On May 11, 2020, Daniel Lurie, freshly retired from working one hour a week leading his “anti-poverty” nonprofit Tipping Point Community, sat down with podcast host Stevon Cook. If that name sounds familiar, Cook was elected president of the San Francisco School Board in 2018 and, before presiding over his first meeting, he had the board skip the Pledge of Allegiance. During a sometimes rambling, sometimes braggy hour-long video, Lurie and Cook fanboyed about the many celebrities, from Prince to John Legend, who performed to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for Lurie’s charity. Lurie also talked about homelessness, and how he planned to solve it in his retirement. “Supportive housing works 85 percent of the time — you get somebody in housing, they stay in housing,” he said. That, of course, isn’t even remotely true. In the 2016 “Performance Audit of Homeless Services in San Francisco” prepared for the Board of Supervisors on June 13, 2016 (and the last real audit we have), the city’s budget and legislative analyst’s office cautioned that San Francisco needed to get a stronger grasp on spending and procedures, writing, “Despite a significant allocation of funds to homeless services, the City does not conduct formal needs assessments of the population to ensure that services align with needs.”
In response to the report, senior staff from the Human Services Agency (HSA) acknowledged that while “a significant portion of the City’s General Fund expenditures for housing placements for the homeless have been allocated to permanent supportive housing … it is not the appropriate exit plan for all homeless individuals, and the cost of mismatch is high.” In fact, HSA’s own analysis showed excessive turnover for individuals placed in permanent supportive housing during a three-year period. In the study of 1,818 adults over the 2010–11 and 2011–12 fiscal years, 50 percent had left their original housing placement as of the end of the 2014–15 fiscal year. Within HSA’s Master Lease program, where HSA contracts with nonprofits to enter into leases with private owners of Single Room Occupancy hotels, or SROs, 66 percent of individuals left. HSA also admitted that some of those people “increased their use of homeless services, emergency/urgent care, or jail time after leaving their placement compared to the three-year period before housing placement.” The nation’s most comprehensive study on the topic thus far, 2021’s “Housing Boston’s Chronically Homeless Unsheltered Population: 14 years later,” painted an even more dire picture: “Housing retention at one year was 82 percent, yet it fell to 36 percent at five years. Corresponding Kaplan Meier estimates for retention were 72 percent at one year, 42.5 percent at five years, and 37.5 percent at 10 years. Nearly half of the cohort (45 percent) died while housed.”
If Lurie was eyeing San Francisco’s mayorship at the time, it wasn’t clear in his interview with Cook as he explained how Tipping Point was working alongside the city, including funding much-needed tracking of homeless individuals. “We’ve helped fund a data system called the ONE System that can actually really understand where all of our homeless neighbors are interacting with the system,” Lurie explained. As a reporter, I was thrilled to hear this — except, as of 2025, I don’t have access to it, and neither do you. Only authorized personnel with a login and password can see the data. “The ONE System is the database used to connect clients to services including shelter, housing, and problem-solving. The Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing uses the Online Navigation and Entry (ONE) System to track client information and match clients to available services. The ONE System is San Francisco’s Homeless Management Information System (HMIS),” the website reads. Whatever they’re using it for, one look at the streets of San Francisco tells me it’s not working.
Lurie told Cook that Tipping Point was also doing a jail pilot program with the Sheriff’s Department. “So, we’re doing a lot of different things, but the big thing is that we bought a piece of property in the SoMa [South of Market] district where we are building a 146-unit building; it will be done in under three years and under $400,000 a unit,” he said. “We will be handing the day-to-day operations off to … I believe we’re going to be using Episcopal Community Services to manage the building, and the city will work with them, but there will be on-site services provided for folks, there will be case management, and we already have been in touch with community groups to help support the folks that are living there to hopefully be as productive as neighbors as anyone else living there.”
‘We’ve helped fund a data system called the ONE System that can actually really understand where all of our homeless neighbors are interacting with the system.’
— Daniel Lurie
That building was 833 Bryant Street. Led by a $65 million gift from Charles and Helen Schwab it became the cornerstone of Lurie’s winning mayoral campaign. As of 2025, Episcopal Community Services still provides client services, and while Lurie often says he holds Tipping Point grantees accountable, he hasn’t done so with Episcopal Community Services, which has received multiple grants from Tipping Point. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, in February 2024, a man’s body decayed in one of the organization’s residential hotel shared bathrooms for more than a week “before the stench and the sight of bodily fluids seeping under the locked door spurred staff to call authorities.” The medical examiner identified the deceased as 53-year-old James Martin Rinkes,“who had been missing from his fifth-floor room at the Alder Hotel on Sixth Street since Jan. 16.” Beth Stokes, executive director of Episcopal Community Services, said it appeared Rinkes may have died from a drug overdose. Rinkes’s family members, based in Ohio, said they didn’t know he had died. In the first seven months of 2023, the medical examiner’s data showed that nearly two dozen people died in Episcopal Community Services buildings.
A Feb. 4 story in the San Francisco Standard stated that 833 Bryant was “rife with pests, filth, allegations of violence, and shoddy maintenance, according to residents, social workers, and city records.” An accompanying video showed cockroaches wriggling in a glue trap in a tenant’s kitchen drawer. The tenant, named “Danny,” said the infestation appeared a month after the building opened in 2021 to much fanfare. Episcopal Community Services still provides client services to Lurie’s campaign crown jewel, where job postings show they pay $30 an hour to senior case managers with a master’s degree and $28 to $31 an hour for case managers with a bachelor’s degree and a few years of work experience, but many of the postings don’t even require applicants to be licensed social workers. In January, police arrested a woman in connection with a double shooting of a man and a woman in the lobby of the building. One of the victims, a social worker, was shot in the face (the male victim was shot in the arm). Both survived. The suspect, Monique Davis, a tenant at 833 Bryant, is a convicted felon who was out of custody on bail at the time.
The medical examiner says that a dozen people have died from drug overdoses inside 833 Bryant Street since 2021. As a candidate, Lurie said he didn’t believe in safe injection sites, but in 2020 he told a very different story. Jail, he said, was not the answer for people on the streets, and safe injections sites were a must. “I believe we should get a couple of those up and running .… I would be, in the future, zero tolerance if there was a place for that drug user to go to do drugs safely and hopefully have a case manager there,” said Lurie, to which Cook responded, “It’s kind of crazy we’re saying, ‘go do drugs safely.’”
On the campaign trail, Lurie pitched solving homelessness by spreading 1,500 new shelter beds throughout San Francisco in the first six months of his administration (the deadline for that is July 8), but as of 2020, he didn’t think shelters were a viable solution. “We are not big fans of shelters,” he said of Tipping Point. “We think we need to build more permanent supportive housing. And putting those folks in jail is not the right answer — we need to get them more mental health beds .… Offer them a shelter bed and then they won’t fall into a mental health crisis or into addiction.” Lurie also felt strongly that even drug tourists should get taxpayer dollars: “I’ve got people telling me we shouldn’t take care of anybody that comes from outside San Francisco; like these people aren’t from San Francisco — you know who that sounds like? That sounds like our president saying keep people out, we shouldn’t help, we shouldn’t provide any support.”
Not only should housing for the homeless be available to everyone, Lurie said in 2020, but it should be everywhere. “I’m for putting six- to eight-story buildings in all parts of the city .… When we talk about, like, a district-wide plan, you know, we pull up every property that should be on the table for a community discussion, right? Every vacant parking lot, every church that has an underutilized parish … there’s lots of those.” Prior to pulling up those vacant lots and churches all over San Francisco, however, Lurie is starting out at a deficit: the Cova Hotel, which housed 116 people, will close Feb. 25 due to “concerns about its impact on the neighborhood.”
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