At today’s Local Homeless Coordinating Board meeting, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s homelessness “czar,” Dariush Kayhan, briefed the group on new ideas for improving city-funded shelters that he and the mayor have been hashing over.
There were just a few, and most of them seem like they need coordination more than cash, but they all answer, to some extent, some of the calls for help that have been coming from the city’s homeless shelter system.
All of this comes from a Feb. 14 announcement by Mayor Newsom that he’d like to redesign the city’s shelters, (the day after SFBG published an expose on conditions inside.) At the announcement, Newsom discussed possibly consolidating shelters into larger facilities, offering more medical respite care, and bringing Project Homeless Connect into the shelters. Ultimately, he called on the people working in San Francisco’s homeless services industry to come up with for how to make shelters better.
Since then, a series of long, comprehensive meetings have been held to gather ideas from homeless people, shelter clients and employees, non-profit groups, medical and mental services providers, and advocates. Meetings were held at shelters and other places convenient to the homeless population (though at all the meetings I attended there was a lot of criticism that the forums weren’t drawing in enough actual homeless people.) Topics tackled included problems accessing the shelters and the quality of medical and other support services — and suggestions were plenty. The Local Board pulled together a report, outlining the most frequent, concrete, and consensual, the most repeated being: don’t reduce the number of beds. (Too bad: The Human Services Agency cut the shelter at Ella Hill Hutch from their budget, which means, as of June 30, 100 fewer mats will be available every night unless advocates rally the Board of Supervisors to put the funding back.) The other biggest cry was for more services in general, made more easily accessible, and a number of really smart ideas came out for how to do that and are included in the report [PDF].
Kayhan said he and the Mayor would be putting together an official response to the report with more concrete details of their vision. In the meantime, he threw a few ideas to the meeting.
They include: