San Francisco’s numerous street-outreach teams, which administer to homeless people and drug users in troubled neighborhoods like the Mission and the Tenderloin, are being reshuffled: They will move from working under the Department of Emergency Management to the Department of Public Health, according to the mayor’s office, another signal that Mayor Daniel Lurie thinks addressing health factors is key to fighting public drug use and homelessness.
“People struggling with addiction need health care, so we’re putting the Department of Public Health in charge and doubling down on our work to connect people to treatment,” Mayor Daniel Lurie said in a statement.
Around 20 city workers will now report to the health department and 100 contracted workers — many of whom currently work for the homelessness department — will now work for the health department.
Department of Health director Daniel Tsai added, “We have the structure in place to rapidly provide the health interventions that people with complex needs such as substance use disorders, serious mental illness, and chronic health conditions need to reach long-term stability.”
The street teams are a key initiative for a mayor who has promised to clean up the streets and has sought to hire more cops and expand the ranks of non-police “street ambassadors.”
Lurie first consolidated San Francisco’s street teams under the emergency department last spring. Under that framework, six teams were created, each with workers from seven departments: health, emergency, homelessness, fire, police, sheriff, and public works. Five teams were assigned to specific neighborhoods and one team worked citywide.
The consolidated teams were meant to increase coordination between departments so that people who needed multiple types of services — wound care and homeless shelter placement, for instance — could receive the help they needed in quick succession.
The streets of the Mission saw marked improvement in the early summer, which workers have partially attributed to the new street team model. According to the mayor’s office, preliminary data shows that the neighborhood street-team workers place people into shelters 40 percent quicker compared to the previous organizational model.
When the street teams were stood up, the emergency department was chosen to house the program because of its experience in coordinating multiple city departments. “This is what DEM does — we step into complex situations, build the structure, and get it running,” said Department of Emergency Management executive director Mary Ellen Carroll in a statement.
But with the teams now established, it’s time for the “next phase” where the health department is in charge, Lurie’s team said.
Lurie has emphasized the importance of integrating health care and homelessness. He recently appointed Michael Levine, a Medicaid executive at MassHealth, to head San Francisco’s homelessness department.
Levine overlapped with health department head Tsai during his time at MassHealth, and Lurie said the two departments would work closely together. Levine, he said, is “an expert in connecting health care and homelessness services.”
Thus far, Lurie’s administration has “set out to fundamentally transform our homelessness and behavioral health response,” the mayor added. “We are moving in the right direction because we’ve brought together our homelessness work with our health care work around addiction and mental illness.”
Other programs designed to address street conditions have also undergone recent changes including the announcement this week that ambassadors near Marshall Elementary School, which sits at the heart of 16th and Mission’s street chaos, are being laid off, and their roles subcontracted out to a nonprofit.