San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors unanimously passed legislation last week that obligates the city to procure 8,250 hotel rooms by April 26. As of April 20, 2,209 were under contract.
Activists around the state organized demonstrations last week, showing up outside hotels and unfurling banners, calling on their city leaders to take over hotels and immediately house the homeless in them. While San Francisco department heads and the mayor had laid out plans to procure 7,000 hotel rooms, they had been adamant that these must be allocated to first responders and the most vulnerable homeless. Moving thousands of homeless people into hotel rooms to enable them to maintain healthy social distancing would be unfeasible, they have said.
The day after supervisors passed the legislation, Mayor London Breed declined to specify whether or how she would implement it.
“Would I like to open up 8,000, 9,000, 10,000 hotel rooms? Of course. Who wouldn’t? But that is not the reality of what we as a city can do,” she said.
The same day, advocates for the homeless around California outlined their demands, including that elected officials house all homeless people and that hotel workers be offered an opportunity to reclaim their jobs.
“If we want to take a real public health approach to this, we need to be working from the prevention end,” said Niki Jones from the Sacramento Homeless Organizing Committee. “We need to be getting vulnerable people into these empty rooms, not chasing sick people.”
Another point of contention is the process. Jennifer Friedenbach, director of the Coalition on Homelessness, said the city should abandon lengthy proposal requests in favor of simply commandeering rooms.
“If they commandeered them, that would get the hotels available immediately,” she said. “We believe the city could get a much better price if they commandeered than if they’re asking for bids from the hotels.” She noted most hotels are sitting empty and shut.
But, as Mission Local reports, the various branches of city government must still clear many hurdles for more than 8,000 hotel rooms to be secured expediently. The supervisors’ plan is estimated to cost more than $60 million per month for rooms, security, food and staff.
Last Friday, at a city press conference, one official seemed unfazed by critiques of the city’s progress. When asked by a KQED reporter about the delay in housing homeless people in hotel rooms, Abigail Stewart-Kahn, director of the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, said “There is no delay.”
Four hotel rooms had been secured for “the non-COVID homeless population,” she said, adding that people are being placed into hotel rooms on a daily basis “in a rapid approach.”
A segment from our radio show, “Civic.” Listen daily at 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. on 102.5 FM in San Francisco.
