coalition on homelessness. so folks are experiencing who are out there the worst moments of their lives. and at that very worst moment, everything that they have left in the world, the city, the agencies that are supposed to be helping them are ripping all of that out of their hands. seriously, this is what we're doing in san francisco. this tactic has been used for decades. it was used by frank jordan. it didn't work. it's been used again and again. this action has been so amplified.

and folks out there are so tired. people lose their tents. so let's say it's a woman who's gender based violence suddenly everybody can see that they're a woman or a trans person. it increases their safety issues. they can't get into housing. they no longer have id. we've seen what one of our members had the purse taken out of her hand and thrown into the crusher. she literally dove into the crusher truck to try to get her purse back. she got it back, but her phone dropped. missed a housing appointment and everything just went completely screwball. from there, people lose their survival gear, their medications, overdoses increase. these kind of actions are known to increase morbidity. it's been studied the evidence is clear. it does not lead to a decrease in the amount of people experiencing homelessness and has, in fact, the opposite effect. immigrant community

members, people losing their identification that they have no way of getting back, no way of getting back. people not being able to work because they lose their work tools that sets them back. everything about this is just horrendous. i want to thank you and thank you, commissioners, for taking up this item. it is so incredibly important. unhoused people are so demonized and politically scapegoated right now. they're disproportionately black and brown, disproportionately people with disabilities. they're out there because of high rents. so thank you. thank you so much. do you still have your name on the list? there's a caller in the queue. oh thank you. caller go ahead. caller we hear you. you have two minutes. hi. my name is ocean coast and i'm with senior and disability action. i'm formerly homeless and i benefit from supportive housing. i'll keep this short. the 2024 point in time count respondents self-reported that 42% of the

8300 plus people experiencing homelessness have a disability, 15% identified as 55% or 55 years or older. this means that many of the people experiencing homelessness have medications and medical assistive devices. medical paperwork that exists within their encampments. that might not be the first thing to grab on the mind of someone facing a traumatizing and disturbing street sweep. the loss of safety, community documents and medical needs is great. stop traumatizing homeless people, eroding housing first for non-evidence based sober housing that reduces the opportunities for exits of homelessness and stop the punitive street sweeps. thank you for your time. thank you. any other callers? no more callers. public comment on this item is closed. commissioner allbright, thank you. i again appreciate the work. that's done to it. sounds like we're at a place to redraft this and to create a resolution. i would just ask that you consider

whether or not to include phones, any kind of money that people may have, as well as court orders, temporary restraining orders or any other kind of court orders that they may have. thank you. good call. thank you. commissioner william. very quick question. i don't know who i'm asking this of, is there a any mechanism for a notice before dpw and the police go out like to, you know, any kind of notice you would give somebody before an action was going to take place if you were being evicted, let's say, from an apartment you were renting, you would get a notice put on. if your water is going to go off, you'd get a notice that says this is going to happen. is there such a mechanism that they can be informed that, you know, next week you can't be here anymore? so gather whatever is important to you and also just

this is just out of the box thinking, some kind of a bag that we could offer them. they could say, put all your really important stuff, medicine, your social security card. i mean, just give them a note, put it all in here so you could take it with you. just just a thought. thank you. commissioner aslan williams, thank you for your question. i think the question underscores why it's so helpful to have these conversations in public, because it a it helps raise those questions, and b provides a forum for, intriguing suggestions such as the one you just made, you know, i think there is a lot of different reports about what actually happens on the ground. what i can tell you just on information and belief. and i'm far from an authority on this. so if i got this wrong, feel free to correct me. but city's policy is to

provide notice, i believe notices are supposed to go up. in the surrounding area, it's a i've been told that they are supposed to go up 72 hours before, and then when they arrive, there's an additional people are given 30, 30 minutes to collect their belongings. and i've heard a lot of different reports that it doesn't actually play out like that. in reality, i think where there's a lot of alignment between commissioner evans and myself and what precipitated working on this document was, whatever the case may be, it is not helpful or productive to separate people from essential items that are essentially going to perpetuate or exacerbate the existing problems. and so, without getting into what is actually happening on the ground, or which, by the way, is also, i

think currently a topic of litigation, so that it's also a complex matter to talk about publicly without getting into the particulars of what is happening, but instead just focusing on what can this commission productively do to help make these issues be less pronounced and try and work towards productive solutions that we can work towards together, collaboratively? that was the mindset of this particular effort. thank you. and i do want to say i think you're i think we should circulate that idea of whether a bag might be helpful. i can't tell you the answer to that myself. sitting here, i think that's something we would have to hear from both, the folks tasked with encampment resolutions and the folks experiencing encampment resolutions, whether that's something that would be helpful. but that is a wonderful, i

think, example of trying to constructively come up with suggestions to how do we make things better? because from where i sit, that's the role of this commission. how do we make things better? thank you. thank you for working on this, commissioner guerrero. yeah, i mean, you know, a lot of the things in that document are things that i expressed at our last commission meeting. so thank you to the commissioners who have taken action on responding to that and making it into like a formal document, so i really appreciate that. and, i mean, to respond also, my understanding is that they're supposed to bag and tag, which refers to putting things in a bag with the person's information. is that not right? good point. so again, you know, there there is a whole process. and policy and procedure procedure. it's also being sunshine by as, commissioner laguana brought up by litigatio.

but, to the extent that it would be possible to have the director bring in any, documents that she has, that would be illuminating and educational for this body to understand what the policies and procedures are. i think the subject of the lawsuit is also that in spite of certain written policies, there's a different reality of what takes place. yeah. and that's what i was going to get to because, you know, within the navigation centers, that's what staff are trained to do also is if somebody leaves their bed, you put the stuff in a bag, you put their name on it. they have 30 days to collect it, so this is not an uncommon procedure, but i would second that. i appreciate, you know, the intention to, you know, recommend these things actually happen. and i was just going to say that i think the point was to call out that there

are specific not not just that these things are necessary, but why they are necessary. right because i think my i took one semester of social psychology, but basically, if you tell a person this is why this is important, they are way more likely to act on that than if they just are told to do something. without that explanation. right? right. and essentially providing science based like expert based, you know, which is what these procedures are supposed to be based on supposedly, but i was just going to wrap that up by saying, you know, our government leaders and officials have a responsibility to not waste city dollars, and it's a waste of city dollars to pour millions of dollars into services that now have to do more labor and to so, yeah, it's not i believe that it's not fulfilling our

government leaders responsibility to make the dollars that are pouring into services, including in this department, have to do more work and put more money into those services. sorry i had a hard time articulating that, but that's all. yeah, no thank you. and i really appreciate everybody, putting some attention on this matter. we'll bring it back for the next meeting in the appropriate recommended form by our recommended by our city attorney, but it sounds like there's no one here present today on the commission that would have any objections to, in principle, adopting this. so our intent is to go ahead and adopt that at a future meeting. yes. and, commissioner evans, i would just make one other suggestion, commissioner albright had a number of different specific suggestions. we're limited to no more than three commissioners working on an item, outside of the meetings, i would suggest that we invite commissioner albright to the to that

pre-draft, if you will, and just also filter it through your expertise and knowledge, i'd be happy to participate. i've also given my written feedback to commissioner evans, to vice chair evans, from a practical matter, i would suggest actually working closely with the department on this. to get their expertise and advice in terms of, how in, in reality, this works like to commissioner williams comment, what is practically, operational. i think that's very well said. and i agree with commissioner evans goals here that the idea is to concisely express here are the items that are important and then why they are important. and it is the why. that's really the

point and purpose of the document. because the more we circulate the why, the more we get alignment, from a whole lot of people that are working on this that may have varying degrees of knowledge or experience with, with the why, our attorney is not here. but again, i'm just trying to remember the brown act a little bit. i believe that if we which is fine, that if we actually have three members of the body that are meeting together, it is, and we're sort of doing this more officially in writing. then we actually have public meeting laws, which i'm very happy to comply with. but i think you're working to get this completed. and so why don't we just check with the city attorney to see if i am able to participate? and if so, i'd be happy to help in the drafting. i thought the number was four, but i'm happy to double check it's three. it's

three. oh, it is because a quorum? yeah it's three. all right, i'm three. learn something new every time i come here. lucky lucky three. okay, great. so i'm going to close this item and, skip over, item 14. bring it back at the end of the meeting and move to item 15. item 15 is, the nomination committee report and a recommendation for candidates for consideration. we had a very positive meeting this past month, commissioner guerrero and i were there, commissioner, albright was excused, we had some strong applicants, and i think we will fully round out the local homeless coordinating board with no vacancies. if we adopt the three recommended candidates, acm brooks for seat two, who is a san francisco resident and works with shelter

tech. jason dews in seat four, who is, with third street youth and also a san francisco resident and maxine jones for seat ten, who is a san francisco resident and she is in permanent supportive housing and part of her tenants association, and then finally, we have for the shelter monitoring committee, xylo, who is a san francisco resident and has worked with, tay in oakland, and meets the requirements for seat five, are there any questions from the commissioners? and then i'll open it for public comment. and i don't know if any folks are still here from that applied to meet up. yep. do you want to come on up? hello members of the

body say hello. huey is back there asleep. if he starts barking. i'm sorry. i'm so glad to be here with you today, i'm a member of the san francisco quaker meeting, which is just a few blocks away from here, this year, a food project, which we began is in its 10th year, a decade of serving people in the community. and you can imagine what i have seen come and go in terms of services and ideas. linkage centers come and go different waves of ideas that some were false starts. we learned some things. we were pivoting. we're continuing to illuminate. which was your word, this issue, this social crisis. i myself was a participant at multi-service center msc for a year when i first moved to san francisco and so i've seen both from the experiential standpoint and also operationally now working at youth spirit artworks, which does have a

transitional age youth shelter, the nation's first tiny house shelter for transitional age youth, actually in oakland on hegenberger near the coliseum station. so i've seen it from a multitude of different vantage points, but i will tell you this, having lived in georgia, having lived in new york, having lived in indiana, where i recently completed my master's degree, we do face a bevy of challenges. there is a whole lot of things that we want to get better. there are many gaps that we want to close, but i would all day long be someone that was lower class, lower working class, and even precariously housed in san francisco, california than in augusta, georgia. jackson, mississippi. portland oregon or richmond, indiana, where i recently lived. and so we have a bevy of challenges, but i just want to illuminate and give witness to the fact that we've just come out of a horrific humanitarian catastrophe, the pandemic. and it's important that while we

acknowledge the challenges that we have, we have to also illuminate and give witness to the remarkable work that we do on an ongoing basis to serve people, that is very unique to the city and county of san francisco. so i want to thank the members of the commission for your work and for us all together, continuing to come together and wrestle with these challenges. thank you so much. thank you. all right, so could i have a motion and a second? so moved second. all right. could we have a roll call on the four candidates? vice chair evans, i, commissioner albright, i commissioner williams, i commissioner, deputy high commissioner. guerrero. high commissioner laguana i great that takes us thank you. that matter's closed. congratulations and thank you for your willingness to serve. that takes us to item 16. the data

officer's report, i will, have yet to make a connection with our new, jocelyn. what's her? jocelyn's title? i i'm sorry. title? yeah manager of planning and strategy. manager of planning. lovely to meet you. first time we've been connected, but looking forward to speaking soon. i hope to have a more fulsome report next month. sounds great. thank you so much, is there public comment on item 16? no no callers in the queue. okay. let's close item 16. and let's move to item 18, commission matters discussion regarding future agenda topics.

so i just wanted to throw into the mix, some ideas around the idea of a presentation or fuller discussion on the pros and cons of sober spaces, whether that be sober, shelter or sober living, and i was going to bring into the conversation some thoughts that folks had shared with me, one was that, perhaps there is a study needed to really understand the sober living models that work and don't work, and what their issues are, so we could it's my understanding that the department plans an approach of like, actually beta testing one sober site and then scaling, and so i don't know if this legislation that supervisor dorsey has is maybe premature in terms of mandating something that hasn't really been tested or proven or studied, so that was one thought. the other is that, you know, which population are we really targeting here for

this, one of the things that i know from my experience working with people that have accessed the residential treatment programs, is that you know, they'll often go into an adu for two weeks and then they go to a 60 or 90 day program. those are the folks that might be the best suited to go into, a sober site, but i don't know if that's what the planned target population is or who we're looking to place there. and so i think, you know, in terms of thinking through who would be targeted, how many people are coming through residential programs and come out and what does that look like in terms of like the, the, the flow of people coming through those types of questions are what's coming into my mind. and so i'm just going to propose that we take a future action item with to have a fuller discussion about sober spaces. is that sounds good. okay, i'm not seeing any other commissioners on the roster. yes

commissioner guerrero, just, does anybody else have anything related to future agenda items? because i was going to kind of switch gears a little bit. no, i have a question about what was just raised, and it is not raised specific to this matter, but just in general, do we have the authority maybe, maybe the director mcspadden could ask the city attorney's office, do we have authority to review pending legislation that the board of supervisors is considering, or is that information better placed in the board of supervisors? i think the same has to do with ballot measures. yeah, i think that's a question for the city attorney. thank you. yeah. and i think beyond this, you know, particular piece of legislation, whether we want to discuss it or not, i think we want to have a broader conversation about the appropriateness of that, because

we will be asked to approve contracts. i think if it i think if we're talking about program related matters, i think that's part of our purview. you'd have to look at the ordinance, our, our governing ordinance. but if it's about a review of pending ballot measures or ordinances, i think we should just ask the city attorney what our scope and review is so that we're within and we're being very clear about what we're trying to do. exactly. no no, i concur, and i'm not proposing that we do a detailed analysis of the legislation. instead, i'm asking for a presentation from the department on what would be their pilot proposal and what are the positive things that we know about sober living spaces and how they are functionally right. so our team has done some work on this, and i and we have an open rfp right now out, for recovery housing. and so we will have some information. i mean it's open now but we will have

some information somewhat imminently about who you know, who will be moving forward with with doing that work and what their kind of, program design is going to look like. and we'll be bringing that to you as you know, as we move forward. so that's one piece and we can talk a little bit in that context about, you know, what we know are best practices in the field and things like that. so great. thank you so much, oh thank you. commissioner guerrero. did okay. is now the time? yeah oh, you wanted to do the closing? yeah. okay. okay. wait wait wait, wait one minute. we have to do public comment, and then i'll give you two minutes at the end to give a closing statement about in closing the meeting in memory of someone, do do we already take public comment on this item? no we didn't. can we take public comment, please? any any public

comment on item 818? seeing none. there's no callers in the. seeing none. i'll close. item 18, let's move quickly to back to item 14. general public comment, and let's limit the comment to one minute. any, one that would like to speak for general public comment, i think i see i don't have any charlotte and charles both. i want to say thank you so much, commissioner guerrero, for saying transparency, because transparency is so important for us to know who we can trust and who we can trust, and that we know that you'll be responsible, that when you say a thing, you mean what you say to us. mr. deputy, i want to say thank you so much for bringing up the food item. because if you take on people's care, food is how you let somebody know that you care. you sit around your tables and eat in your family tremendously, florence lawrence, florence

nightingale, she started nursing she. and that's how i got started. she only did three items, made sure they ate well, made sure they were clean, and they somebody took time to care about them by talking to them. i don't think we have a problem with not enough resources. i just think we need to go back and revamp what we're doing with the resources, because we have enough money. we just need somebody to know how to manage it. well, if you can run a household, you can run taking care of anything in the city. so let's go back to some of the basics and just realize that we be sure you really care. because if they look at you, look at you, they could say they could profile you and say they couldn't believe that was homeless. thank you. charlotte, you cared about you cared about me. thank you so much for staying for the meeting. and. i'm requesting this be put into the meeting, the agenda is you're giving us documents for

public comment. yes yes, there was an animal that was abandoned it to my opinion in a unit in a in a tenant's unit. so this dog was left in an apartment, and it was barking and howling for between 2 and 4 days. oh, wow. and property management, they for the most part, they didn't do anything. and at some point they at one point they actually refused to come out and address the issue. so this is 149 mason and they just said the dog howling for two days was a noise complaint. so it seemed like they didn't even consider that there might have been a person in there who was sick and i'm wondering if i can get someone to investigate. this is like, you know, it seems like there's no type of accountability for

these service providers. it's just like, i just get the sense they just do whatever they want and thank you. and i just wanted to confirm as. 149 mason street a hush managed property. it looks like it's overseen by john stuart company on the internet. is what it says. yeah, i was just i just wanted to make sure that if they can follow up, if it is within the h h department purview. yeah. i mean, they have a contract with the city and county of san francisco. thank you, thank you so much. and thanks for the, written, submitted public comment. as well. do we have additional folks that want to make public comment? charles, a question, what about animal care and control? has anybody called there? so you know, first i had to call the police, but then, they left, but they they left a notice. i mean, the animal control came out, but then, i

called the police, but animal control, i know they were. they left a notice on the door an animal control. they had to wait 24 hours before they could go into the residence. okay. but, you know, you know, a wellness check. you know, if you know, 1954 laws, the law of 1954, if i think there's a problem or an emergency, then they have the right to enter and they the property management overtly refused to do that. and i called the emergency number. you know, that's kind of hidden to if there's an emergency. and i called them and their response was, this dog in distress was a noise issue. and just to ask, is there still noise coming out of the unit now, so i think the i think the tenant abandoned the property, but, animal control came and took the animal. okay.

so that's good. okay. and this is, it's a it's another list of questions. okay like why did the why did the tenant there just wasn't a responsiveness from the, property manager is what you're concerned about. thank you. but part of it is, is like, is anybody going to be held accountable? are they going to do anything better? yeah so we hear it. thank you so much. sorry we don't have more time. we'll look forward to seeing you next month. and i will definitely read through all of the written comment that you've submitted. thank you for that, do we have any other public comment? i'm trying to decide if are you in line for public comment? okay, great. just wanted to make sure i'm trying to make eye contact. i don't want to overlook you, do we have any people? there's no callers in the queue. wonderful. thank you. so let's go ahead and close public comment. and now, before we adjourn, commissioner guerrero, chair's prerogative to ask you to speak. thank you, i

just wanted to take a moment to, acknowledge the passing of a very beloved member of the trans community, portia taylor, who has done some incredible work with the department. and it's an enormous loss to our community, the work that we do and the work that she's done with the department and the city to advance the rights and equity around trans issues, so i just want to read a little bit about some of the work that she did. so she was a case manager for the navigation center, which is the first trans, and sex worker navigation center in the city of san francisco. that we opened with the support of the director and the department in 2022, so she was one of the initial staff members there and just really helped lead the way, as black trans women have historically, in the movement and provide a quality of care for the residents and set the bar really

high for how we use a peer based model to support the community, which trans people have always done historically, led by black trans women, specifically in the history of lgbt rights, so she was also nominated to the city of san francisco's local homelessness coordinating board's coordinated entry systems redesign and implementation committee, where she served her community's most vulnerable residents by participating in the creation and implementation of committees recommendations to improve the homeless systems assessment and housing referral process. with the goal of making homeless resources more accessible to people from the trans community. her invaluable contributions over the last two years towards redesigning the system will leave a lasting impact of greater equity for all, so i just wanted to take a moment of silence and remembrance and honor of portia taylor.

thank you, everybody. and, just want to summarize by saying, you know, it's devastating to have to continue to come every year and announce the death of another black trans woman in the community. and it's something that should motivate us to fight harder for the reasons that systematically the cause of death is so high. specifically for black trans women, as the most marginalized community members within the trans

community. so i hope that this loss will motivate us to fight harder for the rights of trans women of color and trans specific resources. as this is also an epidemic that we are facing. thank you. thank you so much. i'm i'm sorry i didn't have the opportunity to meet her. she sounds like an amazing person, and it sounds like we're indebted to her for her service. so thank you. so i will go ahead and adjourn the meeting and look forward to seeing you all next month. thank you so much. thank you. thank you for doing a great job leading us a great day. thank you.

>> the city has undertaken a pilot program to hook up private privately -- owned hotels. >> the community members say this is helpful for them especially for the seniors and families with kids from seniors being able to connect with the family during the pandemic and too watch the news has been really helpful during this time where they are stuck inside and are not able to go outside. for families it is important to

stay connected to go to school, to get connected so they can submit resumes to find jobs during the pandemic. [speaking foreign language] >> challenges that might seem for the fiber in chinatown is pretty congested. the fiber team found ways around that. they would have to do things such as overnight work in the manholes to get across through busy intersections, and i think the last challenge is a lot of buildings we worked on were built in the early 1900s and they are not fitted with the typical infrastructure you would put in a new building.

we overcame that with creative ideas, and we continue to connect more sites like this. >> high-speed internet has become a lifesaver in the modern era. i am delighted that we completed three buildings or in the process of completing two more. i want to thank our department of technology that has done this by themselves. it is not contracted out. it is done by city employees. i am proud and i want to take a moment to celebrate what we are doing.

>> hello, and thank you to the san francisco league of women voters forviting me today. my name is aaron peskin the president of the san francisco board of supervisors and running to be the next mayor of the city. i love san francisco spent most of my adult life working to make it better. i fought to secure hundreds of millions of dollars for affordable housing, pass rent protection laws to stop unjust evictions and reduce crime with real community policing in my district. championed better public transit and help prepare for climate chaimpg. i know how to bring people together and hold the government account frbl results. that is exactly what we need to face the immense challenges before us today. as mayor, i'll unlock funding no cost to tax mayors to build thousand affordable homes.