SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. (KRON) – Here’s a new look at San Francisco’s safe sleeping village, one right near City Hall in the Civic Center neighborhood.
It’s the city’s first sanctioned encampment, created to help the homeless safely shelter in place during the coronavirus outbreak.
These safe sleeping villages came about after the city failed to secure nearly 8,000 hotel rooms for the homeless.
On top of that, they started seeing more people on the streets, so this is the city addressing those issues.
These sites are supervised with food, bathrooms and health services — but they’re only temporary until the city can get more hotel rooms.
New images show the view above San Francisco’s first sanctioned encampment.
The city branded the site as a “safe sleeping village” where nearly 90 unhoused people are using tents and painted areas on pavement to shelter in place during the pandemic.
“Aesthetically it’s really rough looking,” Kelley Cutler said. “You know you’ve got this big fence, you see the squares.”
Cutler works with the coalition on homelessness in San Francisco and frequently visits the supervised site near City Hall in the Civic Center.
“They do have the bathrooms. There’s porta potties so instead of one porta potty to 150 people, we now have 3 on either side set up with hand washing stations,” Cutler said. “The challenge is still that people are sharing bathrooms so it’s not the first choice.”
The first choice being hotel rooms for the homeless.
The city was supposed to secure nearly 8,000 rooms, but so far only 1,300 unhoused people were moved into hotel rooms and RV’s as part of a statewide program to shelter vulnerable people.
“The human services agency is responsible for this. they’ve taken a long time to bring hotels online, to negotiate the contracts,” San Francisco Supervisor Matt Haney said. “They’re having some barriers around staffing I guess but all of the hotels I’ve been at have been fine with staffing, maybe even overstaffed so you know they have a lot of reasons, a lot of excuses, sometimes a different excuse every week.”
Haney said the city needs to move faster with getting people into hotel rooms.
While the safe sleeping areas provide food and health services, he says they could actually be costing the city more than the preferred option of hotel rooms.
“This is also a massive operation. There’s multiple, likely if you went down you’d see a dozen staff and security and a huge amount of infrastructure that’s been set up and I haven’t yet received any word in terms of how much this costs,” Haney said. “It’s possible that this is actually more expensive than putting people into hotel rooms.”
The city is currently working on a second safe sleeping village in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood.
It’s supposed to launch within the next week.
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