Finalist: Joaquin Palomino and Trisha Thadani of the San Francisco Chronicle

San Francisco spends millions of dollars to shelter its most vulnerable residents in dilapidated hotels. With little oversight or support, the results are disastrous.

For two years, this has been Pauline Levinson’s home:

A run-down, century-old hotel in the Tenderloin, where a rodent infestation became so severe that she pitched a tent inside her room to keep the mice away.

Where residents have threatened each other with knives, crowbars and guns, sometimes drawing police to the building several times a day.

Where, since 2020, at least nine people have died of drug overdoses. One man was discovered only after a foul stench seeped from his room into the hall.

Levinson is one of thousands of poor, sick or highly vulnerable people left to languish and at times die in unstable, underfunded and understaffed residential hotel rooms overseen by a city department that reports directly to Mayor London Breed, a yearlong investigation by The San Francisco Chronicle found.

In a complex arrangement, the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, or HSH, pays nonprofit groups to provide rooms and aid to formerly homeless people in about 70 single-room-occupancy hotels, known as SROs, which the nonprofits generally lease from private landlords. The buildings are the cornerstone of a $160 million program called permanent supportive housing, which is supposed to help people rebuild their lives after time on the streets.

But because San Francisco leaders have for years neglected the hotels and failed to meaningfully regulate the nonprofits that operate them, many of the buildings — which house roughly 6,000 people — have descended into a pattern of chaos, crime and death, the investigation found. Critically, the homelessness crisis in San Francisco has worsened.

To understand why more and more people are homeless despite a broad and expensive push to house them, Chronicle reporters obtained tens of thousands of pages of inspection records, incident reports, city contracts, police records and internal city emails through the California Public Records Act. They spent months interviewing more than 150 supportive housing tenants and employees — many of them in buildings operated by the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, the city’s biggest nonprofit SRO operator — and observing conditions in 16 hotels.

Among the findings:

• HSH says its goal is to provide some residents with enough stability to enter more independent housing. But of the 515 tenants tracked by the government after they left permanent supportive housing in 2020, a quarter died while in the program — exiting by passing away, city data shows. An additional  21% returned to homelessness, and 27% left for an “unknown destination.” Only about a quarter found stable homes, mostly by moving in with friends or family or into another taxpayer-subsidized building.

• At least 166 people fatally overdosed in city-funded hotels in 2020 and 2021 — 14% of all confirmed overdose deaths in San Francisco, though the buildings housed less than 1% of the city’s population. The Chronicle compiled its own database of fatal overdoses, cross-referencing records from the medical examiner’s office with supportive housing SRO addresses, because HSH said it did not comprehensively track overdoses in its buildings.

• Since 2016, the year city leaders created the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, the number of homeless people in the city has increased by 56%, according to data exclusively obtained by The Chronicle that shows how many people accessed services. At least 19,000 people were homeless in San Francisco at some point in 2020, the most recent year for which data was available from the health department.

• Residents have threatened to kill staff members, chased them with metal pipes and lit fires inside rooms, incident reports show. At the Henry Hotel on Sixth Street, a tenant was hospitalized after a neighbor, for a second time, streamed bug spray into their eyes, public records show. Last May, less than a mile away at the Winton Hotel, a resident slashed another tenant’s face with a knife, leaving a trail of blood out of the building. Much of the instability stems from a small group of tenants who do not receive the support they need.

• Case managers who support SRO residents have overseen as many as 85 tenants apiece in recent years — five times higher than federal recommendations — in part because residential hotels receive as little as $7 a day per room for supportive services. That’s far less than the $18 per day per unit that HSH says is necessary for proper staffing for tenants seeking health care, job training and other assistance. Meanwhile, most of the caseworkers make well below a living wage; some are on the verge of homelessness themselves.

• Broken elevators trap elderly and disabled tenants on their floors, shuttered bathrooms force people in wheelchairs to rely on portable hospital toilets, and water leaks spread mold and mildew through rooms. Since 2016, city building inspectors have cited supportive housing SROs for more than 1,600 violations. Despite these problems, HSH has at times allocated hundreds of thousands of dollars less in annual funding for maintenance, repairs, and the hiring of workers like clerks and janitors than what the agency itself has deemed adequate.

• In 2019, the Board of Supervisors considered a ballot measure to create an oversight commission for HSH, which has 192 employees and one of the largest budgets among city agencies. But Breed lobbied against it, saying a commission would create more bureaucracy and that it was important she maintain direct control of the department. The measure died.

• HSH pledged to create a metrics-driven system to hold its nonprofit operators accountable by 2019. Yet Breed has allowed the department to push back this self-imposed deadline twice. HSH officials acknowledged in October that they had not issued a single plan of correction to housing providers, even as some programs have fallen egregiously short.

Left in decrepit buildings with little support, many SRO residents have become increasingly desperate.

Timothy Isaiah, 57, whom the city placed on an upper floor of the West Hotel even though he uses a wheelchair, said he repeatedly missed chemotherapy for his prostate cancer last year when a broken elevator trapped him in his room. Public records and interviews confirm that the elevator was inoperable for six weeks this winter.

Blocks away, at the Baldwin Hotel, Richard Brustie said he became so fed up with the conditions that he and his girlfriend left in January. They opted to live in a tent outside instead.

“I moved in there and the kitchen sink had human shit in it, and the hotel has black mold,” said Brustie, also 57. Past public inspection records confirm similar violations in the Baldwin’s common areas. “So we said screw that, and we started sleeping on the streets.”

After The Chronicle made repeated requests to interview the mayor, Breed — who was briefed by HSH on the findings of this investigation — was made available to speak to reporters by phone for 13 minutes.

The mayor acknowledged that many of the city’s SROs have issues and said people “should not have to live in these conditions.” She blamed the nonprofit operators and called for them to receive more scrutiny — a case she has been making since 2018 when she ran for mayor.

“It’s important that we make sure that the resources we’re providing are being used for the purpose that they’re intended to be used for,” Breed said.

Asked why she has not pressed HSH to hold nonprofits accountable for conditions in the SROs, Breed largely blamed the coronavirus pandemic, which began nearly two years after she took office. Breed declined to comment on whether the city had underfunded some SROs, and said she did not have information in front of her that would allow her to say what she had done as mayor to improve the city’s most troubled buildings.

Shireen McSpadden, who became director of HSH in May 2021, said in an interview that she inherited an SRO stock that city leaders had inadequately funded for years. But, McSpadden added, she would rather see people inside than on the streets, even if it’s in a building that “isn't quite as good as it could be.”

After The Chronicle inquired about the lack of corrective action plans issued to nonprofits, HSH said it had implemented two since December — the first since the department was created in 2016.

In addition, McSpadden said HSH is in the process of directing millions of dollars into the older SROs to attempt to create calmer, safer and better-maintained homes, while also requesting additional money from the mayor’s office in the upcoming budget.

“Every single time we make a decision, we're making a decision about people's lives,” McSpadden said. “As we do this, we may be saying, ‘We're serving fewer people because we're going to focus on making sure that our buildings are really in great shape.’ ”

More than a third of the city’s supportive housing SROs, including many that struggle with chronic problems and funding shortfalls documented by The Chronicle, are run by the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, or THC. Randy Shaw, the nonprofit’s director, defended his buildings as “high quality” and blamed the city for placing only the most high-need tenants in his SROs without providing adequate resources and staffing to support them.

“We throw all these people into our hotels who have no demonstrated ability to live independently, who have severe problems and need to be elsewhere,” Shaw said, adding that there’s often nowhere else for them to go.

When done right, permanent supportive housing is the most effective and humane way to address homelessness, according to years of peer-reviewed research. It can give people the stability, resources and attention to address problems that were aggravated by their time on the streets, including serious health conditions, drug addiction and poverty.

Some supportive housing SROs in San Francisco are relatively well funded, with bigger budgets to maintain buildings and clinically trained staff members who can meet residents’ needs. The city and several nonprofit organizations have also purchased their own hotels and spent millions of dollars to refurbish them with private bathrooms, kitchenettes, and modern plumbing and electrical systems.

Public records and interviews revealed fewer deficiencies and complaints in many of these programs.

But of the roughly 70 supportive housing SROs in San Francisco, reporters found that most were beset either by housing code violations, understaffing, persistent calls to 911, frequent drug overdose deaths or widespread complaints from tenants.

These properties have rooms that are often smaller than what the city allows for a standard parking space, in buildings where tenants typically share a bathroom and kitchen with neighbors. Many residents in these hotels struggle with drug addiction or have mental and physical disabilities, their lives upended by financial crises and other traumas.

The SROs are clustered in and around the Tenderloin, a neighborhood riddled with so much crime and open drug use that Breed in December declared a 90-day state of emergency there. By allowing people to live in such conditions, San Francisco has spent hundreds of millions of dollars but still failed to help those most in need — and only hindered its efforts to tackle the ever-worsening homelessness crisis.

“We’re shooting ourselves in the foot,” said Margot Kushel, a UCSF researcher and national authority on best practices in supportive housing. “We can’t (house) people who are incredibly high-risk and not give them the services they need. It will not work.”

Breed is not the first city leader to rely on Tenderloin SROs to house homeless people. One mayoral administration after another has used the properties to get as many people off the streets as quickly as possible, while failing to address the living conditions inside. San Francisco’s debilitating affordability crisis and fierce resistance from residents to creating supportive housing in wealthier neighborhoods have fueled the approach.

During her 2018 campaign for mayor, Breed — who regularly invoked her own childhood in substandard public housing — promised to look closely at the city’s investment in homelessness services, the bulk of which goes to supportive housing. San Franciscans “deserve accountability,” she said shortly after she was elected.

Last year Breed pledged to take San Francisco’s supportive housing system in a new direction. She expanded the distribution of rental vouchers so more people can live outside of Tenderloin SROs, and boosted funding for support services and maintenance in newer programs — most of which have private bathrooms and in-unit kitchenettes.

“That is so important,” she said this month at a news conference for the Garland Hotel, a newly renovated SRO. Officials showed reporters a spacious room with two large windows, a private bathroom and a kitchenette with a stone countertop. “I want us to move towards places like the Garland … that will allow people to live in their own space, and live their lives with dignity.”

Yet Breed has made the same political calculation as her predecessors: pour money into new programs while overlooking the thousands currently living in underfunded hotels.

While the bulk of her budget this year comes from Proposition C — a 2018 business tax that may be spent only on new homelessness services — Breed has made relatively little additional funding available during her four years in office to improve the existing SROs. Less than 2% of the current homelessness budget will be spent boosting services in older supportive housing sites.

Tenants and advocates fear the city will create a two-tiered system: In new programs created under Breed, people will live in better-maintained buildings in safer neighborhoods and receive far more help as they try to move on from their time on the streets. In the older programs, people like Pauline Levinson will continue to struggle.

Levinson, who attended Lowell High School and San Francisco State University, wound up at the Jefferson Hotel in 2020 after leaving an inpatient drug-treatment program. When the city offered her a room for $500 a month, she envisioned a stable home where she could re-establish relationships with her three children and save up for an apartment.

Instead, at the hotel in the heart of the Tenderloin, ceilings have collapsed on tenants, thieves have stolen from their rooms, and bedbugs have left welts on their arms and legs, according to public records and interviews with 15 residents.

Haunted by the death of a good friend in the building, Levinson said she recently tried to retrieve the woman’s belongings from the trash room after staff members threw them away. But they had already been soiled by garbage.

Levinson is deteriorating, she acknowledges. After slapping a friend in the hallway, getting into arguments with neighbors and staff members, and racking up noise complaints, she is fighting the THC’s attempt to evict her. Levinson and the nonprofit agree that she would be better off in a smaller building with more support — but such options are rare in San Francisco.

“I’ve got to get out of here,” she sobbed one day in January. “This is a nightmare. People give up in these places. There really is no hope.”

Fifteen years before Levinson moved into the Jefferson and more than a decade before Breed took office, a young mayor with lofty political goals made an eye-popping proposal. He was going to end the worst of San Francisco’s growing homelessness crisis within a decade.

That politician is Gavin Newsom, now the governor of California.

A major pillar of his plan was a city ballot measure known as Care Not Cash, which would slash monthly welfare payments to homeless people by hundreds of dollars, to as little as $59. The new policy — based in part on the belief that generous cash payouts drew homeless people into San Francisco and funded drug use — launched in 2004, the same year Newsom became mayor. In exchange for less money, people would be offered a place to stay.

But there wasn’t enough housing available. Scores of people were reportedly stuck in emergency shelters, with little money and nowhere else to go. Sister Bernie Galvin, a Roman Catholic nun who advocated for the homeless, told reporters before the launch of Care Not Cash that it was “heartless, ruthless and basically immoral.”

Facing backlash, Newsom scrambled to find housing. The solution: His administration would secure the 100-year-old residential hotels concentrated in the Tenderloin and South of Market, or SoMa.

Built mostly in the aftermath of the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906, these hotels first housed seafarers, dock workers and other laborers. With sparse amenities — small rooms, thin walls and shared bathrooms — the hotels were frequently used for temporary stays as the city’s new arrivals saved for better housing or followed work elsewhere.

Beginning in the late 1940s, most of the properties were torn down or converted to make room for apartments, office buildings and tourist hotels. Many of those that remained fell into disrepair; welfare officials started using the rooms as shelter for the unemployed and elderly.

Then, starting in the 1980s, the state and federal governments slashed billions of dollars in funding to subsidized housing programs and mental health services. As rents in San Francisco soared and affordable housing options like SROs shrank, thousands of people were forced out on the streets.

By the early 2000s, the city said roughly 8,640 people were homeless in its biennial count, meaning they were living either outside, in an emergency shelter, or in other tenuous circumstances.

Similar to today, sleeping bags lined downtown sidewalks, prompting outrage from business groups and residents who pressured Newsom into action. His administration worked with nonprofits to purchase SROs or — more often — to negotiate long-term contracts with their owners to house homeless people.

Leasing buildings was far faster and cheaper than buying buildings, or constructing new ones, especially in pricey San Francisco. Strict laws that prevented demolishing SROs or flipping them into tourist hotels or apartments unless the owners paid a hefty fee also meant the properties were here to stay, though many of them were mostly vacant. They could remain underutilized structures for the city’s poorest residents, or be used to house homeless people.

The arrangement, called master leasing, is a boon for building owners, who can secure more than $1 million in rent each year. About 15% of the leased SRO units were funded by the local health department and provided robust on-site support. The rest, including the Care Not Cash hotels, were overseen by the city Human Services Agency and offered much less help.

Still, in 2008, a city audit concluded that Care Not Cash was “generally achieving its goals” by moving people indoors, keeping them housed, and offering mental health and drug treatment services. Newsom told reporters it was “a story of success beyond our imagination.”

“Thousands of people were being helped by this,” Steve Kawa, chief of staff for both Newsom and his successor, Mayor Ed Lee, said in an interview last year. “And it’s not just that they have a place to live that’s clean and safe — but they’re also getting the care they need to have as human beings.”

But by 2011, when Newsom left San Francisco to become lieutenant governor, the number of homeless people in San Francisco had remained unchanged. That left Lee, the newly appointed mayor, facing the same political dilemma of thousands sleeping on the streets and increasing demands to do something about it.

Like Newsom — who through his office declined to be interviewed for this story — Lee looked to SROs in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.

But as the city approved contract after contract, it became apparent the approach was falling short. From 2014 and 2016, several audits and public reports found a lack of on-site support and oversight in the SROs.

Case managers’ interactions with residents were often limited to just a few referrals for basic services or written notes about paying rent. Insufficient monitoring by city agencies made it difficult to “track the actual outcomes of supportive housing residents and whether supportive housing programs are effective,” a report by the city Budget & Legislative Analyst’s Office warned.

In master-leased SROs overseen by the Human Services Agency, two-thirds of tenants left within three to four years. Alarmingly, many appeared to wind up homeless again: According to the report, they increased their use of homelessness and emergency services or landed in jail, suggesting that their situation had “worsened.”

A separate study on all SROs by the local health department noted that some hotels were so neglected that “even the most basic functions like bathing, accessing food, and socializing were a struggle” for residents.

Faced with growing calls to fix the system, Lee — who died of a heart attack in 2017 while in office — announced a plan to transform San Francisco’s response to homelessness.

He moved oversight of the SROs and other homelessness programs from a tangle of city agencies to just one: HSH. Lee pumped the new agency’s budget with $202 million — the majority of which went to supportive housing — and promised that the city's investment would lead to better coordination and results.

By 2020, the mayor said, the city would end homelessness for thousands of San Franciscans.

“We will not move them from corner to corner. We want to have sustained support for them,” Lee said at a 2015 news conference, standing in the lobby of the newly refurbished Baldwin Hotel on Sixth Street in SoMa. “This is a world-class city, and we have a world-class heart.”

Christopher Harris’ room was infested with mice and cockroaches, and was so small that when he stretched out his arms, he could nearly graze the opposite walls with his fingertips. This was the Baldwin Hotel in the summer of 2020, five years after Lee’s news conference.

The city had placed Harris, 29, at the Baldwin after the car he was living in broke down. A few months later he was moved to a slightly larger unit near the trash room, which overflowed with so much garbage that the door wouldn’t shut, filling his room with a putrid odor that he tried to mask with candles and incense.

A group of neighbors standing on the sidewalk outside the Baldwin complained of vermin, leaking ceilings and clogged toilets, issues that were previously cited in building inspection records. One man in a wheelchair told The Chronicle his room was so slanted that he rolled across it.

“I really hate it,” Harris said in an interview in June. “It makes me really sad, depressed, isolated.”

A Chronicle analysis of data from the city’s building inspection agency found that since 2016, San Francisco’s supportive housing SROs have been cited for at least 1,600 housing or building code violations. A review of thousands of pages of health department reports revealed scores of additional hazards.

HSH has not adequately funded maintenance in many buildings, or stepped in when nonprofits and private landlords responsible for addressing bigger structural issues have failed to make quick repairs. As a result, these shortcomings have been allowed to fester with few consequences, the investigation found.

​​The citations reviewed by The Chronicle cover everything from missing room numbers to ceilings on the verge of collapse, yet offer just a glimpse into the conditions of many hotels. During visits to 16 SROs, reporters observed dozens of issues that were not investigated or cited by inspectors: a sweltering room heater stuck at 81 degrees; a pitch-black fourth-floor bathroom without power; the door to a vacant room taped shut, cockroaches spilling out of it.

At the Mission Hotel last summer, a cat jumped through the open window of Anthony Alexander’s ground-floor unit and parked itself in front of a hole in the molding. Mice scurry out of the wall so frequently, Alexander said, that the cat knows it just has to wait. Health inspection records show the Mission Hotel has previously been cited for rodent issues.

More than 1,100 of the violations cited by building inspectors in city-funded SROs were related to unsanitary living conditions or general disrepair. “Absolutely brown” water flowed from a sink faucet; “thick mold” covered a room; and a vinyl floor “appeared to be held in place by tape,” inspectors said.

In at least 68 documented cases, elevators were out of service for days or weeks, removing a lifeline for people dependent on wheelchairs and walkers. Some tenants have had to call the Fire Department to get someone to carry them up or down the narrow stairwells, incident reports show.

At the Cadillac Hotel in January, an elderly resident sat on the bottom step, unable to make it up to his room. The elevator was inoperable, according to inspection records. The Cadillac’s nonprofit owner and operator, Reality House West, did not return repeated requests for comment.

“There is no place for SRO tenants to go — there is no up,” said Mark Parsons, 67. He suffered a stroke last year and struggles to walk up the stairs whenever the elevator breaks at the Cadillac in the Tenderloin. “They are just a forgotten class of people, and I’m one of them.”

Eighty of the violations since 2016 cited a lack of services: shuttered bathrooms; heaters that either didn’t turn on or wouldn’t shut off; shower grab bars hanging off walls.

At the Hillsdale Hotel on Sixth Street, hot water was out for at least a week over the winter, prompting inspectors to call for an administrative hearing to speed repairs. Episcopal Community Services, a major supportive housing provider that manages the Hillsdale and Henry hotels, declined several requests for an interview.

Shaw, executive director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, said he regularly visited his hotels before the pandemic and did not see problems with maintenance and upkeep. When there are issues, Shaw said, his staff and the building owners address them as quickly as possible.

Shaw blamed residents for some of the violations documented by The Chronicle. He said some SRO tenants have hoarding disorder — a mental health condition marked by difficulty discarding possessions — and that this behavior attracts pests. Other residents have vandalized buildings and drilled holes in their units, he said, resulting in citations.

“Is every person a victim?” Shaw asked. “There’s no question that there’s a greater challenge housing our population because of the difficulties with the tenants themselves.”

But The Chronicle found that many residents do not contribute to the substandard living conditions to which they are subjected. Rather, these conditions put a heavy burden on people already dealing with physical and mental health challenges.

In January, at the Jefferson Hotel, Tony Evans showed a reporter how he must struggle to pull a small refrigerator out of his closet to sweep away mouse droppings that build up. Evans, who’s disabled by a back injury, said he goes through the same precarious routine three times a week.

A health inspector in December confirmed that mice had come into some tenants’ units when they left their doors open to air their rooms out.

Down the hall, Joseph Atchan pointed to a rough patch in his ceiling where he said it had recently collapsed, raining debris on him and cutting his hand. He showed reporters a photo of the damage. As he spoke, his clothes hung from a thin ledge above his bed; there was no other space for them in his small unit.

“They just put people in these places — they don’t ask them what they need, they don’t help them out, they just leave them stuck,” Atchan said.

City contracts require nonprofit organizations to maintain their buildings in “sanitary and operable condition.” They must frequently clean common areas, remove trash, provide pest control, and repair smaller plumbing and electrical issues.

A large chunk of the money they receive from the city — as much as $1,100 per unit — often goes straight to the buildings’ private owners to cover the leases. These owners are typically on the hook for major repairs, like fixing inoperable elevators and structural problems, though public records show it can take weeks or even months for them to address these issues.

Dipak Patel, who owns several supportive housing SROs leased to the city, said the delays are often out of his control because major repairs can take time, especially in century-old buildings.

For example, the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corp., the nonprofit that owns and operates the West Hotel, said repairs were held up on the broken elevator that stranded Timothy Isaiah in his room, in part because the pandemic delayed the delivery of parts and state inspectors took weeks to sign off on the work.

Meanwhile, some nonprofit directors say the remaining funds aren’t enough to promptly fix all of the problems, let alone properly staff the buildings with janitors and maintenance workers.

After paying rent to property owners and hiring case managers, some building operators are left with as little as $740 per unit each month to clean common areas, make repairs, turn over rooms and provide 24-hour front desk staffing — 33% less than the standard funding for programs opening under Breed today. When things break, nonprofit officials say, there’s often not enough money or staff to quickly fix them.

“If you can't have desk clerks, janitors, case managers and maintenance workers, you can't make this model work,” said Lauren Hall, co-founder and director of DISH, or Delivering Innovation in Supportive Housing, a nonprofit that manages some of the city’s better-funded SROs. “It’s not a model that’s broken. It’s a model that’s under-resourced.”

Presented by The Chronicle with a detailed breakdown of the funding disparities in supportive housing, HSH officials said they were in the process of adding roughly $3.4 million for “repairs and improvements” across all of their master-leased hotels, as well as for deep cleaning and increased janitorial staff at certain properties.

Still, in some cases, the problems can’t be entirely explained by funding: At the Baldwin Hotel, where Christopher Harris lived, the THC was authorized to receive $3,300 to $3,600 per month in rent payments and taxpayer dollars for each unit last year — about $1,000 more than the average rent of a studio apartment in San Francisco.

That funding is higher than at most of the THC’s other properties because of millions of dollars in federal support to house chronically homeless adults with diagnosed disabilities.

Despite the large price tag, inspections and complaints at the Baldwin unearthed a mountain of problems in the past six years, according to city reports: feces in the communal showers; a sink hanging off a wall; a broken elevator that forced staff to deliver food to tenants stuck on upper floors; and an elderly disabled man living amid a “tremendous amount” of cockroaches.

Through interviews and by obtaining internal HSH emails, reporters learned of at least three separate instances in which tenants fled the building to sleep outside.

“Residents were saying all the time that it was worse than being on the streets,” said Lizz Cady, a former employee who oversaw support services for the Baldwin when it first opened.

Shaw denied that the nonprofit was responsible for the conditions inside the Baldwin. He blamed the city, saying leaders never should have placed such a high-need population there. The building has nearly 200 units and extra-small rooms, and is located on a crime- and drug-ridden stretch of Sixth Street.

Living conditions became so untenable that, in 2018, the THC — not HSH — attempted to sever its contract, worth up to $7.7 million per year, to run the Baldwin. In emails, the nonprofit’s deputy director told the city agency that it could not provide its “standard level of services” and that “tenants and staff feel unsafe.”

HSH increased the number of counselors and decided to leave at first 25 – then 55 – of the SRO’s rooms empty, but the problems persisted. In a 2019 annual report, THC staff said fights were common and maintenance staff had a hard time staying on top of frequent property damage.

Harris, struggling to adjust to life inside the Baldwin, was kicked out last July for fighting with other residents. “God is just trying to take me to a better place,” he said before lugging his belongings down to the street. “This place is really evil.”

By November, Harris and his small dog were homeless again, living out of a sedan with a shattered back window.

Then in December, after years of warnings and complaints, HSH and the THC finally agreed to stop using the Baldwin for permanent housing.

Their decision was based on a shared understanding: It was an unsuitable place for people to call home.

When London Breed ran for mayor in 2018, she made a promise: Her administration would audit the city’s spending on homelessness services, making sure nonprofit organizations were holding up their end of multimillion-dollar contracts.

“We need to understand what we’re doing now, whether or not we’re making the right investments and, more importantly, what is our long-term plan of action to address these issues,” she told KQED in October 2018, four months after she won the mayoral race.

HSH had been created in part to oversee San Francisco’s investment in services such as supportive housing. Officials would define what success looked like, then “drive our resources toward programs that meet the city’s strategy and the city’s priorities,” said former director Jeff Kositsky, speaking just before the agency launched. (Kositsky, who ran the department for four years, declined to comment for this story.)

In 2017, officials said they would develop comprehensive performance measures for all nonprofit contractors. HSH said it would put this enhanced oversight in place by the end of 2019 — and the need was urgent.

The agency planned to adopt a system called coordinated entry that would prioritize placing the most vulnerable people in supportive housing — those who had been on the streets longer and had more challenging health needs.

But today HSH has created only limited guidelines to determine how effective its programs are, a 2020 audit found, even though such standards were supposed to be in place more than two years ago.

As the first deadline for that metrics-driven plan neared in December 2019, HSH officials said they needed more time. They pushed their self-imposed deadline back until summer 2021. Breed allowed the delay.

Then, last summer, HSH director McSpadden told supervisors that her department would push back the accountability system’s debut again, in large part because of the pandemic. In an interview this month, she said HSH plans to have detailed goals and requirements folded into all new contracts by June 2023.

Breed acknowledged that specific performance goals are a “key component missing in terms of accountability,” and that she expects nonprofits to alert HSH to issues as they come up.

In the absence of stringent monitoring, the city has relied heavily on short reports filled out by supportive housing providers to measure success. These include self-reported data that is not independently verified by HSH — surveys that claim tenants are overwhelmingly happy with their housing, even in some buildings where The Chronicle uncovered serious concerns from residents.

Supervisor Matt Haney, whose district includes the Tenderloin and SoMa, tried to add a layer of supervision to HSH in 2019. The supervisor — who said his office receives a flood of complaints about conditions in supportive housing sites — proposed the creation of an oversight commission, similar to those that regulate San Francisco International Airport and the Recreation and Park Department.

Under Haney’s original proposal, the commission would have approved or declined most supportive housing contracts — those over $200,000 — before passing them to the Board of Supervisors for a final vote. Moreover, it would have gained the power to hold the agency accountable by, for example, opening an investigation into its activities or firing the department head. And the commission would have created a central public forum where tenants could share their grievances.

“When you don’t have oversight or regular audits, it’s hard to ensure quality and results,” Haney said. “We should have clear metrics and strategy, and that’s not in place right now.”

But Breed was “strongly opposed” to the idea, he said, because she “felt that putting in a commission makes it more challenging for her to be accountable for results.” Haney said Breed spent months lobbying his colleagues against it.

The measure, which required voter approval, needed six supervisor votes to qualify for the November ballot. On July 23, 2019, Supervisors Haney, Gordon Mar, Hillary Ronen and Shamann Walton voted to place the proposal on the ballot in that upcoming election.

But seven supervisors — Vallie Brown, Sandra Lee Fewer, Rafael Mandelman, Aaron Peskin, Ahsha Safaí, Catherine Stefani and Norman Yee — voted to delay consideration of the measure until a future election cycle, effectively killing the proposal.

In an interview, Safaí said he is generally supportive of the idea of a commission. But he said he agreed to delay the measure in 2019 because he wanted more time to consider the proposal amid “strong opposition” from the mayor’s office.

Breed told The Chronicle this month that she had opposed the commission because it would have added “another layer of bureaucracy that can make it difficult for us to try and do the work that we're here to do.”

Nearly three years later, Haney, who was elected last week to the California Assembly, has not revived the proposal. He said he did not have enough support and that the pandemic — which struck several months later — distracted the board with other priorities.

Today, HSH is the largest agency in the city without an oversight body.

Left with scant monitoring and inadequate staffing, many SROs have been overwhelmed by the same issues — mental health crises, crime and addiction — that they are supposed to be calming through stability and support.

The Chronicle reviewed police reports, records from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner and nearly 900 critical-incident reports that nonprofits must fill out whenever there’s a serious emergency in their buildings. They found that police and emergency medical technicians respond to some SROs every other day on average.

In 2020 and 2021, at least 166 people died of drug overdoses in supportive housing hotels, devastating residents and staff members, The Chronicle’s investigation found.

At the Baldwin Hotel last June, a tenant recalled seeing a man running down the hall yelling for Narcan, the nasal spray that reverses opioid overdoses, crying out that his girlfriend was turning purple. He wasn’t able to help her in time: She died, city records confirmed. The medical examiner came to cordon off the room.

Months later, at the Mission Hotel, flies swirled around the lobby as a minister held a service for two residents who had recently passed away. A stream of tenants shuffled through, glancing at the bouquets of plastic flowers on a small altar, but few stopped to participate in the all-too-familiar ritual.

In a February hearing, HSH officials acknowledged that living amid so much death is traumatizing for tenants and staff.

Increased prevention efforts, including installing hallway dispensers for Narcan, have helped bring down the number of fatal overdoses from a peak in 2020, officials said. Because it can take months for the medical examiner to determine a cause of death, complete data from last year is not available, but partial records show a decline in fatal overdoses across the city, including in SROs.

Still, HSH said at the hearing that it doesn’t track how many people overdose in supportive housing programs. In an interview this month, McSpadden said the agency is developing a monitoring system. She added that HSH is implementing an overdose prevention policy that, among other things, mandates additional training for SRO staff.

The problems go far beyond overdoses.

Thieves have ransacked tenants’ rooms, and residents have been assaulted with golf clubs, hammers and other weapons. At the McAllister Hotel on the edge of the Tenderloin in June 2020, a resident tried to saw a passage into a neighbor’s unit. The nonprofit operator, Conard House, did not return requests for comment about the incident.

Some challenges are inevitable when dozens to hundreds of people — many with physical and mental health conditions — are packed into old buildings with little privacy and support. Residents often arrive in poor health, or struggle with long-standing substance use after years on the streets.

Yet in some cases, HSH has not taken even basic steps to ensure a safe and healthy environment.

When the city converted the Winton Hotel on O’Farrell Street in the Tenderloin into supportive housing in 2016, HSH said it would serve as a safe and calm refuge for about 100 formerly homeless people, including many military veterans.

But reporters, reviewing public records and interviewing 20 current and former residents, found that the building has become riddled with crime and disarray. Much of it, tenants say, has been caused by a small group of people who need far more attention and support than the SRO offers.

Emergency responders have been summoned to the hotel at least 740 times since it became supportive housing. Of these calls, 190 involved a potential threat to someone’s life or major property destruction, according to records kept by the Department of Emergency Management, which dispatches police, fire and medical personnel to 911 calls.

Last April, a resident said she was moving her belongings into a hallway to escape a bug infestation when smoke started to billow out of her neighbor’s room. A sofa was engulfed in flames, according to the police report, triggering the overhead sprinklers and flooding the fourth floor with rust-stained water.

The next month, loud shouts echoed through the hotel. When residents peered out of their rooms, they found blood splattered on the floor. According to a police report, a resident had forced his way into a woman’s room to retrieve a stolen tablet computer. In self-defense, she stabbed him twice in the face with a scalpel.

The man was arrested and charged with misdemeanor trespassing. The woman, residents said, was later evicted.

Current tenant Patricia O’Donnell, who was homeless for more than a decade before the city placed her at the Winton, said she was grateful to be inside, “but it’s crazy living in there. Police come all the time.” As a reporter interviewed O’Donnell last May, a squad car pulled onto the curb outside the building and two officers went inside. They needed to defuse a “high priority” fight, according to 911 logs.

Assaults and mental health emergencies persisted at the building through 2021, and four people died in the hotel.

“If you have any kind of trauma, (this building) is going to enhance it,” said Jonathan Nelson, who moved to the Winton in July after the city-funded SRO where he had previously lived was shuttered by a fire. At the Winton, he said, people have broken into his room and dogs have lunged at him in the hallways. “I don’t feel safe at all,” he said.

Under internal guidelines, HSH is supposed to conduct site visits at supportive housing programs that receive federal funding, like the Winton, if serious issues are identified. But records obtained by The Chronicle show that agency staff members have not physically inspected the hotel in more than three years.

In September 2018, when HSH monitors last went to the SRO for an inspection, they checked on the basic upkeep of common areas and reviewed administrative requirements, such as whether tenant files were up to date and properly stored.

HSH then skipped physical inspections of the Winton in 2019, 2020 and 2021. Officials said they typically conduct in-person inspections every other year and that the pandemic disrupted their plans.

Instead, officials asked THC employees to complete a 15-question checklist attesting that they had met basic administrative duties, such as creating an emergency response and disaster plan.

Shaw denied that there were serious problems at the Winton, which he called a “beautiful” hotel. He said that in general, much of the crime in his SROs stems from personal conflicts that his staff has little control over. The Winton and other buildings are generally calm, he said, except for a few high-profile incidents that draw too much attention.

“We're a violent society,” Shaw said. “Let’s not act like there's something unique about SROs.”

Longtime Winton resident Anthony Thorp said he has given up hope that city leaders will fix the issues at the building. He does not blame the violence and disorder on his neighbors — many of whom, he said, are not receiving adequate support — but on the THC for not helping these tenants, and on the city for not stepping in.

“They’re neglecting these people; they’re throwing them into a room like cattle,” Thorp said. “There are some really good, decent people who care about this building. But all the negatives wipe that away.”

Many of the problems in city-funded SROs are aggravated by severe understaffing and wages so low that some nonprofit employees in the buildings are on the brink of homelessness themselves. This dynamic undermines the very point of supportive housing: to offer stability and attentive care for those most in need.

According to HSH’s guidelines, on-site counselors are supposed to work with a caseload of no more than 25 clients. That ratio gives staff members a chance to be a regular and reliable part of tenants’ lives, hosting events and connecting them with health care, job training and other services.

But The Chronicle’s investigation found that HSH seldom gives nonprofits enough funding to meet that standard — even as the city places some of the hardest-to-house people into SROs.

As a result, overworked counselors with annual salaries as low as $43,000 — well below what the federal government considers low-income in San Francisco — have little time to help residents overcome physical and mental challenges. Turnover is frequent, making it difficult for staff and tenants to build relationships and trust.

“They come and go,” said Jennifer Franklin, who moved into the Mission Hotel last summer after months living on the streets. “The one who did my intake, she was gone the next day. And then I had to meet another case manager, and start all over with my story.”

In 2020, the most recent data available, just 12 of the 42 supportive housing SROs that reported figures to the Department of Homelessness kept caseloads at or near a 1:25 ratio. Counselors working in at least 15 SROs handled 40 to 85 residents — so many that, according to experts in the field, they would have little time to offer meaningful assistance.

This lack of support exists even though the city moved forward in 2018 with coordinated entry, placing the people with highest needs into supportive housing.

Breed took office the year coordinated entry launched. Since then, supportive housing nonprofits have repeatedly raised concerns over the low pay and high caseloads: Though the adoption of coordinated entry placed more high-need residents in the hotels, they noted, the city did not alter those hotels’ contracts or provide more funding.

In public hearings, they have cautioned city leaders that staffing woes were threatening to undermine the very purpose of supportive housing. Employees, they warned, often had no choice but to call the police or threaten to evict the most challenging tenants.

Over the past four years, these nonprofit heads have asked for $26.6 million in additional funding to raise wages for the lowest-paid workers and improve services in their buildings, according to the Supportive Housing Provider Network, a membership group representing most nonprofit operators in the city.

But the Breed administration and the Board of Supervisors approved just $6 million in that period, effectively declining either to provide the nonprofits the resources they say they need or to hold them accountable for the poor conditions under the current funding. This amount was divided among all homeless service providers, including those offering street outreach, emergency shelters and housing.

The mayor’s office said in an email that city departments have had to tighten their budgets in recent years. Breed and the Board of Supervisors, the office said, receive “millions of dollars in requests for funding every year, far above what is available to spend from the general fund.”

In an interview, HSH officials said they are in the process of adding $1.1 million for support services across many supportive housing sites — though nonprofit providers have calculated that it would cost nearly four times as much just to raise salaries for all case managers to $58,000 per year.

Responding to questions about the 2020 caseloads, officials said they have since added case managers to some of the most understaffed hotels.

McSpadden said a new $9.8 million program run by the Department of Public Health and funded by Proposition C will also help by providing roving mental health services to tenants with the most significant needs. Prop. C funds can be spent only on new programs that help people who are currently homeless or prevent others from losing their housing.

The low salaries, challenging work conditions and constant turnover have frustrated people like Marissa Roarty, who said she has worked as a clinical case manager at several THC SROs that were short-staffed. When case managers are unable to proactively work with tenants, she said, problems often go unnoticed until they boil over.

In 2016, when Roarty was working at the All Star Hotel, she learned that a former resident was on an angry tirade in the Mission District and threatening Roarty’s life. “Where is she?” the man purportedly shouted as he barged into a nearby hotel. “I want to kill that bitch.”

Other residents have also threatened staff members at the All Star Hotel, critical-incident reports show.

For her safety, Roarty transferred to the Seneca Hotel on Sixth Street, but things didn’t improve there: The hotel’s small, dark rooms and dirty bathrooms set the Seneca’s residents on edge, she said. Inspection records show a history of plumbing issues in the hotel. Meanwhile, Roarty’s caseload nearly doubled, from 40 people to around 70.

“It’s hard to go beyond crisis management when you have such heavy caseloads,” Roarty said. “You’re putting on a Band-Aid rather than getting to the root of the issue.”

It doesn’t have to be like this.

Every other major West Coast metropolis  — Los Angeles, San Jose, Seattle, San Diego, Portland, Sacramento — bases 30% to 68% of its long-term housing for homeless people in “scattered site” programs, according to a Chronicle review of U.S. Housing and Urban Development data. Through this approach, people typically use vouchers to rent apartments on the private market, then case managers help them adjust to their new lives.

“When people get to make choices about where they live — what neighborhood they want to live in or don't want to live in — they’ll be more inclined to stay,” said Andrew Spiers, director of training and technical assistance at Pathways to Housing PA, a Philadelphia nonprofit that trains supportive housing providers in best practices.

Despite residents’ clear desire to live outside of a Tenderloin SRO — where they must share a bathroom and kitchen with strangers and have strict restrictions on who can visit — the scattered-site method has rarely been used in San Francisco. Last year, less than 11% of the city’s long-term housing units for homeless people were in such programs, by far the lowest rate of any large metropolitan region in the country, HUD data shows.

Experts have attributed the low rate to the city’s incredibly expensive rental market, leaving San Francisco overwhelmingly dependent on 100-year-old hotels concentrated in a few small neighborhoods.

While many of these buildings have fallen into disrepair, the city has proved that it knows how to do better. Some SROs are owned by nonprofits — rather than master-leased — and have been newly renovated to include private bathrooms, kitchenettes and larger rooms. Experts widely agree that such improvements lead to more stability and better outcomes for tenants.

“When people get into housing, and it's dignified and well run, we just see this massive transformation,” said Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness, a San Francisco advocacy group.“You can see it in people's faces. They just look different — so much more rested, and the stress lines on their face disappear. … It's just a really beautiful situation.”

In September, sunlight poured through a domed atrium into a bright, plant-lined lobby at the Kelly Cullen Community, a former YMCA that the nonprofit Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corp. spent more than $90 million to transform into housing for medically fragile homeless people.

A nurse tended to a resident with a deep cough, while the assistant manager greeted every person she saw. A flowering rooftop garden offered a calm escape from the frantic energy of the Tenderloin eight stories below.

The 172-unit building has rooms more than twice the size of those in most other SROs, with private bathrooms and kitchenettes. Five social workers, a licensed nurse, a psychiatric social worker and a money manager help residents adjust and stay healthy. Before the pandemic, staff members hosted movie nights, karaoke and other events in a renovated auditorium.

In the past year, Breed has pledged to open buildings that look more like Kelly Cullen. Using a record $1.1 billion budget for homelessness services and a windfall in state grants, she plans to buy hotels with private bathrooms and, when possible, kitchenettes.

By owning rather than leasing these properties, the city can more easily complete critical building upgrades. The mayor’s administration is also providing these new hotels with far bigger annual budgets for support services and property management, though they will not have the same level of staffing as Kelly Cullen.

Breed has also funded about 1,000 rental vouchers, providing formerly homeless people with more choice in where they live.

However, Breed’s massive investment will do little to improve the living conditions in SROs like the Jefferson and the Winton.

The $1.1 billion is earmarked almost completely for new programs, because much of the money comes from Prop. C. Just $14.2 million, or less than 2% of the funds, will go toward boosting services for residents in existing supportive housing hotels and apartments.

“The public wants people off the streets, and (politicians) are getting hammered with, ‘Solve this problem now,’ ” said Margot Kushel, the UCSF researcher. Better conditions for those housed years ago are “not what the public is really clamoring for.”

For the thousands of San Francisco residents living in poorly funded, staffed and maintained hotels, little will change — even though improving these SROs can be a matter of life or death.

In 2011, Joel Yates moved into the Hamlin Hotel in the Tenderloin. Maintenance of the building was adequate, he said, but his small room — comprising nothing more than a sink, a bed and a window that looked onto a wall — reminded him of a jail cell.

Yates had recently left a house dedicated to clean and sober living, and was early in his recovery. When he bumped into a neighbor on his floor smoking crack cocaine, Yates relapsed. (At least two people have suffered fatal drug overdoses at the Hamlin in recent years, records show.) He stopped eating and sleeping, lost his job as a maintenance worker and hoarded scavenged items to sell.

One day in 2016, as Yates was trying to sleep in his room, he struggled to breathe. At San Francisco General Hospital, he was diagnosed with cardiac distress, a result of kidney failure. If left untreated, he probably would have died.

When Yates returned to the Hamlin after weeks in a hospital bed, he said, he learned he had been evicted. The property manager accused Yates of failing to keep his room in “a clean, decent, sanitary, and safe condition,” court records show.

For six months, he slept in an emergency shelter. During this time, because of  his life-threatening illness, the city offered him rooms in several SROs. But he turned them all down.

Recently, the Hamlin’s owner, Chinatown Community Development Corp., completed a major renovation of the building, adding a new elevator, community spaces and kitchens, and updating the rooms.

But at that time, Yates explained, he preferred to be homeless rather than live somewhere like the Hamlin again.

“I knew what the conditions were,” Yates said. “I needed to heal. I needed to recover. And I needed a place where I wasn’t going to feel trapped.”

Then, in early 2017, Yates accepted a room at the Kelly Cullen Community. His kidney disease had made him eligible for the hotel, which housed homeless people with acute medical conditions. He asked his new case manager for a unit with a kitchen so he could eat healthy, and he asked to be able to see the sun.

Yates thrived after moving into Kelly Cullen. He stayed sober and took care of his health. He enrolled in a career development class and is now a community health worker. He joined a performing arts group with other SRO residents. He reconnected with family.

“God has blessed me,” he said of his placement at Kelly Cullen.

The only problem, as far as he can tell, is that he had to almost die to get there.

How we reported this story

San Francisco Chronicle reporters Joaquin Palomino and Trisha Thadani spent a year investigating the conditions inside the city's single-room occupancy hotels, or SROs, which provide supportive housing and have been identified by city leaders as a central tool in solving the homelessness crisis. Reporters interviewed more than 150 residents and front-line workers in the Tenderloin, South of Market and Mission neighborhoods, while visiting 16 buildings. Through dozens of requests for documents filed with six city agencies under California’s Public Records Act, reporters obtained and reviewed tens of thousands of pages of inspection reports, city contracts, police records and internal emails. When reporters learned that the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing did not track fatal drug overdoses inside supportive housing SROs, they created a database of fatal overdoses, cross-referencing hotel addresses with records from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. To quantify health and housing code violations in the hotels, reporters examined city data and detailed inspection reports that revealed frequent problems with maintenance and vermin in many buildings. They then spoke with city leaders, supportive housing experts and the hotels’ nonprofit operators about what they had found — that the city has caused immense harm by failing many of its most vulnerable residents.

CREDITS

REPORTING

Joaquin Palomino • [email protected]  • @JoaquinPalomino

Trisha Thadani • [email protected]  • @TrishaThadani

EDITING

Lisa Gartner • [email protected]  • @LisaGartner

Demian Bulwa • [email protected]  • @demianbulwa

VISUALS

Scott Strazzante • [email protected]  • @ScottStrazzante

Nicole Frugé • [email protected]  • @PhotoFruge

Guy Wathen • [email protected]  • @GuyWathen

COPY EDITING

Caroline Grannan • [email protected]  • @Caroline94127

DATA AND GRAPHICS

John Blanchard • [email protected]

Abhinanda Bhattacharyya

Hilary Fung • [email protected]  • @hil_fung

Dan Kopf • [email protected]  • @dkopf

Icons by ProPublica

DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT

Stephanie Zhu • [email protected]  • @stephzhu_

Danielle Mollette-Parks • [email protected]  • @daniellemparks

Hilary Fung • [email protected]  • @hil_fung

Ying Zhao • [email protected]  • @YingZhao0521

Evan Wagstaff • [email protected]  • @EvanWagstaff

PODCAST

Cecilia Lei • [email protected]  • @CeeLei

King Kaufman • [email protected]  • @king_kaufman

Robert Bowman scanned the aisles of a downtown Target. It was May, and the 49-year-old man with congestive heart failure was about to become homeless. He needed to buy a tent he could pitch on concrete, with fabric strong enough to withstand San Francisco’s summer winds.

He had lived on the streets before, in a life waylaid by trauma, loss and illness. But four years ago, he moved inside when the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing offered him a room at the Elm Hotel in the Tenderloin.

Bowman, though, repeatedly violated the Elm’s visitor policy and owed more than $2,000 in back rent. Now he faced eviction and an uncertain future. Standing in the Target, he spied a red Coleman tent locked in a glass case. The package showed it set up in a woodsy clearing, sun trickling through the trees.

“I’ll take that one,” he told a store employee, wondering where in the Tenderloin he would put it.

Mayor London Breed and her top deputies at the homelessness department have relied on single-room-occupancy hotels like the Elm, known as SROs, as a central solution to the homelessness crisis. Yet the Breed administration has spent millions of taxpayer dollars since 2019 to evict at least 410 people from the same SROs that promised to lift them from the streets, while failing to regulate the process or prevent people like Bowman from cycling back to homelessness, a Chronicle investigation found.

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. 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 Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, or HSH, signs contracts with nonprofit organizations to run day-to-day operations at the SROs, including evictions. 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.

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.

“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. “I haven’t seen a situation where someone was evicted and they were OK.”

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. 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.

They found that the city’s poorest residents have often lost their homes for falling behind on rent. 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.

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. In some cases, the infractions, like those Bowman has been accused of, were frequent, but didn’t appear to pose a safety threat. A significant number of other allegations, though, involved violent or destructive behavior that caused a serious risk to other tenants and employees.

Supportive housing SRO residents can be some of the city’s hardest-to-house people — and that’s by design. In 2018, the same year Breed was elected mayor, HSH adopted a system called coordinated entry. It ensured that homeless people with the most pressing issues, and those who had lived on the streets the longest, were offered rooms.

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.

Bowman 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. He has little income through disability benefits and suffers from bipolar disorder. After developing a potentially fatal heart condition, he relied on his small SRO room for some semblance of stability.

The most important thing for his mental health, Bowman said, is to be with his friends. But at times, the Elm’s strict limitations on visitors made that impossible without violating his lease agreement. “Part of my sanity is my friends,” he said. “I don’t have a family.”

Despite filling the buildings with high-need residents, the Breed administration hasn’t sufficiently staffed, funded or provided oversight for these SROs, many of which are plagued by vermin infestations and chronic maintenance problems, a previous Chronicle investigation found. This failure leaves frontline workers swamped, exacerbates tenants’ existing issues and allows problems to escalate.

Instead of getting the support they need, the most vulnerable residents often face eviction — and HSH offers no formal safety net to ensure they don’t end up homeless again.

Deputy Sheriff Alan Tam, who is part of the department’s Eviction Assistance Unit, said in an interview that he sometimes drives frail, elderly and disabled tenants to shelters after executing evictions from city-funded SROs.

“It would be great to have other places available to put them,” he said. “But then again, that’s what supportive housing is supposed to be.”

Over the course of two weeks, Breed declined multiple requests for an interview. After reporters offered to push back their deadline to accommodate the mayor’s schedule, a spokesperson said she would be “unavailable.” Nevertheless, The Chronicle provided Breed’s office with a summary of this investigation’s findings and asked for comment. The mayor did not respond.

In an interview, Shireen McSpadden, director of HSH, said all tenants sign a lease that clearly spells out the rules they must follow. Property managers often give residents many chances to address disruptive behavior, she said, but some people need to be removed to protect the well-being of the broader population.

“These cases are sometimes very, very complicated, and people have been through trauma and are holding onto behaviors that don’t work” in SROs, she said. “We don’t want to see anyone be evicted, (but) we know that there are circumstances that sometimes make that happen.”

McSpadden acknowledged the need for more consistent eviction practices. After months of inquiries from The Chronicle, she said HSH is working on standardized eviction policies for all supportive housing providers. The details are vague and, as of this week, McSpadden had not yet seen a draft of the proposal. But she said the guidelines will include a list of resources staff members can access when problems come up, and the steps they should take when tenants break rules.

In response to The Chronicle’s April investigation, San Francisco leaders took significant steps to address the broader deficiencies in SROs. In July, the Board of Supervisors approved a ballot measure for the November election that would create an oversight commission for HSH, and Breed earmarked $67 million of her $14 billion budget for improving salaries and staffing in residential hotels, as well as for making overdue repairs to some of the buildings.

McSpadden said HSH was also allotted $50 million in the current city budget for “homelessness prevention,” which includes emergency rental assistance, legal services and support services. Some of this money, she said, will go toward reducing displacement in residential hotels. The city has also expanded in-home support services for SRO residents who struggle to take care of themselves, and has launched a roving team of clinicians that will provide assistance to building staff, as well as physical and behavioral health services to tenants.

McSpadden cited HSH figures showing that in a typical year, just 2% of residents are evicted from supportive housing — a low number given the challenging population, she said.

“Permanent supportive housing, in the way it is set up, isn't going to work for everybody,” McSpadden said. But “it is a proven and successful intervention for a lot of people. And that's why we see very low incidences of eviction.”

The Chronicle, though, found that the eviction figures cited by HSH represent only part of the displacement: Over the past five years, housing providers have issued eviction notices to at least 4,760 additional SRO tenants — about 20% of households each year on average, before restrictions put in place because of the pandemic caused cases to drop. Housing providers filed lawsuits against 1,270 people, or nearly 5% of residents per year on average.

Many of those people appear to have left without a court fight or after striking a deal with property management to leave by a certain date in exchange for the lawsuit being dropped. The city does not track how often these cases occur.

What is clear is that the displacement from SROs undermines the city’s goal of fixing its homelessness crisis. People like Bowman, who could be housed, return to the streets.

In 2007, when Robert Bowman was in his mid-30s, he moved into a six-bedroom home in Antioch that his family owned. He said he was helping to pay off the mortgage, and hoped to gain equity in the property, but then the economy and housing market collapsed.

He lost his job and said he could no longer afford the $2,400 monthly payments. With little money and nowhere to live, Bowman decided to move to San Francisco, where he envisioned finding acceptance. For months, Bowman crashed with friends and slept in shelters.

Soon the Human Services Agency — a predecessor to HSH, which was created in 2016 — offered Bowman a room at the Coast Hotel (the name has since been changed to the Crosby Hotel). The SRO in the Tenderloin is operated by the nonprofit Episcopal Community Services, the second-largest supportive housing SRO provider in San Francisco.

Supportive housing SROs typically outline a number of rules about visitors in their lease agreements. Tenants can have people over only during established visiting hours, and are allowed a limited number of overnight guests each month. Everyone who enters the SRO must have a valid ID and check in with a desk clerk. If tenants break these rules too frequently, they can lose all visitor rights for 30 days.

Bowman struggled to adhere to the Coast Hotel’s restrictions on guests. Growing up, he said, “We always had people come over; we’d have big cookouts. That’s just what I’m used to. It’s a tough change to go from a normal life to an institutionalized one.”

In less than two years, Bowman violated the guest policy multiple times, according to court records. John Stewart Co., at the time contracted by Episcopal Community Services to manage the hotel, moved to evict him. Episcopal, which has overseen a relatively high rate of evictions compared with some other supportive housing nonprofits in recent years, declined to speak with The Chronicle.

Bowman left, eventually moving into a tent in the Dogpatch neighborhood with his boyfriend, Bryan Fikes.

Then, in 2018, an outreach worker from HSH successfully placed him at the Elm Hotel, also operated by Episcopal Community Services. Bowman used his general assistance income to pay $318 in monthly rent.

But the Elm had similar guest rules to the Coast. And Bowman allowed Fikes to stay in his room without permission, among other alleged violations. Within four months, Bowman was served with another eviction suit.

Although the vast majority of the complaint focused on Bowman’s alleged failure to follow the visitor policy, Caritas Management Corp., which has a contract with Episcopal to manage the Elm, also accused Bowman of selling “illicit drugs outside the building” on one occasion. In court filings and interviews, Bowman denied the allegation. “That’s not true,” he said.

When Caritas tried to remove Bowman from the building in September 2019, a judge dismissed the motion, saying Caritas "failed to present sufficient competent evidence.”

Internal HSH emails obtained by The Chronicle revealed that Caritas, which oversees more than 1,400 supportive housing SRO units in San Francisco, does not have an “express eviction policy” at the properties it manages. Instead, each building can decide when to pursue an eviction “based on its tenant population and the staffing and services available for that building or program,” according to an April 22 email from Julius Wilson-Kermah, the agency’s director of property management, to David Kim, Episcopal’s senior director of asset management.

Over the course of a month, The Chronicle sent emails and left voicemails for Devesh Patel, the president of Caritas. Reporters also called and emailed the property management company’s general line. They did not receive a response to any of these inquiries.

In October 2020, Bowman received a new eviction notice. Caritas had lodged 18 additional complaints against him, court documents show.

Caritas once again accused Bowman of violating the visitor policy, including by bringing guests into the building whom the property manager had banned. Caritas also cited Bowman for fighting with his boyfriend in a hallway, putting a new lock on his broken door and damaging the building’s front gate by yanking it too hard. The nonprofit said Fikes had gotten into “heated verbal arguments with residents.”

The Elm’s goal, according to its city contract, is to help tenants “improve their health and retain their housing.” During Bowman’s time at the SRO, the building was budgeted to have two case managers for 80 tenants — a ratio nearly 3 times worse than federal recommendations of 1 to 15.

Because of high turnover, Bowman had several case managers at the Elm. He said he lost trust in them after the property manager’s first attempt to evict him. Even when he was on the verge of losing his home, Bowman said, his case manager did not help him find another place to live.

Bowman called the Eviction Defense Collaborative, a city-funded organization for people who can’t afford legal services. His lawyer helped him strike a deal: Bowman could stay at the Elm if he promised to follow the rules for a year. If he broke them, the property manager could swiftly remove him without a trial.

Often referred to as “behave and stay” agreements, these settlements are a common strategy of supportive housing providers, attorneys and nonprofit directors told The Chronicle. HSH says the goal is to give residents facing eviction an opportunity to change their behavior. But some tenants told The Chronicle they felt set up to fail: The agreements typically last for a year and can include a range of rules unrelated to the reason for eviction.

Bowman was familiar with these agreements, having entered into one with Caritas the first time it had served him papers, just after he had moved in. He felt he could navigate it.

He signed the settlement, promising to follow the rules.

The Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing and the nonprofits it contracts with say evictions are pursued only as a last resort, when residents create dangerous situations or repeatedly fail to correct destructive behavior.

But a Chronicle review of city data and hundreds of lawsuits revealed that residents have frequently been evicted for nonviolent infractions or because they’ve fallen behind in rent. In other cases, tenants were kicked out for behavior stemming from physical or mental health conditions — issues that social workers say could often be addressed through more robust support.

To better grasp why hundreds of people have been displaced from supportive housing, Chronicle reporters created a database of 210 eviction lawsuits filed since 2016. State law allows public access only to records of evictions in which the landlord won the case within 60 days, so a limited subset of records was available. Most of the cases reviewed by reporters were default judgments, meaning residents failed to respond to the complaints within five days and were evicted automatically, without being able to defend themselves in court.

The total number of evictions in supportive housing SROs has sharply dropped in recent years, largely because of laws that prevented nonprofits from kicking people out over rent and city leaders’ desire to keep people inside during the pandemic. But as those protections wane, defense attorneys worry that evictions will return to pre-COVID levels.

Nearly half of the suits reviewed by reporters cited late rent. Building managers kicked some people out for owing just a few hundred dollars, while others fell thousands of dollars behind in rent before losing their home. Both nonprofit directors and eviction defense attorneys said these cases often involved additional violations not detailed in the lawsuits.

In 2016, a judge ordered the Sheriff’s Department to remove a man from the Knox Hotel on Sixth Street who had defaulted on a payment plan for the two months of rent he owed. Court records show that the man — a military veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder — pleaded for more time, saying the legal process was “extremely overwhelming and confusing.”

“If I am evicted tomorrow I’ll be homeless,” the man wrote. A judge pushed the date of the eviction back several times, but eventually sheriff’s deputies showed up at his door.

The other half of the evictions reviewed by The Chronicle were because of “nuisance violations.” Some were cases like Bowman’s, in which tenants were accused of habitually breaking rules — violating visitor policies, failing to keep their rooms clean, arguing with staff and neighbors, or barring pest control companies from entering their units.

Even with this breadth of cases, HSH provides no guidelines for when a supportive housing program should pursue eviction. Moreover, city contracts reviewed by reporters contain sparse, vague language on how nonprofits should attempt to keep people housed.

In these contracts, staff members are required to offer on-site services to tenants showing signs of instability “within a reasonable timeframe.” They are encouraged to “find creative ways to engage with tenants to prevent housing loss” and take a “housing retention approach to lease enforcement.”

Notably, HSH does not require nonprofits — or the property managers hired as subcontractors — to adopt standard written eviction prevention policies. Some agencies include guidelines in their training manuals, outlining steps staff members should take to try to resolve problems and to keep people housed. But Caritas does not have a written eviction policy, something HSH appeared to discover only when inquiring with the property management firm about Bowman’s eviction, emails obtained by The Chronicle show.

On April 19, an HSH program supervisor wrote to a senior director at Episcopal, asking for a copy of the Elm Hotel’s eviction policy. Episcopal looped in the property manager at the Elm, Tai Anthony, who responded on April 22, saying: “There is no formal written policy for evictions. Acts of violence and threats of violence are automatic (to) send the resident to legal for eviction.”

Wilson-Kermah, the property management director for Caritas, said in the April 22 email to Episcopal that it was important for each program to have some discretion over evictions because the buildings each serve unique populations. Wilson-Kermah said Caritas would be open to working with its nonprofit partners to develop formal policies at its SROs.

With no clear direction, evictions vary broadly from address to address. Some nonprofits and programs rarely evict tenants, while others are much quicker to pursue legal action. The Henry Hotel on Sixth Street, for example, has evicted at least 26 residents from its 121 units since 2019, records show. The SRO — also operated by Episcopal and managed by Caritas — serves chronically homeless people with disabilities.

In this patchwork system, tenants and staff told The Chronicle they are sometimes confused over why people get evicted.

One case manager said she has a client who is being kicked out for cursing at a front-desk employee while under a “behave and stay” agreement. Meanwhile, a social worker recalled an SRO resident who repeatedly assaulted other tenants, even throwing an elderly man out of his wheelchair — but never faced an eviction lawsuit.

McSpadden, director of HSH, said she hopes the policies her department is developing will create more consistency around evictions. But she added that property managers are ultimately responsible for how to respond to lease violations.

These nonprofit providers, McSpadden said, are “very much trying to keep people in their units,” but sometimes evictions are unavoidable.

Indeed, many of the eviction lawsuits reviewed by The Chronicle concerned serious behavioral issues that put other tenants’ health and safety at risk. In these cases, residents threatened or assaulted people with weapons, destroyed their rooms and set fires inside the buildings. But some nonprofit directors say a shortage of other long-term care programs and the city’s failure to provide SROs with proper funding and support has magnified these problems.

Shortly after taking office, Breed told a local radio station that she was “really excited” about coordinated entry, the new system that prioritized housing for the most vulnerable people. She said it would help those struggling with homelessness get the support they need in a streamlined way.

Yet the Chronicle investigation published in April found that the Breed administration did not subsequently increase funding or staffing for most SROs. Counselors working in some hotels had caseloads of up to 85 residents, far from the 1-to-25 ratio that HSH officially recommends in agency guidelines. (After the Chronicle report, Breed earmarked $62.4 million in the current budget to lower caseloads and increase salaries.)

Because case management services are voluntary, counselors can’t force clients to take medications, seek substance abuse treatment or access other services. Housing providers said they often see no other option but to file an eviction suit when people refuse to engage with them — threatening to send the people with the most intensive needs back to the streets.

“Those cases are my saddest cases. Those are the things I feel the worst about,” said Anne Quaintance, executive director of Conard House, a nonprofit that operates several SROs for formerly homeless people experiencing mental health issues. “We need new solutions, but they’re not there.”

Taxpayers fund both the defense and prosecution of evictions from supportive housing.

Officials estimate that the city spends an average of $4,500 to defend a tenant, a process that can stretch for months. The cost of pursuing an eviction is somewhat murkier: Financial records from Tenderloin Housing Clinic, the largest operator of supportive housing SROs, show the organization spent an average of nearly $2,000 per eviction suit in 2019.

HSH declined to provide similar records for other nonprofits and said the agency does not track how much money its contractors spend on evictions. Other supportive housing providers said it is not uncommon to spend $10,000 to $20,000 to litigate a complex case.

McSpadden defended the cost of litigation as a “fairly low amount” compared with the $160 million a year that the city directs toward its permanent supportive housing programs. Still, taxpayers have spent millions of dollars on evictions in recent years — money that many lawyers, nonprofit directors and advocates for homeless people contend would be better spent addressing the underlying causes of the evictions.

In March, John Stewart Co., the property management firm, filed an eviction lawsuit against a woman at the Bayanihan House on Sixth Street for allegedly hitting and threatening residents, playing loud music, cursing at staff members, and using homophobic slurs. She was given several chances to correct her behavior, the suit alleges, but was evicted after she slapped a former resident in a wheelchair, and called a neighbor a “bitch” and another tenant an “asshole.”

In a written statement to the court, the woman and her attorney detailed a string of events in an effort to explain her behavior: Over the previous year, she said, her mother had taken her own life and her son and grandson had been slain. The woman said she was in chemotherapy for cancer and had multiple disabilities that caused mood swings. The man she slapped, she said, had blamed her for her son’s death.

She provided the court with records showing she was in anger management, as well as a note from her health care provider that said she was processing her grief from the catastrophic year. If she lost her home, she wrote, she worried her progress would be undone.

She was evicted anyway.

Jennifer Wood, a vice president of John Stewart Co., said she could not discuss the case because of privacy concerns. In general, Wood said, the property management company seeks to balance the needs of an individual with the needs of the community. “We only file a lawsuit if there is a direct health and safety threat to other people in the building,” she said.

Reporters tried to contact the woman evicted from the Bayanihan House, reaching out to her attorney and a friend, but neither knew where she had gone. Presumably, they said, she was back on the streets.

Around the same time that he signed the settlement agreement, Robert Bowman began to feel very ill.

He had not felt well for a while, but now his ankles, feet and stomach swelled. Even while resting, he gasped for air. His doctor diagnosed him with congestive heart failure, an incurable disease that can only be managed and, according to studies, within five years kills about 1 in 4 people Bowman’s age who suffer from it.

Bowman, who found himself dozing off throughout the day, said he was terrified by a doctor’s warning that some people with congestive heart failure fall asleep and never wake up. He didn’t want to die alone at the Elm Hotel.

He leaned on his friends, many of them currently or formerly homeless gay men. Bowman allowed Fikes, who was in the process of becoming a registered live-in aide, to move into his room, where he kept tabs on Bowman’s medications and made sure he was resting and eating regularly. Sometimes Bowman’s friends who didn’t have homes asked to sleep on his floor, too.

After years of struggling with homelessness himself, Bowman said he had a hard time turning his friends away. Some of them had been violently assaulted on the streets. He usually said yes when they asked to stay with him. In return, his friends ran errands for him; Bowman’s heart condition made it increasingly difficult for him to get around the city.

Just before Bowman’s “behave and stay” agreement was set to expire, Caritas said in court that he had breached it. Bowman had not paid about $2,300 in back rent and legal fees, Caritas said, and had also continued to flout the visitor policy, racking up roughly 80 violations over the previous year. Almost all of the infractions were for not signing guests in and out at the front desk, having people over after visiting hours, and allowing banned people into the SRO.

“The volume of activity is way beyond normal or acceptable behavior,” an attorney for Caritas wrote in an April email to Bowman’s lawyer.

Bowman, who said the hotel manager had barred his closest friends because he had previously failed to sign them in, fought the eviction. There were no complaints of his guests being violent toward staff or other residents, he said in a legal declaration. Many of his write-ups were trivial, he asserted in court records, including one instance when a friend came into the Elm for one minute without being signed in.

In a bid to prevent Bowman from returning to the streets, a caseworker at the Eviction Defense Collaborative asked to speak with the counselors at the Elm to find a solution to the conflict. But Caritas’ attorneys denied the request, saying they were “not willing to agree” to the meeting, court records show.

Had the case managers been allowed to speak, there was a “far stronger possibility” that the parties could have resolved the issue, Bowman’s attorney said in a legal filing. “This is supportive housing,” the attorney wrote, and Caritas had “blocked the defendant from getting support.”

On April 14, the court sided with Caritas. Bowman would have to pack up his things.

HSH typically offers no next steps for tenants kicked out of city-funded SROs. On-site support staff are supposed to help residents achieve a “successful transition out of the program” when they leave, city contracts state. But most people return to the streets or emergency shelters, according to case managers, attorneys who represent these residents and the Sheriff’s Department.

But another Bay Area county has shown that, even when a resident struggles profoundly in supportive housing, homelessness doesn’t need to be the result.

In 2015, using public and philanthropic funds, Santa Clara County set out to house 200 of its highest-need residents, similar to the population moving into San Francisco’s SROs through coordinated entry. The participants in the program, called Project Welcome Home, were the highest users of medical or mental health services; they frequently spent time in jail or homeless shelters.

But unlike in San Francisco, Project Welcome Home’s tenants in Santa Clara County received robust support from a behavioral health clinician, a harm reduction specialist and a peer counselor — each with a caseload no higher than 15 people.

Even with this high level of support, the county-funded nonprofit provider, Abode Services, anticipated that Project Welcome Home residents would present challenges. Many tenants have difficulty shedding behaviors that helped them survive outside — such as constant vigilance and hoarding — but cause problems inside.

Recognizing this, Abode rented several vacant units for tenants struggling in their current housing, ensuring they would have a place to live while they looked for their next home. Abode also hired staff members whose sole focus was to work with landlords to try to resolve issues and, when necessary, help tenants relocate.

Under this system, 86% of participants in Project Welcome Home remained housed for several years, according to an independent UCSF study that had been required by the program’s contract and was published in 2020. Tellingly, most tenants weren’t successful at first: Almost three-quarters moved at least once after racking up complaints or running into problems in their apartments. Some residents moved as many as 10 times.

“Folks that are living on the streets that have really complex health, mental health, substance abuse needs aren't expected to be successful in housing on the first try,” Vivian Wan, chief operating officer of Abode Services, said in an interview. “People need multiple chances. … We really didn't give up on them.”

In San Francisco, no such formal program exists. Nonprofits sometimes try to transfer tenants to other buildings “when something isn’t working” to prevent an eviction, said Emily Cohen, a spokesperson for HSH.

But when it came to Bowman, the agency offered no safeguards to ensure that he didn’t return to homelessness. Fearing that his severely ill client would die on the streets, Bowman’s social worker through the Eviction Defense Collaborative scrambled to secure him a room in a privately run residential hotel in the Mission District. Using a rental assistance program, the social worker ensured that Bowman could live there rent-free for up to three months.

When the time runs out, though, the private room will cost more than Bowman can afford. And the hotel is in an unfamiliar neighborhood, far from friends and his doctor. Because of his bad experiences at the Crosby and the Elm, Bowman said, he thought he’d be setting himself up to fail. He was convinced he’d be better off living on the streets of the Tenderloin.

And so Bowman sold his laptop for about $500 to a man who worked at a convenience store off United Nations Plaza. He used some of the cash to buy the $70 tent at Target.

On a bright Wednesday morning in May, he sat in a folding chair in his bare room as a stream of neighbors came to say goodbye. They drank soda and picked through the few remaining belongings that wouldn’t fit into a storage unit he’d rented.

The sound of pounding footsteps was heard down the narrow hallway of the Elm. A friend popped into Bowman’s room to deliver the news: The sheriff’s deputies had arrived.

When asked about evictions from city-funded SROs, Mayor Breed and her top deputies in the homelessness department point to a statistic: 2%.

Self-reported data from nonprofits show that roughly 660 people, or 2% of tenants each year, on average, were evicted from these hotels from 2017 to 2021, even as pandemic-driven restrictions caused cases to sharply drop. Breed and HSH tout that figure as proof of the supportive housing program’s success.

But reporters found that an untold number of tenants are forced out of SROs through informal channels and other avenues not tracked by the city. While HSH counts an eviction only when a judge has ruled in favor of the landlord or the Sheriff’s Department has been ordered to remove a resident, these de facto evictions occur when people leave before that point, under the threat of eviction.

HSH used to try to track some of these departures as part of an annual report provided to the mayor and Board of Supervisors. But it stopped in 2019, the year after Breed took office. Cohen of HSH said the additional information was tedious to collect, prone to errors and went beyond what city law required. However, the move stripped taxpayers of insight into the true scope of displacement in supportive housing.

From 2017 to 2021, housing providers issued eviction notices to at least 5,420 tenants in city-funded SROs — 8 times the number of people officially kicked out. These notices served as a warning: If the tenant didn’t pay rent or correct other lease violations, the property manager could pursue legal action, which happened in about 1,270 of the cases.

An untracked number of these residents voluntarily left their units because they did not understand they could fight the eviction, or weren’t mentally equipped to do so, according to interviews and city reports. Others signed agreements with property managers to leave on their own to keep the evictions off the books, hoping to protect their chances of securing housing elsewhere in the future.

Rita and Wesley Magnenat signed such an agreement to leave the Crosby Hotel by Aug. 31. They received an eviction notice after Wesley got into a physical fight with a neighbor last year, which ended with the neighbor going to the hospital for a cut on his arm. The couple, who said they were threatened by the other resident and were acting in self-defense, are preparing to be homeless.

“We have nowhere to go,” said Rita, who is disabled and uses an electric wheelchair. “It’s scary. … I can’t be homeless. I can’t do that again.”

City records from 2018, the last year that HSH attempted to track de facto evictions, provides a limited window into the practice: 55 SRO tenants “voluntarily surrendered their unit during eviction proceedings” that year, according to the agency report. Hundreds of additional tenants who were not in the middle of an active lawsuit either abandoned their rooms or left for unknown reasons; it is not clear if some of these residents “self-evicted” after receiving a notice.

Regardless, none of these cases counted toward HSH’s official tally of 172 evictions in city-funded SROs that year. In other words, at minimum, 1 in 4 functional evictions was overlooked.

Meanwhile, some nonprofits counsel staff to encourage tenants to move out during litigation, after other efforts to prevent a formal eviction fail. Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corp., which operates hundreds of supportive housing SRO units, states in its training manuals that workers “should explain the consequences of a recorded eviction and can encourage residents to surrender the premises,” according to records obtained by The Chronicle through the California Public Records Act.

Blackmon, the Tenderloin Housing Clinic case manager, estimated that about half of the people who were forced out of the buildings she has worked in over the past three years have left without Sheriff’s Department intervention — and therefore were not counted as an official eviction. At least 131 people have been officially evicted from the provider’s buildings since 2019, sheriff’s records show.

“Some people feel automatically defeated, and they have been through this before and know that they should just leave,” Blackmon said. “Some people don’t even try.”

Officials at HSH say the city’s official eviction rate of 2% is accurate, even though the figure doesn’t capture people who leave during litigation or abandon their units after receiving an eviction notice. By investing in additional support services — including more physical and mental health care, higher salaries for case managers and more manageable workloads — they hope to see that number drop.

“We want to make sure that we're being proactive and keeping people in housing when we can,” McSpadden said. But in a small number of cases, “it takes a few tries for somebody to be in permanent supportive housing before it really sticks.”

It’s true that many people threatened with eviction from city-funded SROs have in the past been ejected from another placement. Of the 210 lawsuits reviewed by The Chronicle, at least 30 involved tenants who appeared to have previously been evicted from supportive housing. Some residents went through two to three placements, each time getting kicked out for similar behavior.

In 2012, John Stewart Co, then a subcontractor of Episcopal Community Services, evicted a man from the Mentone Hotel, mostly for failing to keep his room clean and free of clutter. He went to live in a tent under a freeway before HSH placed him at the Baldwin Hotel, where he was again evicted in March by the Tenderloin Housing Clinic for failing to maintain “acceptable housekeeping standards” and damaging his room, according to court records and news clips.

A 2020 survey by the San Francisco advocacy group Coalition on Homelessness, done with the help of academic researchers and shared with HSH, found that nearly 1 in 5 homeless people in San Francisco previously lived in supportive housing. Many were evicted or abandoned their units under the threat of eviction. Although the survey had a relatively small sample size, it found that Black residents were twice as likely to be kicked out as white residents.

“The problem is bigger than we know,” said Scott Weaver, supervising attorney for the Eviction Defense Collaborative. “And the city has to know that.”

A sheriff’s deputy said good morning to Robert Bowman. He and another deputy crowded into the doorway of the third-floor unit in the Elm Hotel. Three more stood guard in the hallway, one of them holding a shotgun that fired less-lethal “bean bag” rounds.

“Everyone needs to get out,” the first deputy said.

Bowman replied, “We’ve been waiting for you.”

He calmly stood and left the room, carrying his tent and a tarp. Fikes trailed behind, wearing a backpack containing Bowman’s heart medication. The deputies followed the two men down to the lobby and then out of the building.

“Good luck,” one said, shutting the heavy metal security gate. The sun beat down on Bowman and Fikes as they stood outside the Elm, wondering where to go next.

Heading west on Eddy Street, Bowman pushed his electric bike, which no longer worked. He stopped at the end of each block to catch his breath. His face was puffy, and fluid was building in his legs. “Did you take your pills today?” Fikes asked.

Bowman is prescribed a diuretic that allows his body to expel excess liquid. Without it, his lungs would become choked, making each breath a struggle and increasing his odds of a stroke or heart attack.

“I haven’t taken them since yesterday,” Bowman replied. The stress of the eviction had made his health less of a priority. He was also reluctant to take his medication because it made him need to go to the bathroom frequently, he said. And now he didn’t have one.

After about 30 minutes of wandering the Tenderloin, Fikes found a mural-lined thoroughfare between Geary and O’Farrell streets known as Veterans Alley. The sidewalks were lined with discarded mattresses and trash. A small community of homeless people lived there, some of whom Bowman knew from his time working as a cook at an emergency shelter.

As Fikes began setting up the red Coleman tent, Bowman leaned against the wall, looking exhausted, his jeans clinging to his swelling legs. “Take your pills,” Fikes said. Bowman ignored him.

In the next few days, Bowman deteriorated in the Tenderloin alleyway.

He didn’t think he’d be able to manage the side effects of his medication outside, so he stopped taking it. His legs became so swollen that he could barely pull his sweatpants over his ankles. His back and kidneys ached, and just getting out of the tent left him gasping. He said it was the “worst I’ve ever felt, and the worst I’ve ever been.”

After about a week, Bowman realized he was too sick to live in a tent, so he went to the SRO in the Mission that the Eviction Defense Collaborative had secured. The room was the size of a walk-in closet. Graffiti marked one of the walls, and the smoke detector was covered in a black trash bag.

The SRO had even stricter rules than the Elm, prohibiting any guests. Fikes crashed with a friend in the Castro. He brought Bowman food every few days, but they saw each other less and less.

Sometimes Bowman went to the Tenderloin to sleep in a tent with friends, just to be around other people. Then, earlier this month, he developed pneumonia. He spent a few days in the hospital recovering.

Sitting in his small room last week, Bowman said he wished he had done a better job of following the rules at the Elm. If he could do it over again, he said, he would do things differently.

His rent at the private hotel is covered through Sept. 15. He doesn't know where he will go after that. And he isn't sure he will live that long.

“I’m so depressed, lonely, by myself,” he said. “I don’t want to die in here.”

Chronicle staff writer Sabrina Pascua contributed to this report.

CREDITS

REPORTING

Joaquin Palomino • [email protected]  • @JoaquinPalomino

Trisha Thadani • [email protected]  • @TrishaThadani

EDITING

Lisa Gartner • [email protected]  • @LisaGartner

DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT

Danielle Mollette-Parks • [email protected]  • @DanielleMParks

Stephanie Zhu • [email protected]  • @stephzhu_

GRAPHICS AND ENGINEERING

Yuri Avila • [email protected]  • @yag1310

Hilary Fung • [email protected]  • @hil_fung

Erin Caughey • [email protected]  • @erin_caughey

PHOTO EDITING

Nicole Frugé • [email protected]  • @PhotoFruge

PHOTOGRAPHY

Stephen Lam • [email protected]  • @stephenlamphoto

COPY EDITING

Caroline Grannan • [email protected]  • @Caroline94127

By Trisha Thadani, Joaquin Palomino

Months after a Chronicle investigation exposed squalid and chaotic conditions inside city-funded housing for San Francisco’s most vulnerable residents, voters on Tuesday chose to create an oversight commission for the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing — a $672 million agency that has operated without formal accountability.

The yearlong investigation found that the homelessness department — which is directly overseen by Mayor London Breed — has hindered its efforts to tackle the city’s most vexing crisis by relying on underfunded and dilapidated hotels to house thousands of homeless people, most of them seniors or people with physical and mental disabilities.

The success of the measure, which passed resoundingly in Tuesday’s election, reflects the extreme frustrations of San Franciscans who are fed up with the status quo.

“It is a strong message that the residents of San Francisco are looking for a change, looking for greater accountability and looking for a new direction,” said Supervisor Ahsha Safaí, who proposed the ballot measure in direct response to the April Chronicle investigation. “The message is loud and clear.”

The Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, or HSH, was created by then-Mayor Ed Lee in 2016 to consolidate several agencies that dealt with homelessness. Reporting directly to Breed, it is the largest city department without a formal oversight body, despite a massive yearly budget that has swelled from about $200 million to a peak of $1.1 billion in 2021.

In a statement Tuesday night, Shireen McSpadden, director of HSH, noted that the city’s latest count of the unhoused showed a reduction in homelessness between 2019 and 2022.

“We will build on this progress in partnership with a future commission,” she said. “This commission will help increase opportunities for resident engagement in the work of HSH to prevent and end homelessness.”

The majority of HSH’s funds go toward its permanent supportive housing program, which is meant to help formerly homeless people rebuild their lives after years of living on the streets. Most of the units are in single-room-occupancy hotels, or SROs, clustered in and around the Tenderloin.

Yet the Chronicle investigation found that Breed and HSH have chronically neglected and understaffed many of the residential hotels and allowed them to fall into disrepair.

Through a review of tens of thousands of pages of incident reports, inspection records and public data, reporters detailed glaring problems within the SROs: broken elevators that regularly trapped elderly and disabled people in their rooms, vermin infestations that overwhelmed buildings and plumbing issues that flooded bathrooms, seeping through ceilings and causing them to collapse.

At the same time, case managers were often saddled with workloads far higher than federal recommendations. This fueled persistent turnover and robbed residents of much-needed assistance as they navigated life after homelessness.

Additionally, after The Chronicle learned that HSH did not comprehensively track overdoses within its buildings, reporters created their own database of drug-related deaths, cross-referencing records from the medical examiner’s office with supportive housing SRO addresses. They found that roughly 75 city-funded SROs accounted for 14% of all confirmed overdose deaths in San Francisco in 2020 and 2021, even though they housed less than 1% of the city’s population.

In response, Breed and the Board of Supervisors approved $67.4 million over the next two years to boost staffing inside the hotels, raise frontline workers’ wages and make much-needed repairs in some buildings.

Breed has repeatedly opposed the creation of an oversight commission, saying it would add more bureaucracy to the city’s response to the crisis. Despite calling for more accountability o f the city’s homelessness response when running for mayor in 2018, Breed lobbied against a 2019 effort to create such a commission. The measure never made it to the ballot.

But the proposal was revived in May by Safaí, who said that, after reading the Chronicle investigation, it was unconscionable to continue to allow HSH to operate without formal oversight. The supervisors voted unanimously in July to put the commission on the November ballot.

The mayor, meanwhile, continued to voice her displeasure with the effort.

Jeff Cretan, a spokesperson for Breed, told The Chronicle in September that the mayor would not back Prop. C because she believed it would create more bureaucracy.

“While we have a lot to do, we are moving in the right direction,” he said.

The measure did not generate much attention before Tuesday’s election. Its backers raised about $630,000 in support, according to the latest disclosure documents, with no money spent to oppose it.

The seven members of the oversight commission, who must be appointed no later than March 1, will have the authority to approve or reject most homelessness and supportive housing contracts before sending them to the Board of Supervisors for a final vote. The commissioners will also hold authority over HSH’s budget, have the power to investigate the department’s activities, and serve as a central forum for the public to raise issues and advocate for policies.

HSH currently has several advisory bodies, but they are limited to making policy suggestions. Some of these committees will be streamlined under the commission.

Breed will get to appoint four people to the seven-member commission, while supervisors will have control over three. Similar to other mayoral appointments to city commissions, the board will have the ability to approve or veto her nominees.

While there has been widespread agreement among policymakers and housing advocates that HSH should have more accountability, some worried that giving the mayor the bulk of the appointments will compromise the neutrality of the oversight body.

Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness, said the commission is unlikely to cause a “radical transformation” of San Francisco’s homelessness crisis, but that it will add transparency to the way city leaders make decisions.

“Nothing solves homelessness like a home,” she said. “But Prop. C will bring some needed sunshine and regulation on budget decisions.”

By Joaquin Palomino, Trisha Thadani

Mayor London Breed is proposing a $67.4 million investment in San Francisco’s beleaguered housing stock for the homeless, following a Chronicle investigation that revealed understaffing and squalid conditions in the buildings.

The vast majority of the funds, about $62.4 million, would go toward raising pay for frontline workers and increasing the number of on-site case managers, who are critical in connecting residents to health care, job training and other services.

Breed’s two-year budget proposal, which has not been finalized, allocates an additional $5 million for upgrades and repairs in some of the city’s most troubled buildings. The funds target the aging single-room-occupancy hotels, or SROs, that make up the bulk of the city’s supportive-housing program.

While the mayor’s proposed investment would constitute a fraction of the city’s overall budget for homelessness services, it is the most significant funding increase to the system since Breed took office in 2018.

“We know that housing connected to resources is the solution to homelessness,” the mayor said in a statement. “These investments allow us to maintain the critical infrastructure and staffing needed to help keep our vulnerable residents off the street and in housing.”

Through a spokesperson, Breed declined to answer questions from The Chronicle about the budget proposal.

The Chronicle investigation published last month found that San Francisco leaders — including Breed — have long underfunded the city’s SROs, the cornerstone of the city’s housing stock for the homeless. Reporters found that some case managers oversaw as many as 85 residents, five times higher than federal standards, and that staff turnover was frequent. Breed’s proposal would lower caseloads to 25 in SROs and raise salaries from as low as $43,000 to $58,000.

“The revolving door of staff is the real issue,” Shireen McSpadden, director of the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, or HSH, said in an interview. “This is a really exciting investment, and something our providers have been desperate for.”

HSH typically pays nonprofit groups to lease the buildings from private landlords. The nonprofits handle the day-to-day management of the hotels, including mental health services for residents.

But the Chronicle’s review of tens of thousands of pages of incident reports, inspection records and public data showed that chronic underfunding and understaffing — paired with a lack of oversight and accountability — has led to dangerous and unhealthy conditions in many of the city’s century-old hotels.

Broken elevators trap elderly and disabled people in their rooms, vermin infestations overwhelm buildings, and plumbing issues flood bathrooms and cause ceilings to collapse. Meanwhile, at least 166 people died in city-funded SROs of drug overdoses in 2020 and 2021 — 14% of all overdose deaths in San Francisco, though the buildings housed less than 1% of the city’s population.

The investigation also found that San Francisco leaders and HSH have failed to meaningfully regulate the nonprofits that oversee the hotels; comprehensive performance measures that were supposed to be in place more than two years ago still do not exist. In 2019, Breed lobbied against a proposed ballot measure to create an oversight commission for HSH, the largest city agency without a supervisory body. The effort died.

Now, in response to The Chronicle’s investigation, the Board of Supervisors is considering a November ballot measure that would create such a commission over HSH. The mayor said last month that she is open to supporting it.

Over the past year, Breed had a record $1.1 billion budget to spend on homelessness, thanks in large part to Proposition C, a 2018 business tax. Even so, Breed allocated less than 2% of her budget toward boosting services in these SROs and other existing supportive-housing sites, The Chronicle’s investigation found.

It’s unclear how large the total budget for homelessness services will be in the next fiscal year: Both Breed’s office and HSH declined to comment, though it will likely be far less than last year’s historic investment. The mayor will formally propose her budget to the Board of Supervisors on June 1.

According to a spokesperson for HSH, Breed wants to pull $32.4 million, or about half of the funds for her proposal, from Proposition C. The rest of the money would come from local, state and federal sources.

Breed’s desire to use Proposition C money to boost investments in the older housing stock will likely cause tension with the Our City Our Home committee, which oversees the funds and has previously said the money is intended only for new homelessness services — not to boost existing housing.

Shanell Williams, the committee chair, said she would like for Breed to instead pull more money from her general fund and leave Proposition C for new services aimed at those currently living on the streets.

“I’m concerned about what the trade-off is going to be in terms of really moving the needle of getting folks off the street and inside,” Williams said.

Last month, HSH requested about $16 million from the committee to increase support services for adults who live in permanent supportive housing. The committee rejected the request, but its decision was advisory — not binding.

“The mayor has decided that this is how she would like to use this funding,” McSpadden said of the new proposal. “Everyone agrees that this is an important issue. It’s really just a disagreement on what the funding source should be.”

The Board of Supervisors’ Budget and Finance committee will hold a series of hearings on the mayor’s spending plan before voting on the proposal this summer. The supervisors will then return the budget to the mayor for her signature around Aug. 1.