Lurie Backs Down On Homeless Shelter Pledge
Daniel Lurie has quietly done away with a cornerstone promise of his entire mayoral campaign. It’s partly what cinched the deal for voters desperate for some form of intervention in the city’s homelessness crisis. Lurie pledged 1,500 new shelter beds—within his first six months in office at that. Now Lurie’s advisors are saying that City Hall is reassessing their approach.
Executive orders mean nothing without action.
It was an extravagant plan, overambitious, ill-informed. More than Lurie could chew. After all that talk, the mayor has delivered just 16 out of 1,500 beds. That’s 1.06666667% of the job. Those 16 beds sit empty behind locked doors in a finished but unstaffed crisis center at 822 Geary. As the deadline came and went, the city’s homeless remained troubled as ever.
Former mayoral candidate and Lurie competitor Aaron Peskin knew the people’s choice wouldn’t deliver as promised.
“Now he has to face reality, which is yes, a retreat from a feels-good, sounded-good campaign promise,” Peskin told the Chronicle. “He’s not the first candidate who told voters what they wanted to hear and couldn’t deliver. But it’s actually, in some ways, refreshing to know that he’s big enough to say that there are other ways to address this crisis.”
To people on the ground, Lurie was obviously throwing money at the problem from the get-go.
“I can’t believe it took this long for them to see what someone could have told them six months ago,” said city Homelessness Oversight Commission member Whit Guerrero to Filter. “They have been terrible at collaborating. Rather than meeting with experts and coming up with strategies together, what has happened is they have met with providers, ignored their feedback, put out these delusional ideas forward and have had a ton of pushback from providers who have to carry these out.”
Enough hand-wringing, Mayor Lurie. It’s time for concrete plans.
Lurie’s advisor/Chronicle story source Kunal Modi says City Hall is still working towards effective if more reasonable strategies. Modi states the mayor and his aides have made “an explicit shift” toward another model. “Instead of adding a specific number of shelter beds in a set time frame, the new goal is to beef up resources across four categories of services where officials think the city can make the biggest and most immediate impact.”
As a Tenderloin resident, it’s been obvious for months now that Lurie would never follow through with his promise. It’s why this latest serving of word salad feels like empty calories. What does it mean to “beef up resources” if not demanding more from already-failing systems? Where does Lurie expect the extra manpower to come from?
“If something dramatic happens in a space where you have over 100 high-acuity people and you don’t have any say over who comes in, because the city just crams [them] in…staff don’t want to work there,” Guerrero said (Filter).
The SF Standard says that while Lurie’s been in office, 436 shelter beds have been added and/or announced. But Filter recently learned that many beds were emplaced under Lurie’s predecessor, London Breed. Moreover, the majority of those included—over 300—aren’t genuine shelter beds, but were already in place at existing facilities. To make matters worse, seemingly against Mayor Lurie’s own interest, around 250 beds have been removed since Lurie’s term began.
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