Thousands upon thousands of hotel rooms, normally filled with tourists and business travelers, sit empty in San Francisco as the city closes in on one month under shelter-in-place orders.
More than 8,000 of them will soon be filled after the city’s Board of Supervisors passed an emergency ordinance Tuesday in a rebuke of Mayor London Breed’s original hotel plan, according to multiple media reports. By April 26, the city must secure 8,250 hotel rooms for those experiencing homelessness, frontline workers and recently discharged hospital patients, according to the ordinance, which was jointly introduced by Supervisors Matt Haney, Dean Preston, Hillary Ronen and Shamann Walton.
By Tuesday, the city had acquired a fraction of the hotel rooms — about 2,000 — and had filled about half of those. The original plan had been to prioritize a smaller number of hotel rooms for those who had already tested positive and those over 60 or with underlying conditions. Advocates for public health and those experiencing homelessness criticized the plan, claiming it didn’t go far enough to protect one of the city’s most vulnerable populations.
“We have tried to do this through partnership, but legislation is absolutely required,” Haney, who represents District 6, said at the meeting, according to KPIX. “I know that there has been movement. I know there are new commitments from the administration, from the mayor. But it’s not clear enough, it’s not fast enough, it doesn’t have a timeline, it doesn’t have regular reporting, and it isn’t clear enough about the population that will be served.”
The close quarters of congregate-living facilities and poor access to hygiene at outdoor encampments puts anyone unhoused at higher risk, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
On Friday, health officials reported an outbreak of the virus at the city’s largest shelter — 68 cases at the Multi-Service Center South. By Tuesday, the number of confirmed cases had grown to 102 — 92 residents and 10 staff members, accounting for more than 10% of the known cases in the city.
Everyone at MSC South has been relocated to hotel rooms.
In 11 days, the city must acquire about 6,000 more. The ordinance gives Breed emergency powers to seize the necessary accommodations should the city not reach a deal with hotel groups by then.
Breed has cited staffing concerns as the primary obstacle to housing its 8,000-some homeless population during the COVID-19 crisis. But Ronen, who represents District 9, said more than 5,000 of those on San Francisco’s streets can care for themselves. And otherwise, she has spoken with numerous shelter workers and homeless advocates who have offered to help staff the hotels.
“We have approximately 5,600 people that are living on the streets and in shelters that could care for themselves,” Ronen reportedly said at the meeting. “The fact that we haven’t had the urgency and are not spending our time, our energy … to move those people into a hotel room, I believe is wrong from every which way you look at it.”
Once the hotels are acquired and staffed up, the ordinance calls for 7,000 rooms dedicated to those experiencing homelessness and 1,250 for frontline workers who aren’t able to quarantine at home.
“I am sorry that after weeks of warnings,” Preston, the District 5 representative, said, “only the confirmed outbreak in your shelters spurred action from all of us.”
