By Lisa Awbrey, HANC Vice-President

Am I the only one who thinks there’s been a marked increase in fires in our local neighborhoods? Here’s a partial list of recent fires and the number of people displaced by them:

• 1/22/23 1:45 AM 1310 Hayes (Divisadero) 25 people and three dogs displaced.
• 8/23/22 12 PM. 1604 McAllister (Divisadero) 13 residents and two businesses displaced. Three alarm fire, fought by over 100 firefighters.
• 8/31/22 3:41 PM, 700 block of Divisadero (Haight). 12 people and one small business displaced. 
• 4/5/22 8:39 PM 400 Upper Terrace over 50 people displaced. 
• 2/18/19 3 PM 1230 Page Street. 14 people displaced.
• 12/14/18 11 PM 24 unit building@ Hayes and Baker. 20 people displaced. 

How does our city respond to these life changing and tragic events and is there a coordinated process for assisting victims of fire when burned out of their homes? 

Short answer: currently, there is no single city department that is responsible for leading or coordinating assistance to fire victims. 

Is there a centralized data base where the city tracks residential fire incidents? Is the data organized to reflect incidents in specific districts or neighborhoods?  What is the city’s process for investigating the cause of residential fires?  Are we seeing patterns or trends in these recent fires? 

The San Francisco Fire Department keeps some information and tracks some trends in calls for service, structure fires and fire fatalities; their data shows trends over time with geographic breakdowns. Currently the Fire Marshall takes the lead when investigating all fires, suspicious fires or fire trends like the recent spate of fires in large multi-unit rent controlled buildings in the Panhandle, Haight Ashbury and along Divisadero. However, the most current data kept by the city does not include a breakdown by building typology (single, small or multiunit buildings).

Who (what city departments or agencies) are responsible for helping people and small businesses displaced by these events? What is the process? 

The Department of Emergency Management generates incident reports related to individual fires, which include the number of people displaced by a fire, but these reports can be inaccurate because they rely primarily on information provided by Red Cross volunteers doing on site intake from fire victims. It is unclear if the city collates the information from these individual incident reports into broader data sets. 

The existing system for the city’s response to people displaced by fire suffers from a lack of staffing and a lack of coordination among the different departments. As previously mentioned, Red Cross volunteers do initial intake at a fire site and because it is volunteer based, there is a range of competency at the critical intake stage. The Red Cross then provides contact information of the victims who opt-in to city assistance to the Human Services Agency; if they do not opt in, city agents never end up seeing the victims’ contact information. HSA then provides temporary subsidies for displaced residents to use at their discretion, most often in the form of payments for short term hotel stays. Typically, these funds are quickly exhausted and then the victims of a fire must again scramble to find other places to stay. Displacement by fire is especially challenging for low income individuals, seniors and families with few if any other options. Because of underfunding and a lack of coordination among city departments, the individual supervisors’ offices currently struggle to assist in working with MOHCD, HSH, HSA or private apartment owners to try to find alternative housing for people displaced by fire. It is hugely problematic that no single city agency is responsible for coordinating the various departments who each play critical roles in this process.

Here is Supervisor Preston’s legislative aide Kyle Smeallie on the challenges: “The major flaw in this system is that there is not any one agency tasked with coordination among the different departments who each have a role. It often falls on our office, and with a staff of four and a mountain of other responsibilities, we’re not equipped to handle the dozens of cases that come across our plate. At the same time, we don’t want to be yet another city department telling people in need that “it’s not our problem” so we often find ourselves doing everything in our power to get people help. It’s not sustainable, and so in the hearing we intend to explore ways for the city to improve coordination.” [In January 2023, Supervisor Preston called for a hearing on fire prevention at the Government Audit and Oversight Committee; the hearing is confirmed for May 4, 2023.] Preston will hold a community meeting on the subject of fires, displacement and fire prevention this month (April). Stay tuned.