San Francisco spends half a billion dollars each year on contracts with nonprofit organizations to provide large shelter sites and community outreach to homeless people. A civil grand jury report published Tuesday highlights a lack of oversight of these services, putting people seeking shelter at risk.
Mayor Daniel Lurie has directed the city’s response to homelessness to focus on bringing people indoors, ideally to shelters or supportive housing. But the new report finds that the city’s agency in charge of fighting homelessness is ignoring data available to ensure the quality, safety and accountability of these services.
In addition, according to the report, the commission responsible for overseeing the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing is not adequately doing so.
“The current approach is not enough” to address San Francisco’s persistent homelessness crisis, said Ed Cooper in the report’s press release. Cooper is one of the 19 citizens on the 2025-2026 civil grand jury who spent a year investigating local government entities and systems. The jury published five reports on topics ranging from wildfire preparedness to city jails.
In the latest report about the city’s approach to homelessness, the jury focused on the need to strengthen programmatic oversight of related services.
Voters approved a ballot measure in 2022 that created the Homelessness Oversight Commission, which helps the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing allocate contract funds and has the power to review budgets, establish performance standards and audit the agency.
The report found, however, that the commission has never audited the homelessness department or its contractors.
The commissioners have limited capacity to perform their duties, as they rely on the department to provide information to analyze contracts and agency operations, the report states. For example, initially, the department proposed that the oversight commission review all nonprofits’ contracts valued at over $500,000 annually. But by 2025, department leadership changed its policy and stopped presenting contract renewals and extensions for commission review.
Published as the city debated its annual budget, the report does not necessarily suggest that these agencies need more resources. “We’re making recommendations to do more with what they already have,” Gary Hsueh, the civil grand jury’s investigation committee chair, told the San Francisco Public Press.
Critical incident reports collected but not used
The report reiterated findings from a 2024 investigation by the controller’s office, which oversees the city’s nonprofit spending. Both investigations cited accessible data that the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing did not adequately weigh in awarding and renewing contracts.
For example, the agency does not seem to systematically process critical incident reports, which document safety issues at shelters and other facilities. The most serious of these include data about deaths, overdoses and emergencies that require a law enforcement response.
“One key blind spot is that the nonprofit contractors are collecting a lot of data around safety within their own specific sites. But again, harking back to the controller’s office, we don’t really see evidence of a systematic use of aggregated and anonymized critical incident reports to drive and improve client resident safety,” Hsueh said.
Safety issues are often reviewed as isolated incidents and not as indicators of a systemic problem. The report notes that the framework for approving contracts means that the city certifies nonprofit organizations as compliant without considering safety data.
This hampers the city’s efforts to address homelessness.
While Lurie used preliminary data from a one-day street count to claim that unsheltered homelessness has dropped since 2024, people’s experiences in city shelters and housing still paint a dire picture. “Through the course of interviews, this Jury learned that despite being offered placement, some homeless individuals consciously choose to be unsheltered to avoid re-living past trauma from acts of violence endured in prior PSH stays,” according to the report, using an acronym to refer to permanent supportive housing.
Even then, the number of people seeking help from the city’s homelessness department each year has grown at an annual rate of 13.2%, with an increasing number of people remaining in the system each year, according to the report.
Hsueh said he hopes the report’s recommendations, combined with the city controller’s findings from 2024, will prompt action from city officials and department heads, including the mayor, who must respond within 60 days.