San Francisco should move people living on the streets to the top of the list for permanent supportive housing, advocates and service providers said Tuesday.
The current system of setting aside all available housing units specifically for homeless people living in shelter-in-place hotels is not proving effective, advocates and city officials said at a hearing of the Board of Supervisors’ Budget and Finance committee.
In response to the disjointed publication of information from various clinics, providers and governments, a group of volunteers with some technical skills collaborated to build a statewide resource for finding vaccine appointments, now known as VaccinateCA.
After an eight-month pause, court-ordered evictions in San Francisco have resumed, and they’re coming down hardest on some of the city’s most vulnerable residents. The Sheriff’s Department has conducted evictions at 33 addresses across the city since November 2020, according to documents obtained through a California Public Records Act request. More than half — 18 — involved tenants in permanent supportive housing.
Mary Kate Bacalao, director of external affairs and policy at Compass Family Services and co-chair of the Homeless Emergency Service Providers Association, spoke with “Civic” about how her staff — and other workers in the sector — have experienced the process of figuring out their eligibility for a vaccine and actually getting one.
The vast majority of staff and residents at the San Francisco Campus for Jewish Living, one of the largest nursing homes in the region, have been vaccinated against the coronavirus. 94% of staff and 97% of residents have received the vaccine. The facility’s director of nursing and clinical operations, Peggy Cmiel, told “Civic” about how that was done.
More than 70 hotel owners have said they are willing to sell their properties to San Francisco, and now is the perfect time to buy some of them, homelessness activists said at a press conference Wednesday.
Landlords have tried to force hundreds of San Francisco renters from their homes during the coronavirus pandemic. From March 1 to Dec. 31, 2020, landlords filed close to half the number of eviction notices as in the same period a year earlier, even as state and federal moratoriums on pandemic-related evictions remain in effect.
Nearly one in every 10 of San Francisco’s permanent supportive housing units — earmarked for people experiencing homelessness — is now sitting empty. The number of vacant units has climbed 58% since September and now represents 9.9% of the permanent supportive housing stock.
Teachers, child care workers, police, firefighters and food service and agricultural workers will be eligible for COVID-19 vaccinations in San Francisco beginning Feb. 26. Mayor London Breed said Tuesday the city was ready to move past the current plan that limits vaccinations to health care workers and those over 65 years of age.
Nearly a year into the pandemic, Undocufund has raised $3.7 million, and distributed $3.3 million, and since many recipients are families, those grants have benefitted more than 10,000 people, fund organizers estimated. But thousands of applications remain to be processed.
