Most of these tenants have physical and mental health conditions, substance use disorders, and emotional scars from significant trauma, and often need far more support than they receive in the century-old hotels.īowman said he lost his parents in a car crash when he was a child and then, in his 30s, felt abandoned by the rest of his family members after they learned he is gay. It ensured that homeless people with the most pressing issues, and those who had lived on the streets the longest, were offered rooms. In 2018, the same year Breed was elected mayor, HSH adopted a system called coordinated entry. Supportive housing SRO residents can be some of the city’s hardest-to-house people - and that’s by design. A significant number of other allegations, though, involved violent or destructive behavior that caused a serious risk to other tenants and employees. In some cases, the infractions, like those Bowman has been accused of, were frequent, but didn’t appear to pose a safety threat. The other half of the residents were evicted for a wide range of lease violations, from packing their rooms with clutter to assaulting neighbors and staff. The eviction count for the Granada Hotel includes cases only after it became supportive housing in late 2020. The unit count for the Baldwin Hotel is based on the number of occupied rooms. Some buildings are not on the city’s registry of residential hotels, but are classified as SROs by nonprofit operators and other city agencies. Source: San Francisco Sheriff's Department, Chronicle research Before local, state and federal laws largely barred landlords from evicting people over nonpayment during the pandemic and additional funding became available for rental assistance, nearly half of supportive housing SRO tenants who were formally evicted were kicked out for owing money. They found that the city’s poorest residents have often lost their homes for falling behind on rent. Reporters interviewed dozens of people who were in the midst of an eviction from an SRO, had faced one in the past or had been threatened with one. To understand how evictions affect San Francisco’s effort to house the homeless, The Chronicle created a database of hundreds of Superior Court lawsuits, obtained three years of records from the Sheriff’s Department and analyzed data from HSH. “I haven’t seen a situation where someone was evicted and they were OK.” “If they’re being evicted, they are going back out to the streets … or bouncing around from SRO to SRO,” said Andria Blackmon, a case manager at the Winton Hotel, an SRO in the Tenderloin. Under these circumstances, records show, people are typically forced out of SROs for the same issues that qualified them for supportive housing in the first place: poverty, mental illness, trauma and inability to care for themselves. Reporters found that the city agency - which reports directly to Breed - does not require nonprofits and their subcontractors to have standardized policies for preventing or limiting evictions, and sets no rules or guidelines for when a property manager can kick out a tenant. The Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, or HSH, signs contracts with nonprofit organizations to run day-to-day operations at the SROs, including evictions. And reporters found that the scope of the problem is even larger, as countless more people are forced out of residential hotels informally or through channels the city doesn’t track. The number represents about a quarter of all court-ordered evictions carried out by the Sheriff’s Department citywide from January 2019 to May 2022, though these SROs house about 1.3% of the city’s renters. This is the second installment in an investigative series. But by failing to provide safe and stable homes for the city's most vulnerable residents, local leaders have set many of them up to fail. Attempting to solve its homelessness crisis, San Francisco spends $160 million a year on permanent supportive housing.
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