SF’s Lurie shows SJ how to move fast—and big—on homelessness (1/3)
Mayor Daniel Lurie. Image by Wikimedia Commons
Instead of quibbling at Council about small-ball homelessness remediations, our neighbor to the north—led by their no-nonsense new mayor—advocates for large-scale, immediate solutions to homelessness. The Chron reports.
Mayor Daniel Lurie is launching a one-year effort to reform San Francisco’s homelessness, drug addiction and mental health services as he seeks to make progress on confronting the city’s most urgent and serious challenges.
Lurie signed an executive directive Monday that lays out how he wants to make near- and long-term improvements to city systems that assist people who are unhoused, struggling with addiction or mentally ill. Overall, the directive seeks to consolidate services that Lurie thinks are too fragmented and add new measures he believes will promote greater accountability and efficiency to help the city’s roughly 8,300 unhoused residents.
Changes the mayor is seeking include revamping the city’s various street teams, enacting standards that better track results from service providers, and laying the groundwork to potentially restructure parts of the city bureaucracy. The directive also looks to scale back some harm reduction initiatives, particularly for fentanyl users.
The directive includes several initiatives Lurie already started or promised to do, such as a pledge to expand the shelter system by 1,500 beds within the first six months of his administration and tap into philanthropic dollars to fund improvements to homelessness, addiction and mental health services.
Lurie promised a “new era of accountability” from his administration and said he would “deliver outcomes that get people off the street and into stability.”
The directive includes a list of actions Lurie wants city departments to take in the ensuing 100 days, six months and one year.
In the 100-day period, Lurie is looking to overhaul San Francisco’s various street outreach teams to consolidate them into a “strategic neighborhood-based” approach that collaborates with law enforcement to “reclaim public spaces,” according to a draft of the directive obtained by the Chronicle.
He also wants to reform the city’s general assistance program to “prioritize San Francisco residents,” according to the directive. To qualify for cash aid from San Francisco, a person needs to have lived in the city for a minimum of 15 days. Critics argue that lenient residency requirement has cultivated a culture of “drug tourism,” attracting people from elsewhere who want to take part in the city’s open drug markets and receive city assistance.
Lurie said he also wanted to merge two city programs, Journey Home and Homeward Bound, that both focus on connecting homeless people with loved ones in other areas. On the campaign trail, Lurie promised to scale up programs such as Homeward Bound because the city is still sending far fewer people out of town on buses than before the pandemic.
Read the whole thing here.
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