Supervisor Ahsha Safaí introduced a resolution at the Board of Supervisors meeting today, urging the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing to address child homelessness by prioritizing families for shelter.
“In a city with almost 48 billionaires, it is unconscionable that we have children living on our streets when we have shelter beds that are vacant,” said Safaí, who wants the homelessness department to give families shelter or hotel vouchers the same day they make contact with city officials. Families who arrive at an access point, where families get referral to shelters and housing, should be allowed to extend their vouchers if there is no alternative housing or shelter, he said.
In addition, the resolution asks the city to create a multilingual public dashboard where families can monitor the shelter waitlist and their own progress toward entering permanent housing.
According to a school district report, 2,403 of the district’s 50,566 students were in families experiencing homelessness as of the 2021-2022 school year, or about 5 percent.
The San Francisco Unified School District does not track the immigration status of families, but several school staff said that this year broke records for newcomer families, many of whom are homeless. The 2022 homeless point-in-time survey did not give an exact count, but noted that several hundred families were likely living in single-room occupancy hotels.
In a dig at Mayor London Breed, whom he is running to replace in November, Safaí said that it will be instructive to see where the mayor’s priorities lie as the city begins its “budget fight,” when elected officials push their funding priorities.
“Do they lie with immigrants? Do they ride with working families? Do they lie with the people that have built this city and make this city a city for everyone?” Safaí asked.
Safaí’s resolution follows months of advocacy by the group Faith in Action, which has held several press conferences bringing attention to the plight of immigrant and homeless families in San Francisco. Last week, it brought hundreds of people to a Mission church to demand an end to family homelessness.
Supervisors Connie Chan, Shamann Walton, Dean Preston and Safaí earlier attended a rally partly organized by the group of immigrant families in front of City Hall. Chan, who came to San Francisco’s Chinatown with her single mother and younger brother when she was 13 years old, spoke of her own experience crowding into her aunt’s small apartment on Jackson Street as a newcomer.
Holding a sign reading “No más niños viviendo en la calle” (no more children living on the streets), Chan said it was “disappointing” to see the mayor roll out the “red carpet speech for the billionaires, for the developers, for the corporations, and for downtown” while doing little to address affordable housing, working people and immigrants. Chan was referencing Breed’s speech last Thursday, in which she announced her “30 by 30” goal to bring 30,000 new residents and students to downtown by 2030.
The crowd cheered as Chan touched upon the matter of belonging. “Immigrants belong in San Francisco,” Chan said. “In fact, we built San Francisco.”
Hector Salgado and Paula Hernandez have two school-aged children, one at Daniel Webster Elementary School and the other at Everett Middle School.
The family arrived in the city 17 days ago from Honduras, and have been struggling to get shelter ever since. They have slept under a bridge for eight nights, trying to stay dry in the rain.
“Sometimes we eat, and sometimes we don’t.” said Hernandez, who is now 18 weeks pregnant, “I’m not taking my medicine, either.” They will likely sleep on the street again tonight, too, they said.
Among the families that showed up at the rally, others had also come back from a night of sleeping in the cold rain. Jhoselyn Lucero Crispin Flores and her husband and two young daughters, ages eight and 13, had slept under a bus shelter until 3 a.m., when they were able to get into a friend’s car.
“It’s difficult for an adult to bear this, but even more so for a little one,” said Flores, who arrived in the city about three weeks ago with her family. Since then, Flores, who only speaks Spanish, has been calling HSH’s emergency hotel voucher program, but said that the phones have been answered in English — or that no one has picked up at all.
Amy Beck, a pediatrician who works at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, said that living on the street traumatizes children, causes hyperthermia, worsens underlying medical conditions, including asthma, and prevents children from doing well in school. “This is new for me, that parents actually report their kids experiencing homelessness,” said Beck. “And there is just no urgency.”
Matt Alexander, the vice president of the San Francisco school board, said he has heard from multiple school social workers that they wish the city would allow the school district direct access to information in the city’s homelessness tracking system, so that the social workers could interact with families without going through any additional bureaucracy.
If school social workers could access the city’s system, he said, they could ensure families are on the right track, understand the breadth of public resources available, and have access to those resources “much more quickly.”
Nick Chandler, a social worker at Buena Vista Horace Mann K-8 Community School who has worked there for nine years, said he is now seeing families staying in the shelter on-site for four to six months, much longer compared to the three to 12 weeks he saw regularly just a few months ago.
Chandler recalled that school social workers used to access the city system and could help families experiencing homelessness through a pilot program started some years ago. But that program was ended due to the pandemic. “It worked beautifully,” Chandler said. “I learned a lot from the pilot program and how the system works. But it was interrupted by covid.”
He said social workers like him would be able to “immediately” expand their offers of help if the city provides funding — and access to their data.
Added Hernandez, the mother from Honduras: “We just want someone to help us, to give us a dignified home for ourselves and our children, because we’ve spent a lot of time sleeping in the street.”
““In a city with almost 48 billionaires, it is unconscionable that we have children living on our streets..” That’s the right stuff.
Safai is sure a snake. He’s trying to become mayor so now he pretends to be a progressive and parade around with Chan and Preston. How about those three pay to get this family off the street that they just exploited for a rally or maybe Preston or Safai could house them in one of their houses or developer buddy houses. The city is a laughing stock because of this faux progressive grandstanding
How does this city, its mayor and others in power, get away with this? Much less, how do they tolerate looking at themselves in the mirror. Breed’s single goal is sweeping away or locking up poor people, and as the article points out, downtown beautification. A fraction of a percent of the billionaire’s fortunes would provide housing, care and education for all children in this city. Breed knows them, she benefits from their money. Good on Chan, Preston, Walton — and Safai is looking better and better. Think I might vote for him.