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by CLive Whistle/PNN
As I walk toward City Hall I ponder on the notion of the Homeless audit done by the San Francisco Controllers office which will be presented today in front of the Health and Human Services Committee of The SF Board of Supervisors. I tried to understand the idea of being audited as a community. I knew the homeless audit wasn’t supposed to be a bad thing but somehow it still made me feel strange, and I wondered if someday just to be fair, the SF controller could do a Homeowners Audit…..
"You know it’s a shame that we’re living in one of the richest cities in the country, and we have to stoop to making criminals out of poor and homeless people," L.S. Wilson from The Coalition on Homelessness was speaking to the crowd of activists, poor folks and press gathered in front of City Hall to protest anti-homeless legislations proposed by Gavin Newsom and Tony Hall as well as support the positive legislations proposed by Chris Daly as well as the most interesting thing of all, "the Homeless audit" – an audit that was done to assess the most efficient way to provide services for houseless San Franciscans
"In a few minutes members of the health and human services of the board of supervisors will hear items from the community proposal... these items were endorsed by over 40 community organizations working with poor and homeless people on a daily basis. These ideas were birthed from years of bi-weekly or monthly work groups, counseling, or community meetings, as well as critical examinations of practices in other communities. It builds upon improving the system we have in place, it also strengthens the inclusion of input from those who are impacted mostly and therefore are most knowledgeable, staff who will implement them, homeless people who will live under the decisions that are made. These proposals focus their recommendations on improving the effectiveness of accountability of existing service delivery systems and decision-making processes. We call on the city to address homelessness in a comprehensive manner by implementing the continuum of care plan so many of us worked on."
There were several more advocates and community folks that spoke, The last speaker was public defender, Jeff Adachi who referred to some of the statistics gleaned from the audit, "Its ironic that we’re here on such a beautiful day to protest some of the ugliest legislation that has come before the board in recent times. As somebody who has practiced in our court system as a public defender for the last 15 years, I will tell you that locking up homeless people is no solution. According to the report that was issued yesterday by the controller’s office, out of City Hall, the city spends $30 million dollars of your money every year to lock up homeless folks. If today’s anti-homeless legislations are passed you are going to see that number triple."
After Jeff spoke we marched into City Hall, all of us "homeless folks" who were the proud owners of our own audit. Notwithstanding my pondering I realized that considering homeless folks were already considered a thing instead of a people, that maybe this audit wasn't so bad cause– we might as well have statistics to back up our oppression, then maybe we can fight this fight for civil and human rights with a little more power.
The Homeless Audit...
CONTROLLER’S AUDITS DIVISION
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Results in Brief
In the six months from
September 2001 through
February 2002, members of
the Board of Supervisors
introduced 31 pieces of
legislation, made 17 requests
of the City Attorney for
legislation, and made 41
additional requests of city
departments related to
homelessness.
Although the City and County of San Francisco (City)
makes available a wide spectrum of well-delivered services
for its diverse homeless population, the City has not yet
developed an effective, unified strategy for dealing with
the issues related to homelessness in San Francisco.
Homelessness is a major problem in San Francisco: The
homeless population is large, many citizens feel that the
problems connected to homelessness have gotten worse,
and political strife about the best ways to deal with
homelessness hinder the ability of the City to manage these
issues effectively.
Over the years, the City has spent
millions of dollars to address homelessness; however, the
City has not been able to ensure that this money has gone
where most needed. Additionally, the City’s methods for
working with the homeless population have been
inconsistent because different elected officials have
favored different approaches to assisting the homeless. As
administrations have changed, the City has not maintained
policies or planning information related to homelessness.
Moreover, unlike some other major United States cities,
the City has not worked with nearby jurisdictions to
approach homeless-related issues regionally.
If the City is to establish an effective system of services for
homeless individuals, the City will need to ensure that the
system contains three elements that inform and reinforce
one another: policies that include overarching, shared goals
and a strategic plan for accomplishing these goals, services
tailored to different types of clients and their varying
needs, and data that describes the clients who use
particular services, the resources used to provide those
services, how well the services work, and the needs that
remain unmet.
Ideally, to serve clients well and to avoid
wasting resources, the City should supply the right
amounts of the right services. In a good system, these
elements strengthen each other and provide the means to
assess the system’s effectiveness. Specifically, the City’s
policies for the system should determine the services
provided and the types of data collected. Data gathered
about the system and its clients should allow the City to
evaluate its services and to determine or reevaluate its
policies.
The Mayor’s Office on
Homelessness estimates that
15 to 20 percent of San
Francisco’s shelter clients
are seniors, and, according
to the City’s Continuum of
Care Plan, 25 to 30 percent
of homeless people in San
Francisco are families.
However, the City’s current policies provoke much
disagreement among decision makers, and its Continuum
of Care Plan for the homeless is not useful as a strategic
plan. This plan cannot guide the City’s delivery of
homeless services because it lacks the support of key
stakeholders as well as specific, measurable steps and
outcomes. Because stakeholders do not have common
goals for the City’s homeless services, nor do they agree
on a useful plan to implement the services, the City cannot
measure its effectiveness in assisting homeless individuals.
The current structure for delivering services has
fragmented among city departments and various parts of
the Mayor’s Office the authority, responsibility, and
information for the system. No department or agency is
accountable for the system as a whole.
The City also lacks an effective means to collect data
related to homelessness. Currently, the City does not
collect and track data in a manner that provides
comprehensive statistics about services, assessments of
service quality, or data on service funding.
Some of the
reasons that data collection and analysis is difficult in San
Francisco are that the City has a decentralized system for
accepting and tracking individuals who request services
and that no coordination exists among the various service
providers, which must collect and report data to the City.
This absence of coordination creates an administrative
burden for provider organizations, makes extremely
difficult any citywide analysis of service delivery and
provider performance, and does not serve clients well.
Thus, the City’s homeless services lack support from good
policies—which specify goals—and good data—which
shows needs. In addition, according to the information we
gathered, the City’s homeless have more unmet needs for
some services than for others. More specifically, the City
currently funds enough overnight shelter beds to
accommodate all single adults who seek them, but the City
lacks sufficient shelters or shelter beds for homeless
families. Families typically wait three to six months for
space in a full-service shelter. Further, the City does not
fund enough mental health or substance abuse services to
meet the demand, which comes both from San Franciscans
who are homeless and those who have permanent housing.
Finally, a shortage of transitional and long-term housing
exists for all segments of the homeless population, and few
of the homeless can afford "affordable" housing.
For those
whose incomes are sufficient for affordable housing, there
is not much to be found. For the past three years, San
Francisco has created an average of 1,333 fewer units of
affordable housing per year than its population needs.
To determine the needs of different types of homeless
people, we looked at the services available for families,
seniors, veterans, youth, and undocumented immigrants.
We found that the City funds a wide range of services that
appear to be delivered well by highly dedicated city
employees and staffs of non-profit provider organizations.
These services form a continuum of care, from emergency
or front-end services that help those in crisis or immediate
need to transitional services that stabilize homeless people
to long-term services, which include permanent housing.
Services vary in duration and intensity, allowing the City
to make available services with different outcome
expectations that are appropriate for different populations
of homeless people. However, there are people who may
choose never to participate in the City’s range of services.
Policymakers should realize that it will remain an ongoing
challenge to decide how best to respond to these
individuals.
The key policy body in the City’s response to
homelessness should be the Local Homeless Coordinating
Board. However, to be more effective and efficient, the
Local Homeless Coordinating Board needs to have fewer
members, and needs to be empowered and staffed to play a
central role. The City’s key implementation agency for
homeless services should be the Department of Human
Services.
Finally, city departments generally have procedures in
place to ensure that the programs they fund are functioning
adequately and in accordance with their contracts. The City
includes in its contracts with providers many contract
monitoring tools, such as performance measures and
extensive requirements for progress reports, but the extent
to which city departments actually use the data they
receive is unclear. Moreover, the City could more widely
use tools that ensure the efficiency of homeless services,
such as performance measures focused on efficiency as
well as contract provisions to pay providers based on a cost
per unit of service delivered. The City also cannot ensure
that it is purchasing the most efficient services because a
lack of competition among providers for many services to
the homeless causes city departments to award many
contracts without receiving competitive bids.
Key Recommendations
This audit was not intended to determine how to solve
homelessness in San Francisco. Rather, this report
recommends how the City can improve its system for
planning, delivering, and evaluating homeless services in
San Francisco. The City should act on all of the
recommendations presented in this report, including the
key recommendations outlined below. A complete list of
recommendations may be found in Appendix A.
To improve delivery of services to homeless people, the
Board of Supervisors and the Mayor’s Office should:
·
* Reduce the size of, empower, adequately staff, and
comply with the advice of the Local Homeless
Coordinating Board.
*Increase the staff of the Local
Homeless Coordinating Board from the current one
position to three full-time positions: a policy and data
analyst, a grant writer, and an administrative assistant.
·
* Designate the Local Homeless Coordinating Board as
the lead body for policy advice and oversight of
homeless issues in San Francisco, and designate the
Department of Human Services—which is represented
on the Local Homeless Coordinating Board and has a
Division of Housing & Homeless Programs—as the
lead agency for implementation of that policy in the
delivery of homeless services.
·
*Submit all proposed legislation, budget actions, and
ballot initiatives related to homelessness to the Local
Homeless Coordinating Board for review and comment
before adoption of any new measures. Except in
extraordinary circumstances, policymakers should
abide by any measures they approve for at least the
next budget year.
·
* Decide how best to allocate the increasingly limited
funds the City uses for homeless services, based on
prioritized and realistic goals developed by the Local
Homeless Coordinating Board. San Francisco has not
had, and likely will not have soon, enough money to
provide sufficient shelter and housing to meet the needs
of San Francisco’s homeless.
·
*Formalize and sustain a relationship with policymakers
in other Bay Area governments to see how San
Francisco can participate more actively in a regional
approach to homelessness.
*To improve its effectiveness as a policy advisory body, the
Local Homeless Coordinating Board should:
·
* Advise the Board of Supervisors and the Mayor’s
Office about whether to redirect or further restrict the
City’s cash aid to homeless people, and whether the
City should strive to fund more services to provide
homeless people with money management and
representative payee services, where clients have their
rent and other bills paid for them.
·
* Investigate if there are means, including grants, to get
more non-City funds that the City could use to add
capacity in family shelters, full-service residential
treatment programs for families, and mental health and
substance abuse treatment programs.
·
* In collaboration with the Mayor’s Office of Housing,
set realistic numerical goals for the creation of housing
units affordable to low- and very-low income people in
San Francisco, and specify which city departments are
responsible for seeing that specified numbers of units
are created by specified dates.
·
*Compile and analyze the data collected from service
providers by city departments.
Finally, the city departments that contract with homeless
service providers should:
·
* Coordinate with one another to ensure that contracts for
the same or similar services include standardized
service statistics, units of service, and performance
measures, including measures of service outcomes.
·
*Work to implement promptly the federally required
Homeless Management Information System that will
link all service providers and track client data.
We conducted this audit according to generally accepted
government auditing standards.
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