San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie (D) has reneged on a key campaign promise to deliver 1,500 new shelter beds, something he’d suggested could help end the city’s housing crisis within six months. He’s modified his plan several times since taking office in January. Six months into his term, the city has fallen far short.
As of an executive order issued in March, the deadline for the new beds was pushed to September. Now, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, Lurie is abandoning the plan entirely.
“I can’t believe it took this long for them to see what someone could have told them six months ago,” Whit Guerrero, a member of the city’s Homelessness Oversight Commission, told Filter. “They have been terrible at collaborating. Rather than meeting with experts and coming up with strategies together, what has happened is they have met with providers, ignored their feedback, put out these delusional ideas forward and have had a ton of pushback from providers who have to carry these out.”
Guerrero supports adding targeted behavioral health services. But he stressed that the “high-acuity” portion of the city’s unhoused population is smaller than the mayor’s office suggests, and that the main focus should be on expanding affordable housing rather than expanding temporary shelter.
“The focus becomes less about homelessness and more about forcing people into treatment.”
Expanding shelter capacity means either building new facilities and loosening zoning restrictions in other neighborhoods, he explained, or simply adding more people into existing shelters that are already overcrowded.
“If something dramatic happens in a space where you have over 100 high-acuity people and you don’t have any say over who comes in, because the city just crams [them] in … staff don’t want to work there,” Guerrero said.
According to the San Francisco Standard, 436 beds have been added, or at least announced. But some were actually added while former mayor London Breed (D) was in office, and the majority—over 300—aren’t strictly emergency shelter beds, but include those at various treatment or other housing facilities. Around 250 beds have also been removed since Lurie took office.
“Whenever they start to focus only on substance use and mental health, then they become harsher with the treatment,” Maurice Byrd, a clinical training director at the Harm Reduction Therapy Center in the city, told Filter. “In San Francisco there’s an effort to arrest people … then they’re coercing people into treatment. The focus becomes less about homelessness and more about forcing people into treatment. I hope we shift the thinking that this is also about how we choose to spend our money.”
In June, Lurie proposed diverting money that had been allocated for permanent supportive housing—generated by the voter-approved Proposition C—towards building shelter beds instead.
“It makes sense to have shelters in other parts of the city. If everyone has the same concern about helping people then they should absorb some of it.”
The proposal was controversial among homelessness advocates, who argued that this would hurt people who have successfully transitioned out of homelessness because of the Prop C funds. Since Prop C began disbursing funds in 2020, it has led to the creation of 5,300 housing units in the city. Most of them are permanent, and 96 percent of households served through the program have remained housed. Byrd and Guerrero both opposed the plan to divert Prop C funding, and urged city leaders to keep it in place for permanent housing.
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors will soon consider a proposal to require each electoral district to approve at least one new shelter by June 2026—while also restricting any two shelters from being within 1,000 of each other.
“Most city shelters are in low-income neighborhoods—the Tenderloin, Mission and Bayview-Hunters Point,” Byrd said. “A lot of neighborhoods don’t want to have shelters in their backyards. There was a big fight to get the shelter in Embarcadero, because of the affluence of that neighborhood. It makes sense to have shelters in other parts of the city. If everyone has the same concern about helping people then they should absorb some of it. But we also need to expand housing into those neighborhoods.”
Lurie has opposed the proposal, and offered amendments wherein each district would “endeavor” to approve the shelters, by a final deadline that would be pushed back six months.
Image (cropped) via Reentry Council of the City & County of San Francisco
