When CNN announced that former Bay Area reporter Sara Sidner would be coming to delve into San Francisco’s lethal cocktail of fentanyl and homelessness, I knew what to expect. For the May 2023 special, Sidner asked people living on the streets why they came to San Francisco to be homeless and got the same answers I’ve gotten for years: It’s easy. Easy to get drugs, do drugs, put up a tent, steal to support your habit — and San Francisco will pay you more than $600 a month for the pleasure.
It may not come as a surprise, but cities that offer general assistance payments have more than twice the rate of homelessness as cities that don’t. For example, San Francisco and New York City have the highest rates at 10.4 and 10.9 per 10,000 people, respectively, while Las Vegas has the lowest (2.3), with Columbus and Indianapolis tied for second lowest.
Still, San Francisco’s homeless advocates believe money is the answer, with organizations coaching new arrivals to say they’re “from San Francisco” while helping them navigate the system. The city’s “nonprofit partners” themselves complete what has become a billion-dollar-plus industry chasing its own tail, with 59 providers receiving $240.6 million in fiscal year 2019–20, according to the latest audit by the city’s budget and legislative analyst.
When Sidner sat down with former Mayor Willie Brown to ask why he believed San Francisco couldn’t make a dent in its catastrophic homeless problem, Brown was succinct: “It is not designed to be solved. It is designed to be perpetuated. It is to treat the problem, not solve it.”
Whether Sidner edited the piece purposefully or not, it was apropos that Brown’s comments followed an interview with Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness (COH), where she’s spent the last 25 years presenting herself as an expert on the subject.
What are Friedenbach’s qualifications? She doesn’t really have any. Her vague résumé includes a lot of fundraising and, prior to COH, serving as director of the Hunger and Homeless Action Coalition of San Mateo County. Her skill set, as thin as her résumé, touts “a long history of community organizing, working on a range of poverty-related issues including welfare rights, housing, homeless prevention, health care, disability, and human and civil rights.” She comes from a wealthy family that owns almond farms, she owns a home, and her parents keep a condo in the city. Unlike my friend Pali Boucher, founder of Rocket Dog Rescue, she’s never been homeless or struggled to survive on the streets. She is, first and foremost, a cheerleader for keeping people in tents and a proponent of allowing them to do as they please — including using deadly drugs without “stigma.”
I’ve referred to Friedenbach as “CEO of the city’s de facto homeless marketing agency,” spending their money on Sharpies and cardboard to make the handwritten signs they hold up at City Hall protests. Last August, Friedenbach and District 5 supervisor Dean Preston stood on the steps of City Hall giggling together with a group of people who feel the same way as they do. One attendee held up a sign reading, “Downtown is for Drug Users.” In a disturbing twist, the event came after the group Mothers Against Drug Deaths and Addiction held a morning vigil for the hundreds of sons, daughters, brothers, and sisters lost to opioid overdoses.
So, what is Friedenbach’s motivation if not to help the homeless get off the streets? In 2023, I wrote an article in the Marina Times about the possible reasons — mostly ideological, but also financial. One of her former colleagues, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution (“Jennifer is known to be vindictive”), saw that article and reached out with some observations about Friedenbach’s ascension, which he witnessed firsthand.
Nearly three decades ago, the social work professional (we’ll call him “Carl”) started his career as part of MultiCrisis, meeting the homeless population at night wherever they were staying, from parks to underneath bridges, to educate them about the dangers of dirty needles, and to encourage them to get tested for HIV. “Particularly with the gay Asian-Pacific Islander community, there was a hesitancy because they didn’t want to bring shame on their family,” Carl said during a phone interview last year. “In some cases, when someone passed from AIDS, the family would ask the doctor to change the cause of death from AIDS to pneumonia or another illness.”
From MultiCrisis, Carl moved into triage with San Francisco’s General Assistance program (GA), helping homeless individuals get stabilized and find housing. He’s spent 20 years with In-Home Supportive Services (IHSS). Funding for the program is split between federal (60 percent), state (30 percent), and the city (10 percent) but doesn’t cost taxpayers anything.
“Almost 50 percent of the homeless are single adults with no family, and most are from out of state,” Carl said. A person only needs to establish that they’ve lived in San Francisco for two weeks in order to apply for Supplemental Security Income (SSI), but the standards are stricter than most realize. “You have to have an actual address, not a P.O. Box,” Carl explained. “You have to show proof, like a PG&E bill.”
There is, however, one bypass for getting SSI without actual proof of residency: a letter from the Coalition on Homelessness written by Friedenbach. “Then the GA program doesn’t even question it,” Carl said. “Her letter is like a grantee loan certification from the program.”
Twenty years ago, when Carl and his colleagues started SSI GA, Friedenbach was establishing herself as a bright new star on San Francisco’s homelessness front, so they asked her to be part of their program: “We explained that when we help someone with the application process, it can take from two to five years to get approved.” Friedenbach declined the offer — until she realized the money involved. “After that long period of time, once the person does get approved, the check is sizable,” Carl said. “It can be anywhere from $10,000 to $20,000. When Jennifer saw the dollar amount, she wanted a piece of the pie, and suddenly she was interested in participating.”
‘Ka-ching, ka-ching!’
There were stipulations for the SSI GA program, including accountability on the part of participants. “Without accountability you have nothing,” Carl said. “We would get them into job training or the trades or retrain them for something else if they had a disability that prevented them from using their previous skills.” As homeless programs go, SSI GA was a success, with approximately 50 percent of participants staying the course. There was also a social worker on-site at each of their buildings 24/7. If a resident was causing problems, or was dual diagnosed with mental illness and addiction, they had to leave the program and go into a rehabilitation facility. Friedenbach had a huge issue with that. “She said, ‘You can’t force someone into treatment, they must be willing and make their own decisions,’” Carl recalled. “And I said, ‘If they were able to make their own decisions they wouldn’t be here!’”
Friedenbach saw things differently, so she began taking over the program and molding it to meet her own agenda. “She didn’t want to kill the goose that lays the golden egg,” Carl said. “Jennifer wanted to be the middleman. Instead of having the money go back to cover the program’s expenses so that it wouldn’t fall on taxpayers, she wanted a piece of the pie. She didn’t want to be involved until she heard the ‘ka-ching, ka-ching!’”
As Friedenbach’s influence grew, the program fell apart. “I left because of her bulls—, and within two years the program was gone because of her,” Carl said. “You called her ‘Fraudenbach’ [in your article], but you’re being too kind. I call her the ‘homeless pimp.’ We stabilized their lives, she wanted to make money as their middleman. Even a lot of homeless people hate her because the Coalition takes a cut. …”
In other words, Friedenbach and friends are making a fortune from the misfortune of others.
Today, Carl still works in social services for the City and County of San Francisco helping the homeless, as he has for nearly 30 years, and he says he’s glad someone finally exposed Friedenbach: “She’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. She’s a liar. I’ve been trying to get people to listen about her for years. … Every time we try something new Jennifer puts up a roadblock because she wants to keep things the same. She runs the homeless industrial complex. If you’re able to write a letter for someone who just arrived on a Greyhound bus and get them taxpayer money, you’re the CEO. All the mayors and all the supervisors have listened to her and now they’re afraid to speak out against her. But if she was successful, we wouldn’t have this problem. She’s been here so long, and people think she does so much good, but they don’t see her evil side.”
Lack of transparency
The Coalition on Homelessness is incredibly opaque in their 990 filings, required by the IRS to verify that nonprofits should keep their tax-exempt status. It’s no secret the IRS rarely audits these forms, particularly for smaller organizations, but 990s should provide an overview of nonprofit revenue, expenses, assets, and liabilities, as well as sum up the group’s mission, indicate who sits on its board of directors, and state the highest-paid employees’ pay.
The COH mission statement tells you what the rest of the 990 will look like (and that they need to hire a copy editor). “Our vision of our city is where housing is a human right where homelessness is only ever temporary and dignified and where those are forced to remain on dignified and where those are forced to remain on. …” it rambles and repeats. (And yes, those are the exact words.)
Charity Navigator won’t even rate COH, in part because the organization doesn’t track their results. “Ratings are calculated from one or more beacon scores. Currently, we require either an Accountability & Finance beacon or an Impact & Results beacon to be eligible for a Charity Navigator rating,” the website notes.
There is, however, one bypass for getting SSI without actual proof of residency: a letter from the Coalition on Homelessness written by Friedenbach. “Then the GA program doesn’t even question it,” Carl said. “Her letter is like a grantee loan certification from the program.”
According to their IRS filing for 2019 the total assets of COH grew from $400,000 to $1 million. Friedenbach classified her entire salary as “political campaign expenditures” to avoid showing it as a separate compensatory line item. If you read the supplemental information, everything COH did was “advocated, fought, called attention to. …” Basically, they spent $610,000 to harangue policymakers and critics and $60,000 on “programs.” (They also spent $42,000 on someone’s relocation expenses, but there’s no explanation as to who was relocated or why).
For 2021, COH lists salaries, other compensation, and employee benefits as $487,511, with 10 people receiving the title “Individual Trustee or Director,” but the only salary goes to Friedenbach (a paltry $50,340 annually). There are no other employees listed in the filing, so where did the other $437,171 go? Your guess is as good as mine. The 2021 annual report contains numerous typos but no financial disclosures. The operation appears set up to do as Friedenbach pleases with little to no scrutiny.
Waiver of conflict of interest
Also suspect is Friedenbach’s seat on the “Our City Our Home” oversight committee. In 2018, COH drafted a plan to raise $300 million a year for “homeless services” by increasing gross receipts taxes 0.5 percent on San Francisco businesses making more than $50 million annually. They chose Christin Evans, a longtime homeless activist who runs hobby businesses in the Haight-Ashbury district and whose parents own a $12 million home in the city — her father headed the world’s largest aluminum company — as their unlikely spokesperson. Known as Proposition C, the measure got some unexpected financial and personal support from Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of Salesforce, after Evans bullied him on Twitter. Later, Benioff chastised his fellow CEOs for “not caring about homeless people.” Friedenbach, normally critical of the tech industry, gushed about Evans in the media, “We call her the CEO whisperer.”
It took a couple of years to wind through a court challenge from the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, but in June 2020 the funds were released. Swelling to $600 million by 2022, the city spent only a quarter of that amount.
According to SF.gov, the Proposition C oversight committee for Our City, Our Home (OCOH) makes sure spending from the fund is “fair and accountable.” In May 2023, the Homeless Oversight Commission launched to oversee the incompetent Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (DHSH) and “receive advice and recommendations from OCOH on the administration of Proposition C funds.” Guess who the Board of Supervisors appointed as one of its commissioners? Christin Evans.
While Friedenbach has claimed for decades that COH doesn’t take city money, they’re taking money from OCOH in the form of a $250,000 grant. Friedenbach is also a member of the OCOH committee, and sources tell me it’s Friedenbach who “runs the show.” The website’s word salad, riddled with typos, says COH earned the grant because they “prepared testimony and trained presenters to testify before City Budget decision-makers, both in the Office of the Mayor and the City’s Board of Supervisors.”
So how is Friedenbach able to pass a grant from OCOH on to her personal nonprofit? An examination of the OCOH 990 form for 2019 shows that the committee authorized the grant and waived any conflict of interest: “It should be noted that Our City Our Home authorized a 3-year grant of $250,000 to the Coalition on Homelessness. The Executive Director of the Coalition on Homelessness is Jennifer Friedenbach, CEO of Our City Our Home. The grant to the Coalition on Homelessness was reviewed in camera at the Board of Directors’ meeting on August 19, 2019, in accordance with the organization’s Conflict of Interest policy. The Board found no conflict and approved the grant.”
You read that right: the Our City Our Home Oversight Committee found no conflict of interest with committee member Friedenbach granting her own organization, The Coalition on Homelessness, a quarter of a million bucks.
Field of pipe dreams
So how is the money being spent? According to their website, San Francisco spent nearly $300 million in OCOH funds in fiscal year 2022 (July 1, 2022, to June 30, 2023) and added 1,191 units of capacity. “Permanent Housing is a central component … with at least 50% of the Fund allocated for this service area,” OCOH says.
During the 2022–23 fiscal year the city spent $94 million on acquisition of new buildings for use as permanent supportive housing and $57 million in “housing operations.” Overall, the city funded 2,909 units of housing capacity across “several types of housing,” including “783 net units of capacity added in FY22–23.”
Even if the Board of Supervisors suddenly approved $400 million worth of units on an abandoned Nordstrom parking lot where they cast shadows one day a year, and even if the city could buy existing properties or build new ones in a Barbie Dream House timeframe on steroids, would taxpayers be on the hook in perpetuity while the formerly homeless live rent free, doing as they please?
Then there’s the Field of Dreams analogy “If you build it, they will come” — after San Francisco houses the thousands of people now on its streets, what happens when more show up? Maybe Friedenbach can break out her Sharpie and poster board and explain it to us.
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