presented by the Homeless Emergency Service providers Association
The Homeless Emergency Service Providers Association (HESPA) is a coalition of more than 30 community-based organizations serving thousands of homeless and at-risk individuals and families in San Francisco. HESPA members include City-funded service providers, privately funded nonprofits and faith-based providers. HESPA members include leaders on the frontlines of San Francisco’s homelessness response, behavioral health and workforce development systems.
HESPA’s fiscal year 2025-2026 budget proposal calls on our City partners to prioritize community safety and wellbeing for all residents, and to make vital investments that shift focus from one-time interventions toward permanent pathways out of homelessness for individuals and families.
The City and County of San Francisco’s economic forecast is dire.Looming threats from seismic funding shifts and dramatic policy reversals at the federal level pose significant fiscal challenges for localities across the country. But downsizing our homeless support will result in greater costs to our emergency management, physical and behavioral health systems, community safety and addiction recovery efforts. The targeted, modest investments reflected here—reflecting HESPA members’ deep institutional knowledge, evidence-based practice, and decades of community-based service delivery—will keep tens of thousands of homeless individuals and households from continued suffering and more costly interventions.
The guiding philosophy behind HESPA’s 2025-26 Budget Proposal is our commitment to investing in and sustaining prosperity, equity and sustainability. This includes investing in racial and economic justice across the full spectrum of housing, behavioral health and workforce interventions, and prioritizing communities of color. In short, HESPA believes that marshaling the resources for longer-term investments—rather than short-term austerity measures—will shorten the economic crisis confronting San Francisco, and seize opportunities to ensure prosperity for communities seeking to rebuild and rebound from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bringing proven strategies and solutions to bear also means recognizing the scale of the problem. More than 1 in 8 San Franciscans receive CalFresh benefits. An estimated 275,000 SF residents have incomes of less than $18/hour for a family of three, making them eligible for Medi-Cal. San Francisco has some of the nation’s highest housing costs and the smallest child population as a percentage of total population—as well as among the highest child poverty rates. In every SF public school classroom at least one child is homeless. The homeless emergency response system—across populations—is facing a system-flow problem: People are becoming homeless quicker than we are currently able to secure safe, stable housing for those staying in shelters, vehicles and on our streets. Too many instances of homelessness could be avoided with cost-effective prevention interventions. Individuals are languishing in shelters without options for exits into housing. For many, no shelter is available. Children are sleeping in the park with their parents.
It does not have to be this way.
When the City does not have enough permanent supportive housing sites, we offer those with few opportunities to grow their income interventions that are better suited for families and transitional-aged youth (TAY). We have the right tools, but a scarcity of resources requires us to consistently triage our resources in data-driven ways. We need targeted resourcing that provides a ladder for individuals and families through marginal housing and towards stability.
Thousands of nonprofit workers dedicate their lives to building better communities. HESPA staff care deeply about our City and the homeless individuals and families we serve. Vicarious trauma affects many working on the frontlines of our homeless response system, who often share similar life struggles as those we serve. Working with the homeless should not cause people to live on the edge of homelessness. These essential workers must be compensated at a living wage and appropriately trained for the profoundly difficult work they do.
Investments in homelessness response programs are efforts to reverse the legacy of racial and gender inequity in our City. Black and Latine communities are overrepresented in the homeless population, criminal justice system, public benefits system, unemployment system, and are also over-victimized by health disparities, child poverty, infant mortality. Women and gender non-conforming people receive very little resources. Families with Black and Latina women heading households are overrepresented in the homeless population, but continually underserved. Investing in comprehensive and holistic solutions to homelessness is critical for our pursuit of racial and gender equity in San Francisco and our efforts to end homelessness.
Finally, we must shift away from punitive responses that decrease trust and penalize homelessness individuals with unmet behavioral health needs. We cannot arrest our way out of this crisis. Those navigating homelessness are strong and resilient, we should center their voices in the days ahead. We need multi-year solutions that build trust, restore pathways out of poverty and center Housing First best practices.
History of HESPA Funding Proposals and Context for Ask
Founded in 2012, HESPA is a coalition with deep roots in the communities most affected by San Francisco’s continuing homelessness crisis. HESPA advocates for these needs with a collective voice, focusing on system-wide improvements, and we develop annual funding proposals to fill service gaps and meet immediate needs with cost-effective interventions that can be implemented quickly and effectively.
For more than a decade, HESPA has developed proposals to ensure safe and dignified emergency services, replace expired federal Homeless Prevention and Rapid Rehousing grants, prevent homelessness among people at risk and create additional exits out of homelessness through subsidies, vacant unit rehabilitation and modest investments in employment and workforce services. HESPA has also championed hidden populations that historically have been underserved within the homeless population, such as families and youth.
These multi-year investments have been indispensable as we strive to alleviate the housing crisis faced by low-income San Franciscans. As a result, by the end of this fiscal year in June, over 3,100 households will exit homelessness, thousands of households will maintain their housing, and thousands of homeless people will receive deeply enriched emergency, employment, and mental health services that enable safety, stability, and dignity.
Summary of Two-Year Budget Request
The goals of HESPA’s 2025-26 and 2026-27 budget proposal are to:
- Prevent homelessness among people and families at risk of eviction
- Provide creative housing solutions to a greater number of homeless San Franciscans, prioritizing people and families of color who are disproportionately impacted by poverty and homelessness alongside domestic and interpersonal violence survivors
- Ensure immediate expansion of our emergency homeless services system as well as provide sufficient support services and quality staffing in shelters through staff training,
- Meet immediate food security needs for our transition-age youth
- Respond to the behavioral health and other basic needs of people in our homeless response system, bringing those services to them in existing homeless programs
- Increase workforce support for job-seekers who are homeless or at risk of homelessness by integrating services with housing support, increasing investments in earn-as-you-learn apprenticeships and paid job training for youth and adults
Despite the successes enabled by the City’s investments in the homeless service system, significant gaps persist that result in long waits for shelter and housing, visible street-based homelessness, unmet mental health needs among homeless people and families with children and a lack of housing exits from the existing emergency shelter system. San Francisco is facing budget challenges, however, new initiatives and expanded programs are needed to keep pace with the scope of the crisis. Funding our proposal for 2025-26 and 2026-27 will provide the tools to mitigate preventable displacement of low-income San Franciscans from rent-controlled housing and relieve our City’s shelters and streets by providing housing subsidies and expanding shelter and hotel capacity to protect our most vulnerable residents.
This year, we can build on past successes through an infusion of $59.4 million for FY 2025-26 and FY 2026-27 for new baseline funding to house households and stabilize an additional 2,039 households, provide new and improved emergency services for over 1,745 households, and support job services for 375 unhoused community members and families. This funding can come from November 2018 Proposition C revenues and savings within the current city budget, including litigation reserves. This budget proposal attempts to both prevent homelessness and create exits out of homelessness, while ensuring an adequate emergency, behavioral health and employment services systems for those forced to remain on the streets.
This proposal is the result of a careful, data-driven analysis to assess our current housing and homeless system, identify service gaps and tap into the experience and creativity of our providers to determine the most cost-effective solutions.
- Housing: Fund more than 1,359 new household subsidies to unhoused black and undocumented families, people with HIV/AIDS, youth and domestic violence survivors to allow San Franciscans to move out of homelessness or retain permanent housing, stave off ERAP cuts to ensure emergency rental assistance to 1,550 households per year to prevent eviction, and sustain funding for the critical anti-displacement Tenant Based Rental Subsidy Program through RadCo for 1,121 households.
- Emergency Services: Improve quality of shelters and drop-in spaces, continue emergency temporary hotel options to keep families and individuals off the streets,, and fund food security for unhoused people and those struggling to stay housed.
- Prevention: Maintain funding for Problem Solving funds to keep over 600 families and individuals housed and out of the homeless response system, and baseline the highly effective Direct Cash Transfer program for TAY so it becomes a permanent program, preventing 33 young people annually from becoming unhoused.
- Behavioral Health: Fund clinical support at the new TAY Health & Wellness Center located at the TAY Navigation Center, serving 75 youth annually.
- Employment: Fund innovative earn-as-you-learn job training pool for 100 individuals to strengthen our workforce training capacity, and continue vital paid workforce programs for 200 young adults striving to sustain their housing, impacting 300 individuals in all.
