17 families housed in August?! Can we get a WOOT WOOT?!
Every month, we track the number of families we served who exited homelessness so we can determine if we are on pace to meet our housing goals for the year. Staying on top of this information helps us ask the important questions—of ourselves and others—to make sure we are doing everything possible to get people off the streets and into homes.
In August, we helped 17 families move into permanent housing in the San Francisco Bay Area!
As a reminder, our fiscal year runs from July 1 to June 30, so we’re only about two months into our fiscal year so far. As you can see, in July of this year, we permanently housed 13 families as compared to 10 families during the same period last year; and like we said before, we housed 17 families in August of this year, having permanently housed 16 families during the same period last year. It looks as though we’re beating last year’s result by four families. Well done, Hamilton Families team!
Last month, we wrote about how attitudes around homelessness and affordable housing have changed very little in recent years. You may recall that we belong to a larger Bay Area initiative called Shift the Bay who is actively polling public opinion on affordable housing and homelessness issues—reflecting just how far we have come as an organization at Hamilton Families, and as a larger community of housing justice advocates.
But many folks ask us, what more can be done to end family homelessness beyond the rhetoric—important as it may be—and why does it seem like our collective actions are futile?
This month’s move-in snapshot focuses on one of the most effective actions to end homelessness: eviction prevention.
So, what is the relationship between affordable housing and eviction? Today, especially after the pandemic, most low-income renting families spend at least half of their income on housing, with one-in-four families spending over 70 percent just on rent and utilities.
While some San Francisco residents have experienced prosperity and affluence, incomes for working-class Bay Area residents have flatlined while housing costs have soared. Only one-in-four families who qualifies for a homelessness rental subsidy program or an affordable housing program receives any kind of support.
It’s under these conditions where it has become harder for low-income women—especially single, Black and Brown mothers with children and women who are domestic violence victims—to keep up with rent and utilities. Any misstep or emergency, such as a parking ticket, an unexpected medical bill, a towed car, could lead to eviction for a family already struggling to make ends meet.
You may have read a recent article in The Chronicle highlighting how evictions are quickly approaching pre-pandemic levels, which only means eviction rates are increasing. During the pandemic, families and individuals were able to enroll in the CA COVID-19 Rent Relief program. Unfortunately, that program ended on June 30, 2022; beginning July 1 though, a landlord could begin evicting a tenant for non-payment of rent even if the tenant’s rent relief payment was pending.
The result: a surge in cases for San Francisco’s Emergency Rental Assistance Program (SF ERAP); the one caveat, you must not have applied for or been accepted by the CA COVID-19 Rent Relief program. At the publication date of this article, Hamilton Families had 74 completed applications for SF ERAP, disbursing $389,190 of the $555,707 in funds committed this fiscal year-to-date; that’s 70 percent of committed funds.
However, SF ERAP announced that it has put a pause on accepting new applications starting Friday, September 23, 2022, at 5:00PM PT. This news raises several questions: how long the pause will last, is the pause in response to the overwhelming number of assistance applications that have been received, what lessons could we have learned from success or failures of the state-run CA COVID-19 Rent Relief program?
These events also raise the larger question: what are families facing eviction to do moving forward?
Evictions cause families to lose their homes, to be expelled from their communities, forcing their children to switch schools, causing instability that becomes cyclical for generations. “The evidence strongly indicates that eviction is not just a condition of poverty, it is a cause of it,” said Sandra Gamez-Jimenez, Associate Director of Intake at Hamilton Families | Housing Services, “and a legal eviction comes with a court record, which can prevent families from relocating to decent housing in a safe neighborhood, because many landlords screen for recent evictions.”
The fact of the matter is we all deserve a decent place to live. That’s a matter of basic justice, of who we are as a community. Housing is essential, just like food, health care, and an education. Our whole community does better when everyone has good, safe housing options. Let’s make sure all of us, especially those who have been locked out for generations, have a decent place to come home to. That’s the future our community deserves.
We need you! You’re one of the reasons why Hamilton Families has made the progress we have. Here’s how you can show up for unhoused families in your community:
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