We searched high and low, spoke to many organizations and discovered a few things:
- The DAHLIA government housing program only runs on a lottery system - a process that obviously wouldn't be compatible with our Showering the Homeless campaign.
- San Francisco Department of Homelessness & Supportive Housing (HSH) has no contact information available but we hunted down the director's details. After many emails and Twitter DMs, we discovered that the director left the organization a few days ago and we're not even sure if anyone's currently at the helm of the HSH.
- From walking the streets of our gorgeous city, we came across multiple 'luxury apartment' signs with construction underway. In a city where the poverty levels are excruciating yet the most condensed billionaires on the planet reside in this same region, why are more luxury homes being approved? There are also various affordable housing apartments being erected but 'affordable' comes with a five tier system based on demographics and socioeconomic of the individual - it's a complex process.
- We know the ratio of homeless vs. affordable homes is lacking the correct percentage balance but something else seemed off kilter, and we couldn't place our finger on it.
Each time, we kept hitting a dead end until a random conversation with an organization answered multiple questions. We discovered that San Francisco's Planning Department receives applications by property owners, filing to convert their SRO (single room occupancy) building into a hotel. Here's the key: The owner always keeps a few units aside i.e. of the 100 SROs, they'll file 80 rooms to be used for hotel guests and keep 20 affordable housing units for themselves, yet the 20 units will not be available to rent as they never hit the market.
We spoke with the city's Planning Department who stated there was only one active case for an SRO conversion to a hotel: case 2018-002124prj at 54 Fourth St). Just over a dozen rooms would be kept aside for affordable housing - but never available to rent. As a result, the owner would happily pay a conversion fee which is the same thing as a penalty. They would rather be subject to a fine than rent out the units since they don't want tenants, don't want the legal responsibility that comes with tenants and certainly don't want to rent control their units. So they cough up a penalty and withhold the units instead. Here's a great story about it in the San Francisco Public Press - the article is three years old but still relevant today. It's the property owner's right to not rent but it should be a legal requirement, passed by Mayor London Breed, stating it's mandatory for them to market these SROs. This is paramount based on the housing crisis and lack of affordable homes, at an all time high.
Those units could be used even as a halfway, temporary home for our Showering the Homeless program, while the individuals are in transition of their first year, after returning to employment. Even though there's only one active hotel conversion case at the Planning Department, we're aware that there are dozens more that have been already green lit for hotel allowance, which equates to around 2000 vacant SROs, maybe even more. You can read more about SROs in this link.
SF CARES has a very long history of righting wrongs and advocacy achievements for the poverty stricken. We'll push to have these 2000+ SROs made available, possibly even to our program recipients.
Will you join us and/or help us? Will you donate to our Showering the Homeless program? Of course you will! Thank you in advance.
No comments:
Post a Comment