San Francisco’s homelessness department is cutting millions of dollars in funding to HomeRise, one of the city’s biggest providers of housing for the formerly homeless, following an investigation by the Chronicle and UC Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program into the nonprofit.
The Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing announced this week that it will not renew four expiring contracts with HomeRise that fund services intended to keep its residents housed. The department had planned to extend the four contracts by three years, bringing their total value to $39 million.
HomeRise is a mainstay of San Francisco’s supportive housing system and its most heavily funded response to chronic homelessness for the past two decades, serving more than 1,500 residents across 17 buildings. The idea is to help people rebuild their lives after time on the streets. But reporting by the Chronicle and IRP has exposed deadly neglect in its buildings, as well as drastic understaffing and alleged sexual abuse of residents that HomeRise staff largely ignored…