Frequently asked questions

311 is a number you can call to be connected with trained representatives that will help you with any non-emergency matters, including resources available to people experiencing homelessness.

In addition to promoting systemic solutions that make more homes and services available in our neighborhoods, we can each take individual actions to support our neighbors experiencing homelessness. Check out our toolkit or team up with friends, colleagues, and family to organize drives for supplies like socks, clothes, and basic hygiene products.

In partnership with local non-profits, the City of San Francisco maintains Access Points, which serve as community gateways into the overall system of programs and housing opportunities for people experiencing homelessness: 

Single Adults

• 2111 Jennings Street (Bayview)

  • Mon–Fri 9am-12pm

• 123 10^th Street (Central City)

  • Mon, Tues, Thurs, Fri 9am-4:30pm; Wed 9am-12pm

Families

• 3270 18th Street (Mission)

  • Mon-Thurs 8:30am-5pm; Fri 8:30am-7pm

• 1641 LaSalle Avenue (Bayview)

  • Mon, Tues, Thurs, Fri 9am-4:30pm; Wed 9am-12pm

• 37 Grove Street (Central City)

  • Mon, Thurs, Fri 9am-5pm; Tues 9am-1pm, 3pm-4:30pm; Wed 9am-7pm

Youth

• Larkin Street – 134 Golden Gate Ave (Central City)

  • Mon-Fri 9am-2pm

• 3^rd Street Youth Center – 1728 Bancroft Avenue (Bayview)

  • Mon-Fri 1pm-5pm

• Huckleberry Youth Health Center – 555 Cole Street (Haight)

  • Mon-Fri 10am-3pm

• Homeless Youth Alliance – Roving Locations

  • Mon, Wed, Fri 5:30pm-7:30pm @ 558 Clayton Street

  • Tues 3pm-5pm @ The Hive, 1572 Haight Street

• SF LGBT Center – 1800 Market Street (Duboce/Mission/Castro)

  • Tues 5pm-7pm

• LYRIC – 127 Collingwood Street (Castro)

  • Wed-Thurs 10am-5pm 

The 2019-2020 Interfaith Winter Shelter Program will officially open on Sunday, November 24, 2019 and run through Saturday, March 28, 2020. 

The Interfaith Winter Shelter Program is a long-standing partnership among the City, Episcopal Community Services of San Francisco (ECS), and the San Francisco Interfaith Council (SFIC) and provides additional shelter services to adult men experiencing homelessness during the winter months. Host sites rotate throughout the winter season and capacity varies at each site.

Spaces are reserved on a first come, first served basis each Sunday. A reservation ticket will allow a guest a seven-night stay. Two meals will be served to shelter guests each night.

A full list of the 2019-2020 site locations and dates can be found below:

Typically, homelessness is caused by a lack of affordable housing and circumstances that directly impact a person’s ability to maintain housing. According to the 2019 Point-in-time Homeless Count and Survey, the leading cause of homelessness in San Francisco was job loss, affecting 26% of those surveyed.

According to the 2019 Point-in-Time (PIT) count, a total of 9,784 individuals are experiencing homelessness in San Francisco. The PIT count is an observation-based count in which volunteers identify people they suspect are experiencing homelessness; they do not verify that assumption by engaging with individuals.  While the PIT Count is the best tool currently available to gauge homelessness, it is generally understood to undercount the total number of people who actually experience homelessness.

Cities around the world struggle with homelessness to varying degrees. The reason why it’s so visible in San Francisco is because people facing homelessness here are unsheltered at a higher rate than most cities.  For example, San Francisco’s unsheltered rate is nearly 64% while New York’s rate is below 5%. New York has a low unsheltered population because it has invested heavily in shelters, which are important and necessary, but short-term solutions.  A functional system requires enough shelter capacity to accommodate anyone who needs short-term support and enough affordable housing for anyone in a shelter to exit into a stable home.

No. According to the 2019 PIT Count, approximately 70% of people experiencing homelessness lived in San Francisco prior to becoming homeless.  Other big cities like Los Angeles and Seattle report similar data. In a recent survey of 306 individuals experiencing homelessness conducted by Tipping Point’s Chronic Homelessness Initiative team, 21% of respondents stated that they had lived in San Francisco their entire lives.

Dr. Margot Kushel, Director of the UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations, has served and studied people experiencing homelessness for decades. She describes a 50 year old experiencing homelessness as having comparable medical needs to someone in their 70’s or 80’s, given the extremely challenging conditions they face. In San Francisco, the Department of Public Health and the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing provided healthcare to nearly 14,000 people experiencing homelessness over the last year, 2/3 of whom had at least one urgent or emergent care need in the last year. The ~400 most acute users visit emergency rooms 25 times per year or more, incurring a cumulative cost to taxpayers exceeding $100,000 per patient per year. This is nearly 3x the average annual cost of Permanent Supportive Housing ($35k per year), which means we can reduce public health costs over time by providing our most vulnerable neighbors with stable homes + services.

While rising property values do not necessarily cause homelessness, they certainly exacerbate it. From 2010 to 2015, San Francisco added just under 16,000 new homes, and nearly 165,000 new jobs. This is one of the steepest ratios of job growth to housing growth anywhere in the US, and has contributed to a 43% increase in average rents since 2005. The City mandates that about developers set aside 20-30% of new homes as affordable to people earning less than the City’s median income, but rising demand and rising costs have forced many lower income renters into increasingly tenuous financial circumstances. Some people have been displaced to other communities, and others driven out of housing altogether.

No. The overwhelming majority of people want to live indoors.  In fact, the City has maintained a waiting list of over 1,000 people for emergency shelter for many years.  The City’s Homeless Outreach Team (HOT) conducts mobile outreach all across the City, and over 75% of people they reach out to accept some form of support. 

Shelters are considered short-term, emergency options.  Stays in shelters are typically limited to 90 days and the primary purpose is to offer a place, usually a cot or mat on the floor, to spend the night.  Navigation Centers are also intended to be short-term, but they include supportive services and staff try to help clients find long-term housing opportunities. 

An NYU study found that new permanent supportive housing developments tend to correlate with increasing property values in the surrounding neighborhoods.  Closer to home, in the past two years, the City has moved over 200 people into housing units scattered across the City.  In addition, housing prices throughout San Francisco have continued to increase as homelessness has increased.

For the coming Fiscal Years (FY19-20 and FY20-21) Mayor Breed has proposed a number of funding increases to support and expand proven efforts to connect people experiencing homelessness to homes + services. You can see the details here, highlights below:

• Over $180 Million in new funding will go to the creation of new affordable housing, preservation of existing affordable units, and prevention of eviction and displacement. 
• $100 Million in new funding over two years for homelessness services to bolster the City’s ability to help people off of the streets and into care and shelter. This includes investments in Rapid Rehousing programs, new permanent supportive housing, homelessness prevention, and an expansion of Navigation Center and shelter beds to reach Mayor Breed’s goal of opening 1,000 new beds by the end of 2020.
• $50 Million to support the expansion of behavioral health and other health services. This funding will support over 100 additional behavioral health treatment and recovery beds at multiple different levels of treatment, including Dual Open Residential Treatment beds, Behavioral Health Respite beds, and Behavioral Health Assisted Living beds. These beds are in addition to the 100 that have been opened in the last year.
• $12 Million investment in programs to promote cleanliness on San Francisco’s streets by adding 7 new staffed portable Pit Stop public toilets, 80 new BigBelly trash cans, and increased street cleaning. The funding will also expand service hours at existing Pit Stops across the City, and maintain the 2 Pit Stops and 20 BigBelly trash cans that opened during the current budget cycle in highly-trafficked commercial areas.
  • The clean streets investments will also expand the Tenderloin Clean block sweeper program by adding an afternoon and evening shift seven days a week and continue the weekend expansion of the Tenderloin Clean and SOMA Clean programs. It will maintain the Downtown Streets Team, a workforce development initiative that employs formerly incarcerated, homeless, and other hard-to-employ individuals to do targeted street cleaning in the Mission and the Haight. Finally, it will add funding for the Chinatown Clean program, which will operate five days a week.

San Francisco currently spends approximately $365 million on homelessness every year. The majority of that funding goes toward maintaining ~9,000 units of supportive housing; units that keep people who had experienced homelessness housed.  The remainder goes to operating shelters, navigation centers and providing a wide array of services and supports.

Visit our Action Center to learn more about how you can get involved.