A plan to end street homelessness in five years, Part 3: Prevention
The best solution is prevention
This is part 3 in a multi-part series on ending street homelessness in San Francisco. Before reading the essay below, please read Part 1: Types of Homelessness and Part 2: Mitigation.
After part 2 succeeds and no one is sleeping on the street, it's time to focus resources on preventing homelessness, building long-term supportive housing, and helping people escape poverty.
By far the easiest and most cost-effective way to help someone experiencing homelessness is to intervene while they still have a roof over their head. There are a few easy and cheap policies we can implement or expand.
How do we keep people out of homelessness today?
According to Heather Knight at the San Francisco Chronicle, "Of the $250 million [director Kositsky] spent [in 2017], two-thirds went to people who aren’t homeless at all. That’s the amount spent on rental subsidies, eviction prevention and permanent supportive housing." The budget for 2021-2023 is dramatically higher, about $600 million per year (still about two-thirds of it is spent on preventing homelessness).
For the next two years, San Francisco will spend about $60 million (10%) on administration, $140 million on roughly 20,000 homeless people (note: While the official point-in-time count shows roughly 8,000 homeless people, over the course of a year about 20,000 will enter homelessness while others exit it), and $400 million (67%) on preventing people from entering homelessness.
That $400 million is spent primarily on rental subsidies and build-out and maintenance of permanent supportive housing for the formerly homeless, and minimally through various other outreach programs.
This gives us the very rough back-of-the-napkin estimate of $7,000 per currently-homeless person per year. This is about double what it was in 2018 (about $3,800 per person per year).
I haven't been able to find out exactly how many people have been kept out of homelessness, but we can estimate based on the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing's 2020 Implementation Plan report and the 2020 HUD Continuum of Care report. The HSH report says that in an 18 month period the department "helped over 2,500 households with housing, rent subsidies, and other programs" and "provided one-time assistance such as eviction prevention and move-in support to over 2,500 households." That gives a rough range of 2,500 to 5,000 individuals served with prevention programs.
Additionally, the HUD report shows the city maintains 11,238 permanent supporting housing units for the formerly homeless. Not all of these units are occupied all the time, so let's round it down to 10,500.
So $400 million will be spent across at least 13,000 to 15,500 people -- or just shy of $30,000 per person to keep them out of homelessness or in permanent supportive housing. But please note that this is definitely an overestimate of cost. I will attempt to find better numbers on how many people are helped and update this essay when/if I find them.
Expand rental assistance
As detailed in "Understanding Homelessness in San Francisco":
63% of people stay homeless because they just don't have enough money to pay their rent. 26% report their primary cause of homelessness is losing their job
For people who don't have enough money to cover their rent after an unexpected shortfall (eg, medical issue, car crash, surprisingly high bills, etc), the single most cost-effective solution is to give them a no-strings-attached lump sum payment to bridge the gap. The San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing offers one-time rental assistance already, but it is not very much money.
We should allow anyone at risk of becoming homeless to claim up to $7,000 per year (the cost spent per homeless person, detailed above). This should end up being a net cost savings because the city won't need to invest more resources into finding them a new place to live after they become homeless, and will surely save on the cost of medical care if they contract a disease or develop a drug habit while living on the street.
People who can't pay their rent should be able to get assistance without a lengthy application process. Hours and days matter to people who end up in this situation, and we shouldn't punish them for being poor. Yes, there will probably be some fraud, but the solution to that is random audits so that preventing fraud doesn't end up costing more than the program as a whole.
Fund Eviction Defense
San Francisco already provides city-funded eviction defense to tenants. This is great, but many tenants don't know it exists and it doesn't have a permanent funding source.
In the August 2020 budgeting process, the eviction defense program managed to avoid a budget cut and instead got an additional $750,000 for a total of $10.5 million per year. According to the San Francisco examiner, the eviction defense program only has a budget to counsel roughly only two-thirds of tenants facing eviction. And it's super effective, too:
Tenants who benefitted from both full and limited-scope representation from July 2019 to December 2019 were 94 percent low or moderate income, 28 percent white, 22 percent Black, 23 percent Latino, and 21 percent Asian and Pacific Islander, according to MOHCD in February.
Sixty-seven percent of closed cases ended with the tenant staying in their homes —with 80 percent of Black clients winning those cases — leaving about 31 percent of closed cases resulting in the tenant moving out.
- via SF Examiner
Not every person facing eviction will end up homeless, but no one enters homelessness without first losing their home. Investing in eviction defense and finding dedicated funding for this vital program will not only save taxpayer money in the long run, but will help the most vulnerable among us.
Promote the programs to the public
We don't want the first time someone learns about their guaranteed eviction defense rent payment assistance to be after they received a threatening letter from their landlord. Tenants who are on the edge of homelessness need to know their rights and that a lawyer is available to help them for free.
Mailing a letter to every one of the 360,000 households in San Francisco would cost about $112,3201 ($40,300 (at nonprofit rates) in postage plus about $72,000 in printing). This small cost would inform every resident of the city of their rights as tenants, the options available for people thinking of fleeing an abusive partner, or anyone who needs help but doesn't know who to ask.
But we shouldn't stop there. California already requires landlords to affix certain notices, warnings, or addenda to their leases to inform tenants of their rights. If you've signed a lease in the past decade you've probably seen something about Prop 65 and how your building will almost certainly give you cancer. At the very least, you've seen this sign:
Here's another example, drawn directly from my lease:
HAZARDOUS MATERIALS DISCLOSURE; LEAD WARNING: Pursuant to Section 25249.6 of the California Health and Safety Code, Landlord hereby makes the following required disclosure: “Warning - the Unit, the Building and the Development contain chemicals known by the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.” Housing built before 1978 may contain lead-based paint. Lead from paint, paint chips, and dust can pose health hazards if not managed properly. Lead exposure is especially harmful to young children and pregnant women. Before renting pre-1976 housing, landlords must disclose the presence of known lead-based paint and/or lead-based paint hazards in the dwelling. Tenants must also receive a federally approved pamphlet on lead poisoning prevention. The disclosure is attached hereto as Attachment C.
San Francisco should force landlords to inform tenants of their right to eviction defense, rental assistance, and how to report health & safety violations. This would come at almost no cost to taxpayers (except the one-time costs associated with writing the law), and pay dividends over time.
Build more
The most obvious way to keep people from becoming homeless is to build more homes in order to lower the market rate of housing, build publicly subsidized housing for people with very low incomes, and build supporting housing for people who can't take care of themselves.
It's honestly so obvious that it barely bears mentioning, but in San Francisco obvious truths are often elusive.
YIMBY Action, YIMBY Law, and California YIMBY have done great work locally and at the state level to push California to be more housing-friendly. Recent laws from Senators Scott Wiener and Nancy Skinner, and Assemblymembers David Chiu and Buffy Wicks have moved the needle on liberalizing housing production and holding cities accountable for bad actions. Still, these solutions will take 10 years to have a clear effect on rents so we need to do everything we can in the interim.
A dose of prevention is worth a pound of cure
I hope it's clear that preventing homelessness, while costly, will not only save us money in the long term, but it's also the moral thing to do.
$112,320 = 360,000 * ($0.112 postage + $0.2 printing)