Long-term nesters overwhelm SF's temporary housing

Surprise, surprise: After removing maximum stay limits on temporary homeless housing, San Francisco finds that the average guest checks out after roughly six months. Meanwhile, shelter space further dwindles, prompting calls for local land use deregulation, so that quickly-built tiny homes can serve the unhoused community. The SF Standard's analysis below.

Stays in San Francisco's homeless shelters averaged more than six months last year, new data from the city shows, as politicians push to create thousands of more beds amid political controversy and a high-stakes lawsuit.

Before the pandemic, most stays at the city’s homeless shelters were limited to three months, but in 2020, the city changed its policy to allow people to stay indefinitely. Last year, the average stay in an adult shelter was 205 days, according to data from the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing.

In interviews, some people staying in the shelters said that they had spent well over a year living in temporary lodging, in some cases, bunking in a single room with dozens of strangers and a locker full of belongings to their name....

So-called “tiny home” projects that can quickly provide people with private living quarters have seen success in other cities. But in San Francisco, such projects have consistently hit roadblocks due to a scarcity of land, uncertainty around costs and neighborhood pushback.

Paul Boden, who was formerly homeless and is now executive director of the homeless advocacy group Western Regional Advocacy Program, was incensed by the supervisors’ push for more shelter beds and said that the only solution to homelessness is more housing.

“The facilities themselves were supposed to be temporary, and now people are basically moving in and living there,” Boden said. “That should tell you that your homeless program is a dismal failure.”

This article originally appeared in the San Francisco Standard. Read the whole thing here.

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