Fielder proposal to protect unhoused families runs into opposition from ‘moderates’

Two of the board’s most conservative supervisors, who call themselves ‘moderates,’ Thursday attempted to kill a measure that would have called on the mayor to stop evicting unhoused families from city shelters after 90 days.

The resolution, by Sup. Jackie Fielder, came in the wake of complaints from families in the shelter system who said they were facing constant warnings that they might be “exited” from the system.

The meeting of the Government Audit and Oversight Committee got a bit heated at the end, as Sup. Steven Sherrill aggressively insisted that he had heard no evidence that families were actually facing the loss of shelter. Fielder calmly reminded him that several had just testified to their fear of that.

The Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing recently changed its policies for family shelters, imposing a 90-day limit on shelter stays—although providers can extend that three times, for as long as 30 days each.

At the end of those three extension, HSS can add unlimited additional extensions, Emily Cohen, the agency’s deputy director, told the committee—as long as the families are successfully interacting with a social worker and looking for long-term housing.

Three families have been denied extensions under the new policy, Cohen said, and one has been “exited.”

Cohen insisted that nobody who is meeting with their social worker and participating in a search for stable housing will be forced out of the shelters.

But Fielder told me she has heard otherwise (and some of the families who testified echoed that point). “Case managers aren’t taking it to HSH, and people say they are getting denied extensions,” she said. “What I have heard is confusion and fear.”

In fact, she asked at the hearing, if nobody is going to get forced out, why have the 90-day limit in the first place? All is seems to do is scare vulnerable families.

Cohen said the stay limit was put in place to keep the shelter waitlist moving—to encourage families to find other housing so the scarce number of rooms can be opened to other families. She proudly announced that the waitlist had gone done by 51 percent since the new policy took effect.

But that’s a bit misleading: Cohen also said during her testimony that several hundred families had been removed from the waitlist because of changes in eligibility.

Families living in SROs or doubled- or tripled-up in small apartments are considered more stable than people living in vehicles or on the streets, so they are no longer eligible for the city’s family shelter system, she said.

Many families will face the expiration of their shelter stays in May, Fielder said—and while Cohen promised they could all seek extensions, she said HSH had no intention of changing the policy.

The problem is that these families, many of them recent immigrants who speak primarily Spanish, are already traumatized. Even the conservative supes, Sherrill and Sup. Danny Sauter, said there’s a clear communication problem: The city has done a bad job explaining how the system works, and families are frightened of losing their last grip on shelter off the streets. A 30-day extension just sounds like a 30-day eviction notice.

Fielder put it simply: “If there is no intention to create fear and anxiety, why continue the policy? We can’t collaborate if families are coming to us with fear and in survival mode.”

Sauter and Sherrill, in what I can only call unctuous statements, insisted that they supported unhoused families. Sherrill even said he had great respect for Fielder and her “passion.”

Then they both said they would not support the measure—in fact, they said they wouldn’t do Fielder the courtesy of sending the resolution to the full board for consideration.

Instead, they both voted to continue the resolution “to the call of the chair,” meaning it won’t get to the full board unless Fielder can find six votes to pull it out of committee. This is what it means to be a ‘moderate’ in San Francisco today.

The resolution would have had no binding impact; the mayor and HSH set the policy for the shelters. But it would have forced all of the supes to take a stand, and if six voted to call on the mayor to change the policy, it might have had an impact.

Fielder has, however, made the issue big public deal, and it’s now going to difficult for HSH to immediately start “exiting” families.

In the end, of course, it’s about money. As Fielder put it, the city is trying to serve 500 homeless families. If HSH gave them each a $3,500 monthly housing voucher, the annual cost would be $21 million. That’s a fraction of the HSH budget, and about 20 percent of what the city spends on police overtime. It’s also, Fielder points out, less than the city is prepared to spend building a habitat for pandas at thezoo.

“We should be able to do that,” Fielder said.