![]() “It’s really prioritizing scarce resources,” said Cynthia Nagendra, the department’s deputy director of planning and strategy. (A 2019 survey estimated the number of homeless people at more than 8,000.) The threshold for approval is directly tied to housing availability, and right now, roughly one-third of people who take the assessment score high enough to qualify. Though the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing has an annual budget of $598 million and the majority of that is spent on housing, there simply aren’t enough permanent supportive housing units available to accommodate the thousands of homeless people in San Francisco. Applicants with lower scores may qualify for rent assistance or a bus ticket out of town, but if they want housing in San Francisco, they have to wait six months before taking the test again. The total number is intended to reflect applicants’ vulnerability currently, a score of 118 points means they qualify for one of the city’s permanent supportive housing units, which is subsidized by the government and comes with wraparound supportive services. In San Francisco’s system, applicants are asked 16 core questions, and their answers are given a point value which is then tallied. What Davis encountered with those questions is called coordinated entry, a system designed to match people experiencing homelessness with housing. “I thought, ‘You put me on the streets right now, mentally, I will kill myself,’” she said. It was a devastating blow after an already traumatizing few months. That day, Davis was informed that the score she’d been given based on her answers to the questionnaire wasn’t high enough to qualify for permanent supportive housing. ![]() “Whatever my experience is of being sexually assaulted, or what I had to do in order to stay safe on the streets, shouldn’t pertain to whether or not I deserve housing.” Some of the things he asked: Have you ever been sexually assaulted while experiencing homelessness? Have you ever had to use violence to keep yourself safe while experiencing homelessness? Have you ever exchanged sex for a place to stay? “Those are the questions that really bothered me,” she said. There, a case worker she’d never met asked her more than a dozen questions to determine if she was eligible. But with the loss of the twins, the housing program she’d applied to live in after giving birth - intended for families - was no longer an option.Īfter several weeks in a hotel, which a prenatal program for homeless people had paid for while she recovered, Davis went to a brick building in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood to apply for a permanent, subsidized housing unit. The 23-year-old had slept on friends’ floors for the first seven months of her pregnancy, before being accepted to a temporary housing program for pregnant women. ![]() ![]() Tabitha Davis had just lost twins in childbirth and was facing homelessness. ![]()
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