Homeless calls, carless homes, and a new small site

Good morning! Let’s catch up on some news:

• At the Police Commission meeting last night, supporters of the stalled Compassionate Alternative Response Team asked again for funding to divert 911 complaints about homelessness away from the police. More than 100,000 calls were made to police in 2019 about mental health problems, noise, trespassing, and encampments, according to a recent report. Chris Herrring, a UCLA sociologist who studies homelessness, told the commission that sending police to these non-urgent calls is expensive, and can be harmful to the targeted unhoused people. “Police officers and DPW workers were in wide consensus that the approach was not effective,” he said, “and many found the work demeaning and demoralizing.”

The CART program, developed by a coalition of community organizations in 2019, is asking for $6.8 million yearly to handle low-priority calls about homelessness, using workers well-trained in de-escalation and conflict resolution. Though $3 million to launch CART was earmarked in 2021, Mayor London Breed withheld the money, and the program has never been funded or implemented. Instead, earlier this year, Urban Alchemy was tapped to run a pilot alternative program. “It was a surprise to me that the city awarded a completely different program that does not require the training that this CART program has,” said Commissioner Jesús Gabriel Yáñez, calling CART’s proposal for training “robust” and “impressive.”

• The largest affordable housing development to be built in the Mission–510 units that will sit on top of the Potrero bus yard–will be constructed without any parking, worrying current residents of the area who already struggle to find spots. The SFMTA has proposed eliminating free parking between Division Street to Valencia Street and 21st Street to Potrero Avenue, and requiring residents to purchase permits to park in the neighborhood.

Will residents of the new development decide they just won’t own cars? A 2019 SFMTA survey found that 53 percent of households making less than $100,000 a year did not own cars–but that 81 percent of households with children have at least one vehicle. Unless the agency is right that its policies will “disincentivize” drivers, hundreds of new cars are likely to be competing for places to park in the neighborhood.

• In better news, landlords of a 12-unit rent-controlled building near Dolores Park dropped Ellis Act evictions against their residents at the last minute, and instead sold the building to the Mission Economic Development Agency for $7.48 million. Now those units will become permanent affordable housing, as part of the newly revitalized Small Sites Program, which loans nonprofits money to buy a property when its tenants are at risk of displacement. In exchange, the nonprofit promises to keep tenants in their homes, renovate the building, and keep rents affordable in perpetuity.

More tomorrow,

Sara