Featured in the San Francisco Chronicle:
San Francisco is pursuing purchasing four properties, scattered across the city, by the end of the year to turn into housing with supportive services for homeless people.
The city reviewed dozens of potential sites and settled on a motel in the Outer Mission, an apartment building intended for student housing in SoMa, a single-room occupancy hotel in the Mission and a tourist hotel in Japantown. Nonprofits will run the sites and provide services such as a case manager to deal with tenant issues and connections to treatment for substance use or mental health.
The properties will add 368 housing units, part of a total goal of creating up to 1,000 units using $400 million in local funding and a matching state grant that should become available in September. The exact amount from the state is not yet known. The purchases are part of the mayor’s goal to buy or lease 1,500 units before the end of 2022.
The need is dire: There were 8,000 homeless people in San Francisco at the last count in 2019, and advocates suspect the number rose during the pandemic. San Francisco has more than 10,000 people living in around 8,000 units of city-owned or leased permanent supportive housing.
Last year, the city moved thousands of people temporarily into hotels and bought two hotels with hundreds of units for new permanent housing for $74 million, using a combination of local funding and money from state program Homekey. Gov. Gavin Newsom has pledged $7 billion over two years for the program statewide.
Buying older buildings meant the city inherited problems — and some existing discontented tenants — but elected officials and advocates largely praised the purchases as a much faster and cheaper way to house homeless people than building new. Purchasing and rehabbing an existing property last year cost around $323,000 per unit, compared to an estimated $800,000 for a new unit of affordable housing.
Advocates have pushed the city to buy more using an influx of money from the voter-approved business tax hike Proposition C.
The city is also winding down its temporary hotel program and looking for permanent places for people, which the new purchases — one of which is already running as a temporary hotel — could help provide.
For the four sites under consideration, the city will conduct community outreach at the end of August. Officials will then ask the Board of Supervisors to approve the purchases and negotiate the final sale with owners, with the city mum on price until then.
The city hopes to scoop up 52 units at the Mission Inn motel on Mission Street south of Geneva Avenue and 25 units at the Eula Hotel, an SRO near 16th and Mission streets. The Panoramic, 160 units — a mix of studios and three bedrooms — in SoMa and the Kimpton Buchanan Hotel, 131 rooms in Japantown, are also in the mix.
Much of the city’s permanent supportive housing is concentrated in the Tenderloin and SoMa, but two of the properties are in districts with little homeless housing: the Outer Mission and Japantown. Supervisor Ahsha Safaí, who represents the district where the Mission Inn is located, has supported buying more hotels and every neighborhood doing “its fair share” to house homeless people. Still, the plan could create controversy in a quieter residential community.
“These are once-in-a-lifetime opportunities,” Safaí said. “For anyone who would be resistant to it, I would say you can’t complain about people living on the streets and not do something about ensuring they have housing.”
Some residents are already supportive. Steven Currier has lived in the Outer Mission for 28 years, currently seven blocks from the Mission Inn, and argued that people are “not only down and out in District 6 (where the Tenderloin is located),” but all over the city.
“Why not buy the hotel and transition these people who are homeless, which is a pandemic in itself, to put them in permanent housing?” he said. “It’s an honor for us to be able to help these people.”
It’s not the first time homeless programs have been set up in the district. Following complaints about trailers and vans parked on the streets, the city worked to open a space near Balboa Park where homeless individuals could live in their vehicles and receive services such as health care and connections to permanent housing.
Currier said the six-month community outreach process before the parking site opened was at times “very volatile, very vulgar.” As co-chair of the safe parking program’s community working group, he judged it a success, leading to help for those in need and fewer complaints about street conditions. The site closed so that affordable housing could be developed on the property.
Currier said he hopes a motel converted into homeless housing would be better received.
For Mission Inn owner Amit Motawala, the opportunity to sell was appealing as the pandemic dragged on. The motel formerly served contractors who wanted to avoid a weeknight commute back to the Central Valley and international tourists who needed an affordable place to stay.
As occupancy dropped dramatically, Motawala found another way to fill rooms last year through local nonprofit Swords to Plowshares, which provided emergency housing to formerly homeless veterans before they settled into a permanent place. Around half the rooms are still available for veterans, he said.
Selling to fill the rooms with more people in need seemed a natural fit.
“We saw this opportunity and we think it is the right move,” Motawala said.
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