In my last article, I described how housing alone can’t solve the majority of the city’s unhoused. Here is the second most critical misconception about homelessness in San Francisco.
Most of our current homeless nonprofits are doing more harm than good
As someone who heavily utilized homeless nonprofits for years, this topic is complicated for me. Most of these organizations truly mean well, but some end up doing more damage. Of course, those that provide food are a godsend. You can’t really hurt someone by feeding them. And the needle exchanges I used may very well have prevented me from contracting HIV. At the time, needle exchanges provided information about detoxes and treatment centers; I got into a detox through a needle exchange on Skid Row. These programs, often nonprofits run by former addicts, were simply trying to prevent the spread of diseases and to gently guide addicts on a path toward recovery. I got off the streets for good in 2016, and since then the situation has changed dramatically.
Once cities like San Francisco started spending millions on “harm reduction,” working at a needle exchange became more of a career path. Now, these nonprofits often employ recent college grads with a penchant for radical politics and social justice, and pay them $30 an hour to walk the streets and hand out tin foil to fentanyl addicts. We went from exchanging needles to prevent the spread of HIV to the Uber Eats version of free crack pipes. With fentanyl fully replacing heroin by 2019, and that the majority of addicts favor smoking fentanyl over shooting it, the nonprofits had to adapt to maintain continued funding. They switched from needles to tin foil and crack pipes, both of which pose little risk of spreading disease. Abandoning the original goal of reducing harm (curbing the spread of HIV and hepatitis C), the neo-“harm-reduction” movement lost most of its credibility with former addicts like me.
I used to dig through a garbage can and find a half-eaten burrito to get a piece of tin foil. Now it gets delivered to your tent by a kid with an art history degree and funded by tax dollars. I wouldn’t mind this so much if it didn’t cost millions that could be better spent on public detox and treatment. There is zero incentive to get homeless addicts clean, only for them to keep getting high.
We’ve given nonprofits hundreds of millions of dollars to build glorified crack houses where dozens of people die from overdose each month on the taxpayers’ dime.
The embezzling tin foil-peddlers are obviously bad, but the damage they’re doing is miniscule in comparison to the free housing organizations. We’ve given these organizations hundreds of millions of dollars to build glorified crack houses where dozens of people die from overdose each month on the taxpayers’ dime.
It wasn’t always like this. Gov. Newsom signed SB 1380 into law in 2016, which stipulated housing nonprofits could no longer receive state funding if they attached sobriety and recovery requirements to housing. At the time, homelessness numbers in California had surpassed 120,000, and most housing nonprofits didn’t allow active drug abuse. SB 1380 was enacted so nonprofits would be forced to open their doors to everyone and therefore lower the official homeless population. However, the homeless population has since climbed to a whopping 181,000, and the overdose death rate in San Francisco has more than tripled. This measure not only failed to reduce homelessness, but it cultivated a billion-dollar industry of prolonging active addiction.
With these terrible outcomes and increased public scrutiny, some nonprofits are being investigated:
• In February, J&J Community Resource Center was nabbed for double billing, submitting false invoices, and seeking reimbursements from the city for cigars, alcohol, and motorcycle rentals.
• In April, the nonprofit Homerise — one of the city’s largest “homeless housing” providers with tens of millions in public contracts — was caught misusing millions in taxpayer funds on huge pay raises and lavish spending that was earmarked to help the homeless. While maintaining a vacancy rate as high as 30 percent at some of their drug-infested properties, management handed out bonuses and maintained a whopping 118 company credit cards.
• In November 2022, the FBI was called to investigate the United Council of Human Relations, one of the city’s many corrupt nonprofits, after discovering extensive criminal activity, and the city has since barred it from receiving future contracts. We can only hope that this is the first domino out of many more to fall on a federal level, and San Francisco can soon start anew with a focus on mental health and addiction treatment.
Our experiment with neo-harm reduction and housing-first for the mentally ill and addicted has failed; more important, those suffering from such afflictions have suffered the most. A new direction is far past due, and given the recent election results in March in which several moderate measures were passed in San Francisco and statewide with Proposition 1, the majority of voters clearly agrees.