By Christin Evans, HANC Board
As I write this, the final city budget has not yet passed through the Board of Supervisors, but the late night marathon of budget trades between the Mayor and Supervisors has concluded and next year's budget is largely settled. The budget has some good, bad and ugly in it. Activists from the people’s budget coalition including labor unions fought hard and late into the night with mixed results.
Winners included the police department, the district attorney and sheriff's office including money for new jail beds. Unions were able to stop some of the Mayor's proposed layoffs.
New treatment and shelter beds also were funded — however nowhere close to the 1500 beds promised by candidate Lurie on last year’s campaign trail. Of note, 120 RESTORE beds for homeless individuals struggling with opioid use received funding. The RESTORE beds are jointly managed by the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH) and the Department of Public Health (DPH) and expand a pilot program that was started under the Breed administration at a former shelter-in-place hotel in the Tenderloin.
There were also 50 hotel vouchers for temporary adult shelter and 130 for temporary family shelter. Most likely these hotel vouchers will be used to assist some of the 500+ RV dwellers that are set to be swept in the next year. Concurrent with the budget negotiations, Mayor Lurie announced his plans to limit oversize vehicle parking to two hours citywide - essentially an RV ban - that will threaten to tow vehicles of anyone deemed by the city as not sufficiently cooperating with city homeless services.
In his initial budget proposal introduced in late May, the Mayor had proposed to fund approximately 630 total shelter beds, mostly for single adults. He was proposing to sweep three years of unencumbered funds and interest from the Our City Our Home (OCOH) fund established by voters in 2018 by Proposition C. However, to do so, he would have grabbed approximately $88 million most of which was set aside for housing for families with young children and transitional age youth. Advocates fought back and won a partial victory. Now only $34 million of OCOH funds will be reallocated to adult shelter over the next two years.
The latest version of the budget now adds hundreds of rapid rehousing vouchers including 130 vouchers for families, 100 for transitional age youth and 100 for single adults. Rapid rehousing is typically for 2 to 5 years giving a household time to establish new income streams to eventually take over fully paying the rent.
There were also wins to protect homeless prevention dollars from being swept, as 30 shallow subsidies for families and a total of $6.7 million were appropriated for prevention initiatives for young adults and families. Historically, providing assistance to pay back rent has been a very effective strategy at stemming the flow of new households into homelessness. Prevention is a less expensive way to tackle one root cause of homelessness- growing rents that are escalating beyond individuals’ ability to pay, particularly with seniors and disabled individuals on fixed incomes.
However, the Mayor is threatening to sweep future OCOH funds for shelter instead of housing and prevention. The trailing budget legislation requiring a super majority of the votes of the board of supervisors (8 out of 11 votes) would give the Mayor additional powers to sweep funds with a simple majority rather than a super majority. This continues the Mayor’s effort to accumulate power at the expense of Board oversight. As of this writing, that possibility is not yet settled. It would be unfortunate if the mayor succeeds, because ultimately shelter does not end homelessness, only affordable housing ends homelessness.