While Care Not Cash has housed over 1,500 people, last week’s release of the annual count shows that the homeless population in San Francisco remains unchanged from last year. Meanwhile, nearly 1,000 people have been dropped from the County Adult Assistance Program (C.A.A.P.) rolls without getting housed – and most are still in town.

As the City pursues a “housing-first” policy to address homelessness, shelters that shut down have not been replaced – although the numbers show a persistent need. St. Boniface plans to re-open its homeless shelter after shutting down last year, but the Human Services Commission has not released the funds to make it happen. Even though the Board of Supervisors allocated the funding nine months ago.

Because of Care Not Cash, the number of homeless C.A.A.P. recipients in San Francisco has plummeted – from a peak of 2,920 in 2002 to 333 last December. But you can’t judge success by the declining caseload – as every system of “welfare reform” will trumpet the fact that it has fewer recipients. Meanwhile, nearly 1,000 homeless people have been dropped from the C.A.A.P. rolls – without getting into housing.

Where did these people go? Anecdotally, many of them stayed in San Francisco and are still homeless. “We haven’t had much of a decrease since Care Not Cash went into effect,” said John Weeks, Executive Director of the St. Boniface Neighborhood Center. “Every day, we get about 80 to 100 people who come into our church through our Daytime Program.”

To find out what happened to this population, the City paid Berkeley Policy Associates (BPA) – a statistical consulting firm in the East Bay – $50,000 to conduct a study. But advocates are not pleased with the way that the study was done.

“As soon as BPA was awarded the contract,” said Bill Hart of the General Assistance Advocacy Project, “I told the Department of Human Services (D.H.S.) that the logical place to conduct it would be out of our office – because we can account for over 300 clients who come in every month.” Such an offer was never accepted, and now everyone acknowledges how difficult it was for BPA to track down former C.A.A.P. recipients.

To track their whereabouts, BPA cross-referenced the names of former C.A.A.P. recipients with the database of other programs like Food Stamps, Supplemental Security Income (S.S.I.) or Medi-Cal. By doing so, one could discover if these homeless people were still living in San Francisco – and receiving public assistance. But BPA only searched for 186 names – less than 20% of the total population affected.

Jim Buick, Deputy Director of D.H.S., explained that the process is more complicated than just inserting more names in a database. Because the benefits derive from various systems, he said, cross-referencing nearly 1,000 names is very data-intensive. “The reason they stopped at 186 is that it’s a statistically valid number,” he said.

But Hart argues that it’s not a representative sample – as the results showed a large number (72%) of former C.A.A.P. recipients getting Food Stamps. “Food Stamps has a work-requirement,” he explained, “and you must apply for other sources of income if you qualify. There’s no way that 72% of them are getting Food Stamps.”

But if we assume that the sample was accurate, 62% of former C.A.A.P. recipients got some form of public assistance in San Francisco – whereas only 10% got it elsewhere. Data from the Department of Public Health also shows that half of these former recipients are still using the City’s various health care facilities – which means that they are still local.

“Shelters solve sleep, soup kitchens solve hunger, but housing solves homelessness,” said Mayor Gavin Newsom – as he outlined the City’s “housing-first” policy at his Annual State of Homelessness Address last December. “It is our public policy to put resources into permanent supportive housing,” said Buick. “We’re not looking into expanding shelters.”

But if most of the former C.A.A.P. recipients who did not get housing stayed in San Francisco, where will they stay besides the homeless shelters?

While the annual count showed a slight increase in the number of homeless people in San Francisco, it also showed a decrease in the number staying in shelters. And until the City manages to put every homeless person into permanent supportive housing, there’s going to be a need for shelters – no matter how imperfect they are.

Last year, two homeless shelters – 80 beds at St. Boniface and 25 at Dolores Street Community Services – shut down because their leases expired. In July, the Board of Supervisors secured over $400,000 in the budget to operate a new shelter to combine the two that had closed. St. Boniface secured a new location – at 366 Clementina Street.

That was nine months ago, and the shelter still hasn’t opened. “It’s been one roadblock after another by the City,” said John Weeks of St. Boniface. “We wanted to serve 105 homeless people, which is what the funding was approved for. But the Human Services Agency insisted that we can only have 65 beds – so we agreed very reluctantly.”

Buick says that the process has taken so long because of neighborhood concerns. “We’ve been trying to facilitate an agreement,” he said. “Most of the community don’t want a shelter at all, so we need to address lighting, security and other issues.” As for the decrease in the number of shelter beds from what the Supervisors called for, Buick acknowledged that it’s “part of the process” in getting the neighborhood on board.

At its March 22 meeting, the Human Services Commission had an item on its agenda to release $493,090 to St. Boniface – and authorize a contract with the City to create a homeless shelter. But after several neighbors spoke out against the project, the Commissioners voted to continue the item.

The neighbors who complained aren’t just yuppie condo owners afraid that a homeless shelter will hurt their property values. The site at 360 Clementina is surrounded by three high-rises of public housing with senior and disabled tenants – not exactly the portrait of a selfish NIMBY.

But meanwhile, the S.F. Housing Authority has magnified the tenants’ safety concerns by cutting funding for security guards at Clementina Towers. Within that context, you can understand how talk of a homeless shelter next door would cause panic in the eyes of some residents.

On the other hand, the funding was already approved – and the neighbors have had nine months to register their complaints. We’re talking about replacing shelter beds from two homeless shelters that have shut down in the past year – while the City’s homeless population remains static.

For St. Boniface, the nine-month delay after getting the funding approved has been infuriating. “We wish the City could put us out of business by giving everybody homes,” said Weeks. “But until this happens, homeless shelters are necessary. We need to take care of people who are falling beneath the cracks.”

The Human Services Commission will vote to release the funds for the St. Boniface Shelter at their next meeting on April 26th.

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