by Jordan Davis
About a year ago, District 5 Supervisor Dean Preston, who represents the majority of permanent supportive housing tenants in San Francisco—including myself—introduced and passed a resolution calling on the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH) to fill vacant PSH units. Given that the Supreme Court’s recent decision in the Grants Pass case makes it easier to sweep unhoused individuals, and that Mayor London Breed is now trying to bus homeless people out of town, it would seem that there is a renewed urgency to fill these units.
But, as a permanent supportive housing tenant advocate, I must ask whether the city should fill some of these units, or whether it should instead look at creating housing opportunities elsewhere in the city.
According to a July 31 report from NBC Bay Area, approximately half of all vacancies of PSH units are due to damage, which will require a major investment from the City to repair. Some of this damage may have been caused by tenants, but some of it stems from the fact that many of these buildings are century-old hotels with high capital needs, acquired before HSH and the department’s standards for new housing were established in 2016. But we don’t know whether the damage, or to what extent, occurs at older legacy sites as opposed to newer ones—data that would be quite useful.
The idea of the city intentionally leaving PSH units vacant is hardly novel. The San Francisco Chronicle’s “Broken Homes” investigation from 2022 profiled the troubled Baldwin Hotel, a case study that showed how putting vulnerable tenants in spartan hotels with small rooms was more costly than anticipated. The city was spending $1,000 more per month per unit for rent at the Baldwin than the average cost of a studio apartment in San Francisco, the investigation found. Due to all of the human and fiscal cost issues at the Baldwin, building owners intentionally left 25 rooms vacant, then 55, just so they could manage the building more easily.
The Baldwin was eventually decommissioned, and tenants were given a just transition to other buildings, including the Garland Hotel,where all the units had private bathrooms and kitchenettes. At the May 2024 Homelessness Oversight Commission meeting, Commissioner Christin Evans praised the Garland for its low vacancy rates, low evictions, and its cost-effectiveness, costing the City only over $2,000 per month compared with The Baldwin at between $3,300 and $3,600.
The Baldwin may be gone, but a lot of similar permanent supportive housing buildings remain, many of which don’t have necessary amenities like private bathrooms and food storage and preparation facilities. Also, it’s not known whether there is a cost-benefit analysis of keeping these buildings online and open to referrals. Furthermore, the capital and repair costs means that they might remain offline for an extended period of time, which might leave the City asking if it’s worth it to fill these units.
I have previously written about scattered-site housing, and it may be best to think about using the tax dollars that could be used to fill these units to allow for an individual who is ready to leave homelessness to use a subsidy for renting a studio on the private market. Otherwise, our City might not make progress in keeping people housed, costing more money in the long run.
So, where do we go from here? It might be time to think about a just transition for tenants in some of the more challenging single-resident occupancy hotels into better quality housing; a component of this plan should include linking the funding to the tenant rather than a specific unit. Although tenants at the affected sites would need to be persuaded, I believe that tenants—especially those in the high cost, high needs, high-vacancy, low-amenity SROs—were provided vouchers for better housing, almost all would accept right away. We need to consider why these units are offline, and how we could house PSH tenants safely and economically.
Jordan Davis (she/they) is a permanent supportive housing tenant who fought to reduce thousands of her fellow tenant’s rent to 30% of income. She can be reached at 30rightnow@gmail.com
