As San Francisco moves to slash longstanding funding for legal aid that helps low-income residents avoid homelessness, the city granted up to $5.68 million for homelessness-prevention legal services to a single nonprofit without opening the opportunity to other providers.
The award, which was approved by the department and the Homelessness Oversight Commission in February, will dispense $4.7 million before contingency funding to Open Door Legal through June 30, 2027. An Open Door Legal press release said the award would allow it to expand legal services in the Mission and Tenderloin for residents at risk of homelessness, and projects 600 households served annually. Although the grant’s effective period began in February, the organization is still hiring and building out capacity.
The decision has infuriated numerous legal services organizations because the scope of the contract substantially overlaps with services already provided by multiple established nonprofits across the city that had long been funded through the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, not the city Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, but are now being significantly cut.
The Mayor’s Office for Housing and Community Development, which has long funded general civil legal services, cut funding to $3 million in 2025-26 from about $4.2 million in fiscal year 2024-25, even as eviction pressures mounted. Another drop, to $1.2, million is planned for 2026-27, according to budget records. The mayor’s office said the cuts are needed to help offset a $1 billion budget deficit.
The legal service providers also objected to the city’s decision to award the $4.7 million contract to a single provider without a competitive process.
“It makes so little sense that you have these programs that you are cutting that are effective, in place and have experienced, skilled people in them, and then you’re providing this deal to this other organization that is going to have to expand their services,” said Laura Chiera, Legal Assistance to the Elderly executive director and managing attorney.
Shireen McSpadden, the executive director of the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, said the department is authorized under Administrative Code Chapter 21B to enter contracts related to projects addressing homelessness without going through the city’s usual competitive procurement rules. At an April 2 meeting of the Homelessness Oversight Commission, McSpadden said the authorization helps expedite projects as the department faces staffing and procurement constraints that limit its ability to run full competitive bidding processes while managing homelessness programs.
The department is working toward a broader, multi-year procurement plan that would create more regular and predictable opportunities for organizations to compete rather than relying on ad hoc awards, she said.
McSpadden did not explain why the department chose to direct the funding to Open Door Legal alone, or why it opted to build around one expanding organization while long-established providers offering many of the same services are being cut elsewhere in the city budget.
McSpadden and the mayor’s office did not respond to repeated inquiries into whether other providers were considered, what needs assessment justified the award, how the grant fits into the city’s broader legal-services strategy and why Open Door Legal was selected.
The clearest explanation available for why the city’s homelessness department chose Open Door Legal is that the department appears to have embraced a view long upheld by Open Door that broad civil legal services should be treated as a homelessness-prevention strategy, not just a poverty or justice issue.
Open Door Legal executive director Adrian Tirtanadi said the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing reached out to his organization in the fall and asked for a proposal after taking interest in a study the organization helped produce that argued access to legal representation significantly reduced homelessness risk among clients who received it.
“It’s a great validation of our work and our model, and not just us, but of the impact that sort of general civil legal services has on homelessness,” he said.
The award will enable Open Door Legal to substantially expand the kinds of legal cases it sees as upstream drivers of homelessness in partnership with GLIDE Memorial Church, Third Street Youth Center & Clinic and the Latino Task Force, he said.
That includes domestic violence matters, wage theft and employment disputes, public benefits cases, informal and non-eviction housing conflicts such as lockouts or utility shutoffs, and other legal problems that can cause someone to lose income, safety or housing stability before they ever face a formal unlawful detainer filing.
But the new funding does not resolve the broader cuts to civil legal services, which he and other providers have continued to raise concerns about, Tirtanadi said.
“The net result of this may not be net more clients are served from a system perspective.”
Although the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing grant might appear to expand San Francisco’s legal aid services, providers said the new money does not add capacity but rather restructures support in a way that leaves major parts of the system weakened, stranded and less efficient.
A February impact memo from Bay Area Legal Aid reported that the cuts to legal services would mean 945 fewer people served, more than $700,000 in lost direct economic benefits to low-income residents and more than $2.5 million in estimated downstream value, using legal-aid return-on-investment formulas that include avoided homelessness costs, preserved income and debt relief, and money kept in the local economy rather than revenue to the city.
Raegan Joern, managing attorney for Bay Area Legal Aid’s San Francisco office, said the city is strengthened by the robust network of specialized providers with long-standing community relationships, neighborhood infrastructure and subject-matter expertise already in place.
“I think the city is very, very lucky to have that,” she said. “Some of the counties we work in just really don’t have the array of providers.”
Chiera of Legal Assistance to the Elderly said the $4.7 million Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing award to one organization exceeds the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development’s entire general civil legal services budget, yet many legal aid nonprofits are already deeply rooted in the neighborhoods the new contract is supposed to serve, including La Raza Centro Legal and La Raza Community Resource Center in the Mission, and API Legal Outreach in SoMa and among Asian and Pacific Islander residents.
Across the city, she said, residents already have trusted places to go for help.
“People in the community know who to call,” Chiera said.
Nonprofits demand reversal
A coalition of 10 nonprofits wrote to the city’s homelessness department and the mayor’s office calling for a reversal of the award, saying the city is dismantling a long-established network of nonprofits that are trusted in the communities they serve while spending millions to build a parallel program from scratch.
Chiera presented the protest letter to the Homelessness Oversight Commission on April 2. She said organizations “applaud the decision of HSH to invest in general civil legal services as homelessness prevention,” but questioned the choice to fund one organization’s expansion into neighborhoods where other nonprofits have already spent decades building relationships and infrastructure.
“We are flabbergasted, to be honest,” she told commissioners.
She argued that because there was no open solicitation, there was “no transparency, no clarity, no recourse,” and said the public still lacks a clear accounting of the contract’s goals, intended client population, deliverables and expected outcomes. She asked the commissioners, who approved the funding without discussion in February, to examine how and why the contract was awarded to Open Door Legal without competition.
Commissioner and former Supervisor Bevan Dufty said the testimony raised “very legitimate questions” about both the process and the awarding of a large contract while established providers were losing funding.
“I think this is not a good look,” he said.
He said there had been “warning signs that this was not business as usual” when the contract came before the commission in February, but that he had still supported it along with the rest of the commission.
He also issued a public apology.
“I should be better, and I’m going to be very careful in reading what comes before us at every turn.”
Dufty said he wants the issue revisited. But McSpadden told the commission the contract is already in place and the city attorney said the city may have limited ability to revisit or alter it.
McSpadden reminded the commissioners the contract had not been hidden from public view.
“We did have a process where it came before the commission,” she said.
The commission took no formal action, but commissioners indicated the issue could return for further discussion.
Mounting outside pressure
The city’s legal aid reductions have also drawn organized public pressure outside the provider network, including from clergy and faith leaders.
In a recent open letter to Mayor Daniel Lurie, a group of Christian congregations calling itself the Exodus Coalitionargued that cuts to civil legal aid would directly undermine access to justice for poor San Franciscans and “actually contribute to an increase in poverty and homelessness.”
The letter links legal representation not just to fairness in court, but to broader city outcomes: preventing displacement, protecting domestic violence survivors, reducing deportations and avoiding the far higher public cost of responding after someone has become homeless.
“Funding civil legal defense prevents homelessness, and is a wise investment in tight budgetary times,” the group wrote. “Most importantly, though, we believe that justice is not a luxury line-item but the measure of our common life.”
