By acting now, the tenant application processes can begin and permanent placements can begin by December 1 rather than next February.

Leases would be conditioned on voter approval of Prop F, the business tax increase that funnels money for homelessness

The vast majority of unhoused want housing. And will stay in housing longterm if given the opportunity. Many predicted after the Hastings lawsuit was filed that Tenderloin tent dwellers would refuse housing; yet few did.

In order to obtain housing for homeless single adults the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which I head, began a Modified Payment Program in 1989. By January 1990 we had replaced the city’s entire 1000 person plus Hotline Hotel program of temporary housing with our permanent housing program. We then began leasing SRO’s in 1999 so that tenants would have nonprofit management

I’ve pushed for the city to use SRO hotels for permanent housing for nearly forty years.

But San Francisco’s November 2018 Prop C and Prop F on this November’s ballot (business tax hike) provide unprecedented local funding; the city can begin meaningfully reducing its unhoused population while awaiting a new presidential administration to provide significant new  funding.

Only 25% of American families eligible for federal housing assistance now receive it.

Can San Francisco finally solve its homeless crisis? When I saw widespread visible homelessness on the city’s streets begin in 1982 I never dreamed it would continue for forty years.

City Could Add over 6000 Housing Units for Unhoused in 2 Years

One man there said he was a drug addict, and he told me he'd rather have a hotel room. He said, you know, people will be too close together in the tents whether they're socially distant or not. And he just doesn't want to die of COVID-19 while he's trying to kick his drug habit and get his life back in order.

Well, the history of tent encampments in San Francisco is a fraught one. San Francisco government has long actually fought against them. Police have slashed them with knives. Staff have thrown them into garbage trucks and crushed them. So city hall has been saying that when the COVID pandemic is over, they're going to shuffle people back into shelters

Yeah. There's a bit of an ideological divide in San Francisco. You know, our equivalent to a city council, the board of supervisors, wants the homeless to be housed in hotels and already some are. The mayor has said that housing the entire homeless population in hotels is unreasonable but not because of cost but because of city staffing shortages. And these encampments, which are planned to be about five total when it's all through, are not a perfect solution either. They only house about 50 to 70 people each. And San Francisco has more than 7,000 people living on the streets.

There was an outbreak at the city's largest homeless shelter with more than 90 people testing positive for COVID-19, most of them homeless people, though some staff. So, you know, they had closed all the shelters, and now all the city's homeless population are just out on the streets

So explain how the coronavirus specifically changed the calculus here.

In San Francisco, people without housing will now be able to stay in official tent encampments.

Reducing homelessness is the target of many social programs. Studies suggest that the most effective programs not only help people find places to live but also help people solve the underlying problems that led to their homelessness in the first place.

In addition, people who are homeless are sometimes the victims of violent acts that can leave behind both physical and emotional stress.

According to data issued by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty in 2015, single men are more than three times as likely to be homeless as single women.

The number of people in the United States who are homeless is difficult to estimate because the population of homeless people is constantly changing as some people find housing and others are displaced.

Other young people become homeless when they run away from home because of abuse, neglect, stress, or indifference on the part of their families, or they are told to leave.

t portable toilets and hand-washing stations as officials focus their efforts on other neighborhoods.

More than 60,000 have filed unemployment claims this year in San Francisco alone, and the mayor expects at least 40,000 more, suggesting one in nine residents will have lost their jobs.

jails,

“But people who suffer from substance-use disorder and mental illness, that just doesn’t turn off because of a pandemic,” she said.

Less than 2 percent of the U.S. population has been screened for the virus, while wealthy enclaves like Bolinas, Calif., have arranged for each of its 1,300 citizens to get a test.

“It’s scary and it feels threatening to my health to just be outside,”

As one of San Francisco’s oldest neighborhoods, the Tenderloin is chock-full of historic buildings, theaters and restaurants

Groups of 10, 15 or more congregate on corners and spill into the street. Open-air drug use, rampant before the virus struck, continues unabated, alongside sidewalk bazaars of bric-a-brac.

the mayor even threatened to close the park if visitors didn’t comply with health guidelines