Breed Orders SF Homeless Outreach Workers to Offer Relocation Out of City Before Shelter

Updated 4:30 p.m. Thursday

As encampment sweeps ramp up across San Francisco, Mayor London Breed has directed homeless outreach workers to prioritize “relocation support” out of the city over housing or shelter.

Under the executive directive issued Thursday, all city and contracted nonprofit staffers must offer access to Journey Home or another of the city’s relocation assistance programs before providing other services, including housing and shelter.

“We’ve made significant progress in housing many long-time San Franciscans who became homeless, but we are seeing an increase in people in our data who are coming from elsewhere. Today’s order will ensure that all our city departments are leveraging our relocation programs to address this growing trend,” Breed said in a press release.

Data from the city’s January point-in-time count of the unhoused population showed that 37% of those surveyed who had been previously housed had been living in San Francisco for less than a year, and 40% said they came to California from out of the country or state — both double-digit percentage increases since prior to the pandemic.

The Journey Home program offers travel assistance and temporary housing for people experiencing homelessness and people with substance use disorders, according to the release. It is a part of the city’s efforts under the Drug Market Agency Coordination Center, a centralized hub for local, state and federal law enforcement agencies to disrupt drug dealing and public drug use in the Tenderloin and South of Market neighborhoods, started by Breed in May 2023.

Another relocation program known as Problem Solving Relocation Assistance is the successor to Homeward Bound, which started in 2005 to offer bus tickets out of the city. The newer program tries to connect people with “stabilizing networks of family and friends” back home, Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing executive director Shireen McSpadden said in the release.

The shift comes as city officials on Monday began clearing encampments in the Mission, Potrero Hill and Lake Merced neighborhoods following an announcement from Breed last month that “very aggressive” sweeps would begin in August.

Jennifer Friedenbach, director of the Coalition on Homelessness, criticized the city’s approach of more aggressive sweeps and said the solution to homelessness is preventing it in the first place.

“We have over 700 vacant units in San Francisco that are permanent supportive housing that we’re paying a lot of money for. We need to fix our broken housing placement system,” she said. “So there’s a number of steps that the city should be working on that would vastly improve the humanitarian crises that folks are facing on the streets.”

Between Monday and Wednesday, the city’s Healthy Streets Operations Center reported removing 75 tents and four structures from public spaces. Nine people accepted housing.

Last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order directing state agencies to dismantle encampments and encouraging cities to follow suit, citing a June decision by the Supreme Court granting local jurisdictions more power to crack down on unhoused encampments.

Following the ruling, a federal magistrate judge lifted a temporary order blocking the city from arresting unhoused people who refused to move when no shelter was available, which was put in place in 2022 as a lawsuit by the Coalition on Homelessness worked its way through the courts. Though the city could and did continue to clear encampments despite the order, its lifting seems to have renewed Breed’s efforts to do so.

Friedenbach said that during the sweeps, the city was violating its own “bag and tag” policies by throwing away the belongings of unhoused people.

“The Supreme Court removed that requirement so cities could just cite and arrest — they don’t have to offer shelter first — but that did not change anything with regards to illegal property confiscation,” Friedenbach said. “It is still illegal to take property out of someone else’s hands against their will.”

During a meeting of the Homelessness Oversight Commission on Thursday, Commissioner Christin Evans said that when people have their property taken, they often lose important belongings like identification documents, medications and safety gear.

“It makes it harder for us to do our job and get them to a safe and stable exit from homelessness. The mayor’s policy is making our job harder,” she said.

KQED’s Christopher Alam contributed to this report.