cawacko
Well-known member
For those who are into the homeless issue and its policies here is a very long and detailed article about what San Francisco is doing and the challenges the City is facing.
SF struggles to help ex-homeless thrive off streets
Ten years ago, San Francisco decided that the way to solve its intractable homelessness problem was to spend millions of dollars a year to set up housing-and-counseling complexes for street people. Since then, about 9,000 people have been lifted off the sidewalks and given a roof over their heads.
And yet, it seems like little has changed.
Panhandlers still swarm residents and tourists alike. Ragged down-and-outers still hang out on the sidewalks with giant bindles or heaped shopping carts. Drug users inject in the open all over downtown.
The reason? The nonprofits and city agencies supplying the housing at taxpayer expense have been far more successful at providing residences for those on the street than at giving them counseling services - drug rehabilitation, mental health care, job training - that might help them leave the housing, get off welfare and build better lives.
The result is a huge population of formerly homeless people who still beg, do drugs, wander around with bags of junk - in short, who behave exactly like homeless people. Except they sleep inside at night.
Even the people running the city's homeless services say San Francisco should be doing better.
Although the city spends $38 million a year on what is known as supportive housing and $170 million annually on other services for the homeless - money that comes in part from the voter-approved Care Not Cash program - only 5 percent of those who move inside ever leave the system.
Read 'Halfway Home' Part Two
City welfare and nonprofit officials say they believe they could improve that figure, as well as keep those who stay in the system from hanging out obtrusively on the street, if they could hire more counselors. But even as it pays millions to acquire more housing, the city hasn't found the money to develop a system that would be more effective at helping the formerly homeless move out into self-sustaining existences.
Problem is plain
The evidence of what's wrong and what needs to be done is clear.
Police and city officials estimate that 50 to 75 percent of San Francisco's panhandlers are living in housing, not on the streets.
Only about half the city's supportive housing complexes provide one counselor for every 30 residents, the nationally accepted goal. About a third of the complexes have just one per 100.
A yearlong examination by The Chronicle found that the 103 buildings that make up the city's supportive housing network are decent, clean places - and many residents do just fine, occupying themselves with job training or other productive pursuits. But there are also plenty of people who spend their days watching TV, smoking dope and doing nothing with their lives.
Federal and local studies have shown that the city saves money by putting the homeless in those complexes - a Chronicle study in 2006 found that a homeless person can cost $100,000 annually in emergency medical and other services, while a supportive housing unit costs about $25,000 a year.
But San Francisco, like many other cities that have adopted the housing-with-counseling strategy, is struggling to find ways to get significant numbers of people off the dole altogether.
San Francisco's big boom in supportive housing began with city voters' passage of Care Not Cash in 2003. The initiative sharply reduced direct payments to welfare recipients and funneled the money into acquiring housing for homeless people.
With that money and other funding sources, the city has amassed 5,300 units of housing - a total that continues to grow.
At first, the results looked good. In two years, the city's homeless census plummeted 28 percent, from 8,640 in 2003 to 6,248 in 2005. The number of sprawling encampments downtown diminished.
'We're struggling'
But since then, the census tally has been stuck at about the same total. Over the past decade, 9,250 homeless people have been moved indoors, but only about 300 of them have left the system each year - and not all of those moved on to greater independence. Some proved to be so problematic they were evicted.
The city keeps adding a few hundred units every year. But with so few people leaving the supportive housing network, those spots are quickly taken.
"The art of case management is not an easy one," said Bevan Dufty, point man on homeless initiatives in San Francisco. "Same goes for housing. We're struggling right now and can do better.
"But we are trying," he said, pointing in particular to two large supportive housing complexes that opened this year for homeless veterans, and another set to open this fall with an in-house job training center.
"For some, supportive housing is where they will always stay, and that will be a success," Dufty said. "The magic is finding those who can move beyond it so they can make room for others."
Dufty estimates there may be 1,000 among the 6,000 or so supportive housing residents who could easily move on if given more help.
Mayor Ed Lee said he would like to provide more counseling and that he's trying to find federal or state dollars that could help pay for it. He said the technique of supportive housing is relatively new, and that it's not surprising the city needs to make refinements.
"Before, a lot of people thought these were just shelters," Lee said. "We all know now that is not so, but now the system also has to evolve and get better."
A need for 'exits'
Propelling the newly housed toward fruitful existences has never been easy.
For many chronically homeless people, life started out on the bottom end - poverty, abuse, little education, untreated mental illness. So giving them a roof is just a start, experts say.
Counseling, job training and even instruction in simple life management are all crucial to helping them make it on their own.
"We've been great at housing people, but the next step is exits," said Trent Rhorer, who as head of the city's Human Services Agency helped lead the decadelong supportive housing boom. "That is, how do we help people successfully exit our housing into that next step in independence?"
The most recent study of the city's supportive housing network, a 2011 audit by the city's Office of the Controller, said: "San Francisco lacks a formal, citywide exit or graduation program that would help supportive housing tenants who want to move to other stable housing to do so.
"Not only would such a program provide more suitable housing to these single adults, it would make available units for others who need them," the study said.
Budget dilemma
In two years, however, little has changed. Rhorer said he wants to create such a program, but he felt constrained from doing so because of budget problems. Similar concerns kept the city from even measuring how many people in supportive housing got jobs, drug treatment, mental counseling - in short, how many graduated from the system.
"When we started this supportive housing push, we just did it - created as much as fast as we could," said Scott Walton, Rhorer's manager of adult homeless housing. "And the fact is, you can't build in that much housing with the same services everywhere. Assessing what's needed next, and improving the services, is the next step."
He noted that the city's retention rate - the basic measurement of supportive housing success in the United States, tallying how many people stay housed long term - is 95 percent.
"So the fact also is that lives have been greatly improved by moving people inside," Walton said.
San Francisco's dilemma is shared all over the nation, which has gone from just a handful of supportive housing units a decade ago to 300,000 today.
"There is not a great way of accomplishing the best service coordination, and there is a lot of interest in this right now," said Nan Roman, president of the National Alliance to End Homelessness in Washington, D.C. "There is just not enough money to keep endlessly adding supportive housing units, so you need to be able to have people move out to make room for those coming in."
There are 17 nonprofits running supportive housing programs for the city. By far the biggest player is the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which has 1,600 units - nearly a third of the city's total. The organization's buildings include the 248-room Mission Hotel, the largest supportive housing complex in California.
Not enough counselors
The Mission and most of the group's other buildings have a counselor-to-resident ratio of 1 to 100 - much lower than the standard goal. Executive Director Randy Shaw said he'd like that to be closer to 1 to 30, as it is in many other complexes.
But Shaw says his group tried first to satisfy the city's desire for additional housing units to get people off the streets - and only in recent years have many providers come to understand the breadth of counseling needs.
"The supportive housing budgets have been frozen at the same amount since 2009, but the population has become more problematic," Shaw said. "We'd like to do more assessment on the front end - a lot of clients are not capable of living inside and should be in institutions because they set fire to their rooms, walk around naked, stuff like that. But funding is a problem."
Not everyone who moves inside needs intensive counseling, said the housing clinic's deputy director, Krista Geata. Many residents can do just fine with a 1-to-100 counselor ratio. The trick is reaching those who can't.
Running in place
James Bergen, 47, exemplifies the dilemma.
He has been at the Mission Hotel for more than a year on the Care Not Cash program, living on the $104 he gets monthly after paying rent, plus $172 in food stamps. Weakened by hepatitis C - probably from life as a methamphetamine junkie before he cleaned up years ago - he splits much of his time between watching TV in his tidy room with his girlfriend and collecting recyclables.
The recycling involves lugging huge trash bags up and down the streets of the Mission District and South of Market, stuffing cans and bottles into them to sell for pennies on the pound. Like many who receive Care Not Cash welfare grants, he said he needs the extra money just to get by - "and I don't do that panhandling thing."
Bergen attends job-counseling sessions to earn a Care Not Cash grant that is slightly higher than usual, but his main goal is getting his hepatitis under control, moving out and getting back to landscaping work.
But with only three case managers for the Mission Hotel's 300 residents, he isn't presented with a lot of options.
"You sit around here and listen to people talking depressed here, and it makes you want to move ahead faster," he said, sitting on his bed and scratching the neck of his Jack Russell terrier, B'Nard. "The thing about places like this is, sure they could use more counselors, but really only you can determine which direction you go in. You can stay in one place forever, or you can try to move ahead.
"I want to move ahead. I could use a little more help maybe, but it's hard and it's up to you."
Sprawling complex
Signs of contentment and discord alike are everywhere in the catacomb-like, three-story Mission Hotel near the corner of South Van Ness Avenue and 16th Street. A close examination shows why it is so beneficial to have these residents inside - but also why it is so hard to help many advance.
Most rooms, like Bergen's, are organized and clean. The hallways are spotless and usually quiet, and exterminators make regular rounds to kill the roaches and mice endemic to virtually any low-rent residential hotel. Under the city's rules, substance abuse is kept behind room doors.
It looks like any other inexpensive housing complex. But with that comes predictable quirkiness and tension. This is, after all, a population of people that once was dysfunctional enough to be homeless - and the Mission books edgier people than many complexes.
One resident on the third floor is given to popping out of his door at least once a night and screaming into the hallway until others come out of their rooms and yell at him to shut up.
Another longtime resident, a Satan worshiper named Wolf, often sits outside the front door in his wheelchair. His face and arms are a mass of tattoos, including one of Jesus with fangs and horns, and he wears a top hat decorated with genuine rattlesnake heads.
"Hey, if they didn't have us here, where would we be?" Wolf chuckled. "Would you want us to be in your yuppie duplex? We all gotta live somewhere."
A lot to handle
"A lot of the people who come here, they never had any structure in their lives, and giving in to move inside and get some structure is scary" for them, said Art Durazo, the 57-year-old case manager in charge of the third floor. "We've got people who sleep in their clothes as a survival instinct in case they have to run, people who hoard because they've never really had anything, people with tons of issues. This is where they come when they have nowhere else."
Like most of the Mission's staff, Durazo doesn't have a bachelor's degree - but as a recovered junkie, longtime drug counselor and holder of a social services vocational training certificate from Merritt College, he oozes street credibility.
"You can't force yourself on anybody," he said, "so the way we engage is when they need a doctor appointment, need clothes, need furniture, things like that, you jump in. That starts the dialogue, and you work from there."
But with only one case manager per floor, trying to engage everyone as much as should be done is impossible, he said.
Durazo spends what he regards as too many hours in his office doing paperwork for residents' program applications or other issues and being available for walk-ins. It would be better, he said, if all case managers at his and other lightly staffed complexes could be more practical, such as teaching more seminars or strolling the building regularly to make contacts.
"There's just not enough of me to go around," Durazo said. "Say I was teaching a life skills class, or doing more training sessions on resume writing or dressing for success - who would do those other things, like help people figure out their rent issues, file paperwork for outside courses or Social Security?
"After being on the street, people lose their sense of trust, and for them to hold their heads up again, redevelop their self-esteem, takes some real work," he said. "Most people can't do that alone. They need our help."
Where there are more counselors per resident, examples of success are easier to find.
Vaughn Davis, a Silver Man robot street performer on Fisherman's Wharf, lives at the Hartland Hotel in the Tenderloin, also run by the Tenderloin Housing Clinic. For the first time in many years, he's hoping he will soon be able to scale back on the sidewalk gig.
The Hartland's case manager-to-resident ratio is 1 to 60, and Davis, 39, said his life changed when he moved there a year ago after spending five years at the Mission Hotel. The increased attention he got from the complex's counselors landed him several job-training sessions - the latest of which resulted in an apprentice post in a hotel desk clerk program.
"I've been doing the Silver Man act in the streets since the 1980s, and that tip jar is the only source of money that's been constant in my life," he said. "But this hotel clerk job is good, and I think it will lead to something permanent."
Cheering them on
Former Hartland manager Leona Luckett - who functions like a counselor as well - said she rarely gives up trying to help residents improve their lives, no matter how many times they fail. You never know when an effort will stick, she said. Davis, for instance, tried several job programs with her staff's assistance before landing his clerk post.
"The secret is talking and listening," said Luckett, who recently moved from the Hartland to manage another hotel. "Some people here don't have an auntie or a sister to listen to them, no parents left, nobody to cheer them on.
"We can do that instead - and then connect them with programs that help. We do care."
The series
In 10 years, San Francisco has found enough supportive housing to pull 9,000 homeless people off the streets. Yet many of them don't change their behavior - they still panhandle, gather recyclables and use drugs in the open. They still act homeless, even though they aren't.
The city and nonprofits that provide housing are supposed to offer counseling and other services so the homeless can move forward. In a two-day series, The Chronicle reveals how those services are lacking, even as the city adds hundreds of housing units each year.
Sunday: Many rooms, too few counselors.
Monday: Tales of struggle, success.
http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/SF-struggles-to-help-ex-homeless-thrive-off-4705541.php
SF struggles to help ex-homeless thrive off streets
Ten years ago, San Francisco decided that the way to solve its intractable homelessness problem was to spend millions of dollars a year to set up housing-and-counseling complexes for street people. Since then, about 9,000 people have been lifted off the sidewalks and given a roof over their heads.
And yet, it seems like little has changed.
Panhandlers still swarm residents and tourists alike. Ragged down-and-outers still hang out on the sidewalks with giant bindles or heaped shopping carts. Drug users inject in the open all over downtown.
The reason? The nonprofits and city agencies supplying the housing at taxpayer expense have been far more successful at providing residences for those on the street than at giving them counseling services - drug rehabilitation, mental health care, job training - that might help them leave the housing, get off welfare and build better lives.
The result is a huge population of formerly homeless people who still beg, do drugs, wander around with bags of junk - in short, who behave exactly like homeless people. Except they sleep inside at night.
Even the people running the city's homeless services say San Francisco should be doing better.
Although the city spends $38 million a year on what is known as supportive housing and $170 million annually on other services for the homeless - money that comes in part from the voter-approved Care Not Cash program - only 5 percent of those who move inside ever leave the system.
Read 'Halfway Home' Part Two
City welfare and nonprofit officials say they believe they could improve that figure, as well as keep those who stay in the system from hanging out obtrusively on the street, if they could hire more counselors. But even as it pays millions to acquire more housing, the city hasn't found the money to develop a system that would be more effective at helping the formerly homeless move out into self-sustaining existences.
Problem is plain
The evidence of what's wrong and what needs to be done is clear.
Police and city officials estimate that 50 to 75 percent of San Francisco's panhandlers are living in housing, not on the streets.
Only about half the city's supportive housing complexes provide one counselor for every 30 residents, the nationally accepted goal. About a third of the complexes have just one per 100.
A yearlong examination by The Chronicle found that the 103 buildings that make up the city's supportive housing network are decent, clean places - and many residents do just fine, occupying themselves with job training or other productive pursuits. But there are also plenty of people who spend their days watching TV, smoking dope and doing nothing with their lives.
Federal and local studies have shown that the city saves money by putting the homeless in those complexes - a Chronicle study in 2006 found that a homeless person can cost $100,000 annually in emergency medical and other services, while a supportive housing unit costs about $25,000 a year.
But San Francisco, like many other cities that have adopted the housing-with-counseling strategy, is struggling to find ways to get significant numbers of people off the dole altogether.
San Francisco's big boom in supportive housing began with city voters' passage of Care Not Cash in 2003. The initiative sharply reduced direct payments to welfare recipients and funneled the money into acquiring housing for homeless people.
With that money and other funding sources, the city has amassed 5,300 units of housing - a total that continues to grow.
At first, the results looked good. In two years, the city's homeless census plummeted 28 percent, from 8,640 in 2003 to 6,248 in 2005. The number of sprawling encampments downtown diminished.
'We're struggling'
But since then, the census tally has been stuck at about the same total. Over the past decade, 9,250 homeless people have been moved indoors, but only about 300 of them have left the system each year - and not all of those moved on to greater independence. Some proved to be so problematic they were evicted.
The city keeps adding a few hundred units every year. But with so few people leaving the supportive housing network, those spots are quickly taken.
"The art of case management is not an easy one," said Bevan Dufty, point man on homeless initiatives in San Francisco. "Same goes for housing. We're struggling right now and can do better.
"But we are trying," he said, pointing in particular to two large supportive housing complexes that opened this year for homeless veterans, and another set to open this fall with an in-house job training center.
"For some, supportive housing is where they will always stay, and that will be a success," Dufty said. "The magic is finding those who can move beyond it so they can make room for others."
Dufty estimates there may be 1,000 among the 6,000 or so supportive housing residents who could easily move on if given more help.
Mayor Ed Lee said he would like to provide more counseling and that he's trying to find federal or state dollars that could help pay for it. He said the technique of supportive housing is relatively new, and that it's not surprising the city needs to make refinements.
"Before, a lot of people thought these were just shelters," Lee said. "We all know now that is not so, but now the system also has to evolve and get better."
A need for 'exits'
Propelling the newly housed toward fruitful existences has never been easy.
For many chronically homeless people, life started out on the bottom end - poverty, abuse, little education, untreated mental illness. So giving them a roof is just a start, experts say.
Counseling, job training and even instruction in simple life management are all crucial to helping them make it on their own.
"We've been great at housing people, but the next step is exits," said Trent Rhorer, who as head of the city's Human Services Agency helped lead the decadelong supportive housing boom. "That is, how do we help people successfully exit our housing into that next step in independence?"
The most recent study of the city's supportive housing network, a 2011 audit by the city's Office of the Controller, said: "San Francisco lacks a formal, citywide exit or graduation program that would help supportive housing tenants who want to move to other stable housing to do so.
"Not only would such a program provide more suitable housing to these single adults, it would make available units for others who need them," the study said.
Budget dilemma
In two years, however, little has changed. Rhorer said he wants to create such a program, but he felt constrained from doing so because of budget problems. Similar concerns kept the city from even measuring how many people in supportive housing got jobs, drug treatment, mental counseling - in short, how many graduated from the system.
"When we started this supportive housing push, we just did it - created as much as fast as we could," said Scott Walton, Rhorer's manager of adult homeless housing. "And the fact is, you can't build in that much housing with the same services everywhere. Assessing what's needed next, and improving the services, is the next step."
He noted that the city's retention rate - the basic measurement of supportive housing success in the United States, tallying how many people stay housed long term - is 95 percent.
"So the fact also is that lives have been greatly improved by moving people inside," Walton said.
San Francisco's dilemma is shared all over the nation, which has gone from just a handful of supportive housing units a decade ago to 300,000 today.
"There is not a great way of accomplishing the best service coordination, and there is a lot of interest in this right now," said Nan Roman, president of the National Alliance to End Homelessness in Washington, D.C. "There is just not enough money to keep endlessly adding supportive housing units, so you need to be able to have people move out to make room for those coming in."
There are 17 nonprofits running supportive housing programs for the city. By far the biggest player is the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which has 1,600 units - nearly a third of the city's total. The organization's buildings include the 248-room Mission Hotel, the largest supportive housing complex in California.
Not enough counselors
The Mission and most of the group's other buildings have a counselor-to-resident ratio of 1 to 100 - much lower than the standard goal. Executive Director Randy Shaw said he'd like that to be closer to 1 to 30, as it is in many other complexes.
But Shaw says his group tried first to satisfy the city's desire for additional housing units to get people off the streets - and only in recent years have many providers come to understand the breadth of counseling needs.
"The supportive housing budgets have been frozen at the same amount since 2009, but the population has become more problematic," Shaw said. "We'd like to do more assessment on the front end - a lot of clients are not capable of living inside and should be in institutions because they set fire to their rooms, walk around naked, stuff like that. But funding is a problem."
Not everyone who moves inside needs intensive counseling, said the housing clinic's deputy director, Krista Geata. Many residents can do just fine with a 1-to-100 counselor ratio. The trick is reaching those who can't.
Running in place
James Bergen, 47, exemplifies the dilemma.
He has been at the Mission Hotel for more than a year on the Care Not Cash program, living on the $104 he gets monthly after paying rent, plus $172 in food stamps. Weakened by hepatitis C - probably from life as a methamphetamine junkie before he cleaned up years ago - he splits much of his time between watching TV in his tidy room with his girlfriend and collecting recyclables.
The recycling involves lugging huge trash bags up and down the streets of the Mission District and South of Market, stuffing cans and bottles into them to sell for pennies on the pound. Like many who receive Care Not Cash welfare grants, he said he needs the extra money just to get by - "and I don't do that panhandling thing."
Bergen attends job-counseling sessions to earn a Care Not Cash grant that is slightly higher than usual, but his main goal is getting his hepatitis under control, moving out and getting back to landscaping work.
But with only three case managers for the Mission Hotel's 300 residents, he isn't presented with a lot of options.
"You sit around here and listen to people talking depressed here, and it makes you want to move ahead faster," he said, sitting on his bed and scratching the neck of his Jack Russell terrier, B'Nard. "The thing about places like this is, sure they could use more counselors, but really only you can determine which direction you go in. You can stay in one place forever, or you can try to move ahead.
"I want to move ahead. I could use a little more help maybe, but it's hard and it's up to you."
Sprawling complex
Signs of contentment and discord alike are everywhere in the catacomb-like, three-story Mission Hotel near the corner of South Van Ness Avenue and 16th Street. A close examination shows why it is so beneficial to have these residents inside - but also why it is so hard to help many advance.
Most rooms, like Bergen's, are organized and clean. The hallways are spotless and usually quiet, and exterminators make regular rounds to kill the roaches and mice endemic to virtually any low-rent residential hotel. Under the city's rules, substance abuse is kept behind room doors.
It looks like any other inexpensive housing complex. But with that comes predictable quirkiness and tension. This is, after all, a population of people that once was dysfunctional enough to be homeless - and the Mission books edgier people than many complexes.
One resident on the third floor is given to popping out of his door at least once a night and screaming into the hallway until others come out of their rooms and yell at him to shut up.
Another longtime resident, a Satan worshiper named Wolf, often sits outside the front door in his wheelchair. His face and arms are a mass of tattoos, including one of Jesus with fangs and horns, and he wears a top hat decorated with genuine rattlesnake heads.
"Hey, if they didn't have us here, where would we be?" Wolf chuckled. "Would you want us to be in your yuppie duplex? We all gotta live somewhere."
A lot to handle
"A lot of the people who come here, they never had any structure in their lives, and giving in to move inside and get some structure is scary" for them, said Art Durazo, the 57-year-old case manager in charge of the third floor. "We've got people who sleep in their clothes as a survival instinct in case they have to run, people who hoard because they've never really had anything, people with tons of issues. This is where they come when they have nowhere else."
Like most of the Mission's staff, Durazo doesn't have a bachelor's degree - but as a recovered junkie, longtime drug counselor and holder of a social services vocational training certificate from Merritt College, he oozes street credibility.
"You can't force yourself on anybody," he said, "so the way we engage is when they need a doctor appointment, need clothes, need furniture, things like that, you jump in. That starts the dialogue, and you work from there."
But with only one case manager per floor, trying to engage everyone as much as should be done is impossible, he said.
Durazo spends what he regards as too many hours in his office doing paperwork for residents' program applications or other issues and being available for walk-ins. It would be better, he said, if all case managers at his and other lightly staffed complexes could be more practical, such as teaching more seminars or strolling the building regularly to make contacts.
"There's just not enough of me to go around," Durazo said. "Say I was teaching a life skills class, or doing more training sessions on resume writing or dressing for success - who would do those other things, like help people figure out their rent issues, file paperwork for outside courses or Social Security?
"After being on the street, people lose their sense of trust, and for them to hold their heads up again, redevelop their self-esteem, takes some real work," he said. "Most people can't do that alone. They need our help."
Where there are more counselors per resident, examples of success are easier to find.
Vaughn Davis, a Silver Man robot street performer on Fisherman's Wharf, lives at the Hartland Hotel in the Tenderloin, also run by the Tenderloin Housing Clinic. For the first time in many years, he's hoping he will soon be able to scale back on the sidewalk gig.
The Hartland's case manager-to-resident ratio is 1 to 60, and Davis, 39, said his life changed when he moved there a year ago after spending five years at the Mission Hotel. The increased attention he got from the complex's counselors landed him several job-training sessions - the latest of which resulted in an apprentice post in a hotel desk clerk program.
"I've been doing the Silver Man act in the streets since the 1980s, and that tip jar is the only source of money that's been constant in my life," he said. "But this hotel clerk job is good, and I think it will lead to something permanent."
Cheering them on
Former Hartland manager Leona Luckett - who functions like a counselor as well - said she rarely gives up trying to help residents improve their lives, no matter how many times they fail. You never know when an effort will stick, she said. Davis, for instance, tried several job programs with her staff's assistance before landing his clerk post.
"The secret is talking and listening," said Luckett, who recently moved from the Hartland to manage another hotel. "Some people here don't have an auntie or a sister to listen to them, no parents left, nobody to cheer them on.
"We can do that instead - and then connect them with programs that help. We do care."
The series
In 10 years, San Francisco has found enough supportive housing to pull 9,000 homeless people off the streets. Yet many of them don't change their behavior - they still panhandle, gather recyclables and use drugs in the open. They still act homeless, even though they aren't.
The city and nonprofits that provide housing are supposed to offer counseling and other services so the homeless can move forward. In a two-day series, The Chronicle reveals how those services are lacking, even as the city adds hundreds of housing units each year.
Sunday: Many rooms, too few counselors.
Monday: Tales of struggle, success.
http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/SF-struggles-to-help-ex-homeless-thrive-off-4705541.php
