New San Francisco study looks at data about homelessness with a different approach
As new San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie begins to take on one of the city's oldest challenges, there is a new report measuring the SF's progress in the fight to reduce homelessness.
The good news outlined by the study is that thousands of people are being helped out of homelessness. The bad news is that, despite a growing effort, the city is still losing ground.
Over the past decade, the city has dramatically increased its spending on homelessness, by hundreds of millions of dollars, primarily for more housing units. But during that time, the city's homeless population has remained notoriously stable, climbing a bit last year to over 8,300 people. Those results have fueled a lot of frustration. Why doesn't all the added money and housing seem to be adding up to real progress?
Member of the San Francisco Homeless Oversight Commission Sharky Laguana would like everyone to think of this through a new lens. And with the new data report, he's sparked a new buzzword when it comes to solving homelessness.
"This is a hard concept to wrap your head around," said Laguana. "We're putting more people in housing than we ever have before. We've placed this mini and shelter. We did this. We did that. And the public hears all these numbers, and what's missing is a sense of context. Where are we?"
For anyone who has ever found themselves lost in the forest that is San Francisco's response to homelessness, they're not alone. Laguana had similar questions.
"When I joined the commission, I told myself, what I wanted to do working on this problem, I don't wanna get distracted by the trees," he noted. "I want to stay at the 60,000-foot level, and how all these systems work with each other. Or don't work with each other."
So in his role as commission data officer, he started asking the city for numbers, hoping to understand something that might seem very straightforward.
"How many people are flowing into the system, and how many people are flowing out of it?" he wondered. "And the answer was, 'We don't have that data. It's in different systems.'"
After months of pulling numbers from across the city's maze of different services, he has some preliminary findings -- and an idea.
"You know, I had this concept of a pipe fairly early on," Laguana said.
Using the new numbers and the pipe analogy, he's produced a nine minute report on how the city's homeless system is flowing, so to speak. There are people flowing into it. The big takeaway, as some might have guessed, is that more people are flowing in than out.
"Really, we're not gonna get anywhere until we address the amount of water flowing into the pipe, and try to reduce that," Laguana explained. "And, at the same time, we have to figure out how to increase the amount of water flowing out of the pipe."
He says this might help San Franciscans better understand why all of the additional spending for all of the additional housing still leaves the city with an unsheltered homeless population that doesn't change very much.
"It just stays the same," Laguana said of the results "And so it's natural for people to go, 'What are we spending all this money on? How is this getting any better?' In reality, what's actually happening is our budgets are going up, the number of people becoming homeless has gone up, almost on a one-to-one basis. But the number of people who are unhoused and unsheltered stays exactly the same. So we're putting more and more people into housing, year over year over year. And that works. It's sustainable, as long as budgets continue to increase. And we keep finding more housing."
Thanks in part to Laguana's work, this idea of flow is now a trendy topic in the city's homeless conversation, even getting a mention from the mayor's homelessness chief. But for the new administration, solving this challenge is going to get far more complicated.
"We're not going to be able to keep up with that increasing number without having an increasing budget," Laguana said of the costs. "And when the budget starts to go down, now we're in a place where we've gotta figure out how to do more with less. And that's a very challenging position to be in."
The report and the housing simulator can be viewed online.
