Just like SJ, SF has trouble equitably spreading homeless shelters around the City
All 11 Supervisors stressed, three months ago, that SF shouldn’t pack shelters, clinics, and other services into just a few neighborhoods. Actually doing something about it is a different story. The exceptional Frisc reports
Rejected six years ago, a City Hall effort to make each San Francisco district host its share of homeless shelters and services is back. This time around, it has gained more traction.
Yet the latest proposal has also created the first notable disagreement between Mayor Daniel Lurie and some of his board allies.
Introduced in April, the new geographic equity law seeks to ease overconcentration of services in a few neighborhoods such as the Tenderloin, South of Market, Mission, and Bayview. First, it would require every supervisorial district to appprove at least one facility by June 30, 2026. The type of site could range from overnight shelters and longer-term “transitional” housing to clinics and programs that offer addiction treatment and mental health care.
The bill would also establish a 1,000-foot buffer between facilities, making it harder to open new services where they are already concentrated.
Sup. Bilal Mahmood, who represents the Tenderloin, Haight, and other central neighborhoods, is the main sponsor. “On the record, every supervisor has already voted and said yes to shelter in every district,” Mahmood tells The Frisc. He’s referring to a March resolution that urged the mayor to “explore and implement a fair distribution of new homeless shelters across all districts.” It passed unanimously.
Responding to pressure from Lurie and five supervisors, Sup. Mahmood made substantial changes to the bill, prohibiting new shelters, transitional housing, or treatment facilities within 300 feet of another facility or in neighborhoods where the share of beds exceeds the number of unhoused individuals. It no longer requires at least one shelter in every district. The amended legislation won unanimous approval in the Budget and Finance Committee July 23 and will go to the full board for a vote.
While many supervisors have called for more homeless services and less concentration of them, they might not want to take the political risk in making policy, notes one Tenderloin neighborhood advocate. “What’s right and what’s fair is the spread of homeless services throughout this entire city, because our homeless population comes from this entire city,” says Del Seymour, who runs a Tenderloin nonprofit and has served on a local homelessness services oversight board. “But it’s going to be a nasty fight. The west side doesn’t want to share these services. So what are we going to do, just go out and fight people?”
The political split isn’t just a west side thing. Progressives and moderates are also scrambled, just like when a similar bill came up in 2019. That effort came from then-District 6 Sup. Matt Haney, who now represents the eastern half of SF in the California Assembly. “The people who voted for it [in 2019] were the people having services crammed into their district, and the people who had no services in their district didn’t vote for it,” says Haney’s spokesperson Nate Allbee, who served on Haney’s staff at the time. “It wasn’t a progressive-moderate thing.”
Even if the bill is watered down or can’t withstand a veto, its support so far is a sign of progress in the city, says Haney spokesperson Allbee: “It shows you how much the attitudes have changed.”
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