Long regarded as a critical supplement to the work done by city building inspectors, two community-based code enforcement outreach programs that target some of the city’s most at-risk tenants could soon cease to exist as San Francisco’s Department of Building Inspection looks to trim costs.
Emails sent to about half a dozen local housing nonprofits on Monday informed them that the decades-old Code Enforcement Outreach Program, or CEOP, is facing complete erasure due to the city’s budget woes. Among the supports offered by the nonprofits that receive funding through CEOP and the SRO Collaborative program, another DBI-administered initiative focused on residents of low-income single-room occupancy hotels (SROs) that’s also at risk, are multilingual outreach, housing counseling and disaster preparedness services. In the past, the programs have united advocates representing landlords and tenants.
And yet, both are on the chopping block under DBI’s proposed two-year budget plan, which suggests cutting the department’s annual $4.8 million allocation for the programs as Mayor Daniel Lurie seeks to eliminate $185 million in grant and contract spending in order to close a looming $800 million two-year city budget shortfall…