For years, San Francisco’s approach to fighting homelessness has concentrated shelters and services in just a handful of troubled neighborhoods. Now, city leaders are considering legislation that would effectively impose a moratorium on new services and shelters in areas such as South of Market and the Tenderloin, while establishing a new data-driven system that ties shelter capacity to neighborhood needs.
Supervisor Bilal Mahmood told the Chronicle that he has made significant changes to legislation he introduced in April, which would have required the city to approve at least one homeless shelter or behavioral health site in every district over the next 18 months and prohibit new sites within 1,000 feet of existing ones. The changes are the result of negotiations between Mahmood and Mayor Daniel Lurie, who in April expressed support for a “data-driven strategy” to fight homelessness but did not outright support the legislation. Now it appears Mahmood has successfully gotten the mayor on board, and should he retain the support of six of his colleagues, who signed onto the original proposal, the bill is likely to pass.
Mahmood said he planned to introduce the revised legislation at the board’s budget and finance committee on Wednesday.
Among the changes, Mahmood said he is lowering the shelter buffer zone from 1,000 feet to 300 feet, a move he said would reduce “clustering” of homeless and behavioral health services. He pointed to city data that says the Tenderloin has about 18% of the city’s8,300unsheltered people as of the last point-in-time count but holds 33% of the city’s 3,200 shelter beds, illustrating the imbalance. The revised legislation would establish a needs-based shelter model that would prioritize funding for new shelters in neighborhoods where there are more unsheltered people than places to house them, and require that decisions on future shelters be made based on the numbers. The city would only approve new shelters in “oversaturated areas” like his district via a Board of Supervisors vote.Mahmood’s original bill required that a shelter be built in each district, but he said he received a commitment from Lurie that money set aside for building shelter beds over the next three years will be spent outside neighborhoods like the Tenderloin and SoMa. The legislation would update every two years using new data from the biennial point-in-time count, the single-day survey of all unhoused people within city limits, Mahmood said. It also exempts shelter expansions at existing sites or relocation of services within a neighborhood. “What we’re trying to address is twofold: how do we respond to homelessness citywide — not just with a patchwork of independent decisions — and how do we avoid repeating the mistakes of the past by oversaturating certain neighborhoods?” Mahmood said…