San Francisco's shelter system leaves some out in the cold

In January, Mayor Gavin Newsom announced his goal to reduce the number of homeless people on San Francisco’s streets by 50% and the city’s overall homeless count by 30% by the end of 2010. And he vowed not to leave office before his goals were met. Newsom’s New Year’s resolution is an ambitious one, and he hasn't given any concrete details on how he would finance his plan in the face of a $522 million budget deficit for the coming fiscal year. He also hasn't said where the approximately 3,200 homeless people currently on the streets will go.

Emergency shelters and resource centers have been closing their doors or reducing their hours, affordable housing is still not keeping up with demand, and the number of homeless people in San Francisco has been increasing slowly but steadily since 2005 -- despite the Mayor's efforts. KALW's Ali Budner reports on life in the city's homeless shelters -- from both sides of the administrative desks.

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ALI BUDNER: Tanya Figueroa is warm and kind. Her thin, wrinkle-laden face shows a lifetime of laughter, but there’s little now. She’s chronically homeless.  

TANYA FIGUEROA: By the time I get up and before my feet hit the ground, my bed’s been taken.

It’s morning, and Tanya Figueroa has come to the MNRC -- The Mission Neighborhood Resource Center -- to begin the daily ritual of securing a bed in one of the city’s eight adult homeless shelters. The waiting room buzzes with activity. Dozens of people are gathered around tables, talking, resting their heads, or staring into space.  

NATE MILLER: It’s packed in here in the mornings. We’ll have to lock it. Full capacity.

Nate Miller is a staff member at MNRC. The waiting room walls are lined with metal lockers. There’s a nook with a payphone. An altar by the door remembers homeless people who’ve died. And of course, there’s the reservation desk, where another staff member sits with a solitary computer.

MILLER: As soon as people get here, the beds usually start dropping at 7 and then people don’t get beds and still wait around for a while.

When Miller talks about beds “dropping,” there are no pillows or sheets falling from the sky. He means numbers are appearing on the city’s computerized shelter reservation system, known by the acronym CHANGES. The MNRC is one of just a handful of places in the city where homeless people can sign up for a shelter bed. But Miller says it’s not that easy.

MILLER: So you make a reservation for bed 22 on the fourth floor at MSC South or something. So it’s kind of like just booking it on Expedia or something except that as soon as they open up, you have to get them right away, so we’re actually racing against the other places that make reservations.

The CHANGES computer system was created in 2004 in an effort to centralize homeless shelter reservations and make the process uniform for all clients. Whereas once, people would wait in line at a given shelter and go through a lottery for a bed at that site, now, of course, everything happens on a computer. But computers can fail. And at MNRC, where only one computer is connected to the CHANGES system, any malfunction can mean people might not get housed for the night.

LAURA GUZMAN: The system sometimes does not accurately portray what is the capacity of the shelter. So the shelter may be more full than what the system shows. And CHANGES has been a complicated program and a program that breaks very easily.  

Laura Guzman is director of the Mission Neighborhood Resource Center.  

GUZMAN: That’s why you hire people who are really fast with computers. [laughs]

Joyce Crum knows it can be difficult. She’s Director of Housing and Homelessness at San Francisco’s Human Services Agency.  

JOYCE CRUM: One of the safety nets we implemented in the very beginning, because we were having a lot of computer bugs, is the resource center would call the shelters and say “I have a group of people standing here, do you have any shelter beds?” And if they did, “Send em over, give me their names,” and they’d check 'em in that way. So it was merely picking up the phone to interact and don’t let the computer system thwart you from doing what you need to do.

But Sen Bivens, a staff member at MNRC, says the problems run deeper than that, because of a lack of shelter beds.  

SEN BIVENS: I used to be able to make a call: “I have an at risk senior here, that’s on crutches. They have a broken foot, or whatever.” I could get them accommodated. Now, it’s a crapshoot. I can call, they’ll say no I don’t have any beds. You just have to go with the system. You know it’s... I’m at a loss for words. I just get a lot of angry people. We have a woman over here right now. She’s very angry she didn’t get a bed. She says she’s been waiting for three days.

More than 6,500 people are homeless in San Francisco, according to an official city count in January 2009. In 2002, the year before Mayor Gavin Newsom took office, the official count found more than 8,600. That overall reduction is a plank in the Mayor’s political platform, though homeless advocates dispute those numbers. What’s clear is this: with the recent budget crisis, shelters and resource centers have been shutting down and reducing their hours.

GUZMAN: Since Mayor Newsom has been mayor, we have lost 464 sleeping units in the emergency homeless shelter system.

Again, MNRC Director Laura Guzman.

GUZMAN: Since last October, we have seen an increase of about 68% on the number of people who come every day to drop in and many of those are shelter seekers. And we really have been talking about reaching an emergency crisis around the lack of shelter beds, given the needs.

While Guzman believes making more beds available would help solve the emergency shelter crisis, Joyce Crum, of the Human Services Agency, says the city aims instead to channel more resources into permanent housing options.

CRUM: I can tell you our goal is not to open more shelters. Our goal is always focusing on bringing on more housing. We will definitely maintain our current stock of shelter but no, there is no goal to expand shelter. Because you can expand, you can expand, you can expand, you know, and what does that do? I think one of the criticisms that I would have of the advocates is that shelters is not a house. And we don’t want people permanently living in our shelters.

Yet many still rely on the 1,226 beds in San Francisco’s emergency shelters each night. So people like Tanya Figueroa are taking their situation day by day.

FIGUEROA: Every day I gotta come down here and get a single bed. Every day... I was in 103 the night before last and I was in bed 43 last night, the same place. And last night when I lay down there was eight beds that I counted that were empty at 11 p.m. at night.

MNRC Director Laura Guzman, has one explanation for those empty beds. She points out that roughly 30% of the beds in San Francisco’s emergency shelters are set aside for participants in The County Adult Assistance Program, or CAAP, also known as General Assistance, or GA. It’s part of Mayor Newsom’s Care Not Cash program: some qualifying homeless people are offered stipends for housing. If no housing is available, Guzman says, they’re guaranteed a shelter bed.

GUZMAN: The whole debate when Mayor Newsom proposed the Care Not Cash was whether or not people were going to have housing, but the reality was there was not enough housing so shelters became equal to a housing benefit.

CAAP participants who qualify for emergency shelter have beds attached to their names for up to 45 days, whether they sleep in them or not. And many do not. A CAAP bed can only be made available to other bed-seekers for one-night stints if the person it belongs to does not check in by curfew. But often, that’s too late for anyone else to make use of it. MNRC’s Laura Guzman:

GUZMAN: We know that people who get GA have a right to their shelter bed and yet many people do not occupy those beds. When we have all these other folks, people who have disabilities, people who are not on government benefits, who could really utilize those beds for more than one night.

Advocates like Guzman lobbied the city. And last July, Joyce Crum and San Francisco’s Human Services Agency addressed the problem.  

CRUM: By changing the system, and doing away with a number of the referral beds and reducing the number of CAAP beds, we added 200 additional beds to the resource centers.

Still, reserved shelter beds lie empty, and with a glitch-prone computer reservation system, many people still end up sleeping on San Francisco’s streets. For the last five years, the official count of homeless people in San Francisco has been rising. Meanwhile, another emergency shelter is slated to close this June. It will be converted into permanent housing for veterans and for seniors. That’s good for them. Advocates like those at the Mission Neighborhood Resource Center will continue pursuing shelter beds for the rest. But at the end of the day, there’s no guarantee the computer will grant those homeless people a place to sleep.

In San Francisco, I’m Ali Budner for Crosscurrents.