hotel rooms
Photo by Loi Almeron

San Francisco’s policy on where to house vulnerable homeless residents during the COVID-19 crisis has resembled Lombard Street in its in mass of twists and turns — and another curve came today. 

During the Board of Supervisors’ virtual Budget and Finance Committee meeting this morning, city controller Ben Rosenfield said San Francisco is now “currently planning for up to 7,000 rooms” in vacant hotels to be occupied by the homeless, first responders and other vulnerable populations. 

This comes not 24 hours after the city pulled an abrupt about-face on plans to put 394 homeless people into a congregate shelter in Moscone West and 162 into another at the Palace of Fine Arts. It also comes one day after the Board of Supervisors introduced emergency legislation demanding 7,000 rooms for the city’s homeless. 

“I’m sorry, I can’t keep up with the policy changes from this administration,” said Supervisor Hillary Ronen, who was caught off-guard by Rosenfield’s statement at today’s meeting. “This is the first I’ve heard of it — and it’s fabulous news, if true. It’s almost exactly what we wanted.” 

Added Supervisor Matt Haney, “this is thousands more rooms than they were committing to, even yesterday. This covers a lot more people, but not everyone. But this is a big deal and I believe it will save lives.”

While it was hoped the supervisors’ emergency legislation could be voted on next week, due to a procedural quirk, the earliest it could have been ratified by the full board was actually two weeks from now — rendering today’s hotel announcement rather timely.

During today’s meeting, Rosenfield said that the city currently has 1,977 hotel rooms under contract or imminently under contract. The preliminary three-month cost estimate for those rooms is $35 million, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is anticipated to reimburse some $20 million of that cost. The city is assessing sources for the $15 million balance, including the California Office of Emergency Services. 

Rosenfield then startled board members when he said that the city is currently planning to obtain up to 5,000 more rooms. The estimated preliminary cost for 7,000-odd rooms is $105 million over three months. FEMA is expected to reimburse $55 million of that, with the city hunting to backfill the shortfall. 

Our messages for the controller’s office and the mayor’s office have not yet been returned. 

How many hotel rooms to obtain and who to put in them has been a source of extreme and growing consternation in this city. Officials hustled to put out a request-for-proposal and make tentative agreements to obtain thousands of hotel rooms by mid-March. But, to date, only hundreds of them have been filled, with little emphasis on proactively relocating the homeless and other vulnerable populations prior to sickness and outbreaks.

Both Supervisors Dean Preston and Matt Haney have initiated private fund-raising drives to put shelter populations into hotels; Haney is amassing funds to relocate the 37 women in the Community Forward shelter, whom he says were offered space in Moscone and turned it down out of health safety concerns.

To date, the mayor’s office has not been responsive to calls to proactively house the homeless in hotels. This has been couched as a Health Department-related decision: That department crafted priority tiers of populations that should be placed in hotel rooms — first responders, people under investigation, aging homeless street-dwellers with underlying conditions — and asymptomatic homeless people do not factor into this mix.

In e-mails to the media, however, Human Services Agency director Trent Rhorer has been stating that it would not be “fiscally prudent” to funnel General Fund dollars toward “renting thousands of hotel rooms for a population that does not require an urgent COVID health quarantine or isolation intervention.”

“Fiscally prudent,” for what it’s worth, is not a medical term.

Ronen’s questions on how much the city has spent and planned to spend on the abortive shelters at Moscone West and the Palace of Fine Arts — and how comparable that expenditure is to the estimated costs of obtaining hotel rooms — were not answered.

It was also not discussed just who would be getting a room, but Ronen said that, with 7,000 rooms potentially in play, it’s hard to imagine that asymptomatic, at-risk homeless people or Single Room Occupancy hotel-dwellers wouldn’t be involved.

“I’m not happy it took five weeks to address what medical professionals and five supervisors have been shouting from the rooftops: It’s not safe to place the homeless in congregate settings,” she said. “We should be using empty hotels for this purpose. Let’s make it happen and happen fast.”

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Managing Editor/Columnist. Joe was born in San Francisco, raised in the Bay Area, and attended U.C. Berkeley. He never left.

“Your humble narrator” was a writer and columnist for SF Weekly from 2007 to 2015, and a senior editor at San Francisco Magazine from 2015 to 2017. You may also have read his work in the Guardian (U.S. and U.K.); San Francisco Public Press; San Francisco Chronicle; San Francisco Examiner; Dallas Morning News; and elsewhere.

He resides in the Excelsior with his wife and three (!) kids, 4.3 miles from his birthplace and 5,474 from hers.

The Northern California branch of the Society of Professional Journalists named Eskenazi the 2019 Journalist of the Year.

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8 Comments

  1. >“I’m sorry, I can’t keep up with the policy changes from this administration,” said Supervisor Hillary Ronen

    I’m sorry, but that is a disgusting cheap shot in the middle of an unprecedented health and economic crisis.

    Breed has won nationwide praise from both political and health professionals for the way she has handled herself and the effect that it as had so far on San Francisco. There is no playbook to look at in terms of spending buckets of money (and other resources) that we don’t have on people who haven’t tested positive or exhibited symptoms.

    I’m sure that I’m not the only one who appreciates Breed’s leadership and is glad that we don’t have a little tiny leader like Ronen with her utterly worthless yapping. Wow I hope that she somehow reads this. Shame on her.

    It’s Passover. Hey, Moses…why did it take you so long to cross the Red Sea?????

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    1. Yuliya — 

      With all due respect, and no matter how well or poorly any of elected leaders have performed, please don’t compare any of them to Moses.

      Yours,

      JE

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      1. Trust me, I would never compare ANY of our elected officials to Moses.

        I was referring to the act of leading a group out of danger and the responsibility therein.

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  2. The paragraph below feels like op-Ed, not fact-based reporting… how is spending to set up Moscone or setting population tiers not ‘proactive’?

    “To date, the mayor’s office has not been responsive to calls to proactively house the homeless. This has been couched as a Health Department-related decision: That department crafted priority tiers of populations that should be placed in hotel rooms — first-responders, people under investigation, aging homeless street-dwellers with underlying conditions — and asymptomatic homeless people do not factor into this mix.“

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    1. Dear sir or madam — 

      In haste, I left out the words “in hotels.” I will add those now. But I would challenge you that putting 394 people in beds six feet apart in the midst of a pandemic qualifies as “housing.”

      JE

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  3. Excellent news.

    The supes hung in there when they were being labeled kooks, and then Moscone gave them their opening. Street Sheet rises from the ashes and SF journalists crescendo in a coverage frenzy, cherry-on-topped with brilliant comments from avid readers. 🙂

    Breed can turn it around. She can get Wiener to help now that the blood drive happened. I checked twitter, he’s packing groceries today. She should call him.

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  4. “The estimated preliminary cost for 7,000-odd rooms is $105 million over three months.” for those that can’t do math, this equals $5000 per room per month. I know this is an unprecedented time, but it seems like the city supervisors always tend to make the most expensive decisions. Heading into a recession/possible depression is not the time for expensive decisions.

    Unprecedented times need to get unprecedented ideas. How about flying these 7000 folks to Vegas and rent the rooms for a 1/3 of the price? With flights included round trip, this would save tens of millions.

    But that would mean we wouldn’t be funneling money to the back pockets of the SF bureaucrats…

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  5. The world had to literally come to a stop, before our Homeless are taken care of.

    Glad that day has come, regret the price in human lives & suffering it has taken to get there.

    No other journalist has championed this cause like you have, in all your writing, from SF Weekly to the present..

    To all the journalist at MissionLocal who have helped you, keep up the good fight, it matters!

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