able to age with dignity and their communities, and many of the clients in my center serves are on s.s.i., living on $1,000 a month. the market will not provide housing for them. fifty% of a.m.i. or up is not going to meet them where they are at. just last week we had a client come in to is a 77-year-old individual who has been living out of his car for years and been trying to get senior affordable housing, but with no luck. a personal story, i live in the richmond district, and a few years ago, if i could have the viewer, please. a few years ago, i met this woman in the modal on the streets. she was living out of two suitcases, often living on should -- in shelters. she is 80 years old, well educated, lived in pac heights and the richmond district, and luster housing about five years ago and has been chronically homeless since then. it took the efforts of myself and staff at the independent living resource center and a dedicated social worker to help find her housing. she is lucky, so to speak. she was constantly in and out of the hospital, which decreased after she got housing. slippi

john was on s.s.i. disability but somehow this was cutoff. he was homeless about before he came here and came "to get away from trouble." he was initially seen by street health worker shannon in october 2016 during civic center out reach. he was noted to be injecting into public and having several possessions, including electronics and several bicycles in various states of repair. he had a long history of bipolar disorder that had initially been diagnosed when he was an adolescent. he stated his goals were to get or drugs and visit his family back east. he was among the first 20 patients in our low barrier buprenorphine pilot. over the next several months he had numerous police contacts and several periods incarcerated in jail. he is involved in community justice court. he had periods of depression, several medical and psychiatric emergency visits and two medical hospitalizations for serious skin and soft tissue infections. street medicine saw him frequently, often several times a week, initially only in the streets, but gradually more and mo

hand to see if somebody should really be on s.s.i. in terms of calfresh, our nutrition program, there's 6,000 people that are on calfresh. and then, medi-cal, we have 10,000 clients that are on medi-cal. having said that, our systems are complicated, and they're governed by complex state, federal, and local law. it's not always easy for people to get on and stay on benefits, so knowing the unique challenges, we decided we need today have a second initiative and a manager to look at how we link our three departments. and the only way to do that is to do that link jake work. so the goal of this benefit linkage initiative, which started last year, is to meet people where they're at. to stream line our processes where state and federal law allow us to do so. it's also enabled us to do pilot programs, assess what's working, what's not working, the flaws in our systems, how we can use data to inform where the gaps are. so i'm going to talk a little bit more about those pilot programs in a little bit more detail. so the first is our navigat

or more per year, and while their income is often half of that, if they are only living on social security, s.s.i., or a small pension. and also the stated waitlist can be as much as three to have to five years, and we actually have seniors who come to our office, and they have been on a waitlist for up to ten years. our city's housing programs are turning their backs on people who served and built our safety, and this is unacceptable. this is why we strongly support the senior housing bond working groups three recommendations that you heard previously. this would be to increase the number of senior housing units throughout the city in locations where they are needed for our seniors, and to build more deeply affordable housing for seniors with less than 30% of the a.m.i. we do not need any more homeless seniors are seniors who are forced to leave our city. thank you. >> thank you. >> good afternoon, supervisors. i'm so glad that this hearing is happening. you know, if we build it, they will come, they are waiting and waiting and waiting. one example i have a is of my upstairs neighbor, elaine, u.

things , so there's often challenges of maintaining housing stability you are on a fixed income, when you have social security or s.s.i., the consideration of issues related to accessibility and the need for home modifications, as, you know, a lot of older adults are living with disability, so sometimes they need their houses to be outfitted to really make sure that they can get in and out, have accessibility that they need to, and that they are safe. there's also functional impairment and personal care needs, as you probably know, in-home supportive services is by far the largest program that we run at the department of aging and adult services. we serve about 25,000 people in that program annually, it is just a critical program to help keep people in their homes. people are also at risk of social isolation, and at a higher risk of abuse with self neglect which leads to destabilization of housing. the median income for seniors taste waste on census data, the median income for a single senior household is $21,900, this includes both homeowners and renters. approximately half of senior households in san francisco are r

on that. and he is president of the commission navigated key approvals for the two largest s.s.i. p. projects, the new head water project, and the biosolids digestive project. so, ike, we're going to greatly miss your profound vision, your keen insight, and your dynamic presence, but we look forward to working for you in your new leadership role on the t.i. t.a. board. with that, i would like to present you with some momentos of your service. we have a bucket for him with some very necessary things. they're outstanding. you're going to treasure them for always. >> thank you. >> chairwoman: but, more than that, we have something very special -- this is heavy. this is a water meter cover -- >> wow. that's great. >> chairwoman: -- which you can put -- [applause] >> chairwoman: i'm gonna miss you. >> yes. >> chairwoman: a hug for you. >> thank you so much. before -- i just wanted to just express my appreciation for you serving as one of the commissioners. as you know, i was part of both of your compaigns in 2015 and 2018, "ike for commissioner," and it was, you know, very great to work w

on this, it's important to us. and then cases that we talked about earlier, the dual diagnosis cases to apply and to receive s.s.i., you have to kind of disentangle the substance abuse disorder from the mental health disorder because if it is only substance abuse they're not eligible for s.s.i. and you need to isolate the factors to be able to make that case. so the legal approach can help with that and the attorneys are sort of experts in that. and then we also have focused on clients, caap clients, who we have assessed and we've said through our assessments we think they could do a light work assignment but not a full work assignment. so for those clients if you notice that they're struggling and they don't seem to be showing off or having trouble with what we call light duty work assignments the tipping point workers can say this is really an s.s.i. case and reassess. so there we have about a 350-person target over the three-year contracts. if successful, then we can scale it. so i know that it's been a long hearing but i just want to conclude and we obviously know that there are gaps in our systems. i think tha