San Francisco Chronicle • Jul. 28, 2019 • By Kevin Fagan
Homelessness was already a confounding crisis, but the coronavirus pandemic and the economic ruin it wreaked have amplified the existing challenges and created new ones.
While housed residents hunker down indoors as much as they can, many of them struggling with unemployment, thousands of people on the street have nowhere to go and little hope of climbing out of their predicament. Even those in shelters and government-rented hotel rooms face an uncertain, frightening future, realizing that there’s more exposure to the virus in congregate settings and that someday, those safe hotel rooms will no longer all be available.
Ask any dozen people in the Bay Area what they think of homelessness, and you’ll get a dozen different answers. For the past two years, we asked Chronicle readers to submit questions about this most vexing, heartbreaking, seemingly insoluble problem in the Bay Area, and received more than 700 submissions.
Most of them raised issues in a handful of key areas. We’ve pared them down to these topics, and highlighted this year’s questions.
#8. How many families are homeless, and what’s being done to help them?
The 2019 one-night homeless count found 612 people in 201 families, similar to the 2017 one-night count of 601 persons in 190 families. That means 8% of the total homeless population is made up of families. The Coalition on Homelessness says the count is actually much higher, pointing out that the school district — using its own definition of homelessness — lists more than 2,000 students as being homeless. And the subcategory of chronically homeless people in families grew from 26 in 2017 to 175 in 2019. However, the city has a robust network of programs specifically for homeless families, including Compass Family Services and Hamilton Families, and it is rare to see families living outside. San Francisco offers 800 family shelter beds, a range of rent subsidies for families, and 2,388 permanent supportive housing beds for families.