Because we believe it is the most efficient way to help people experiencing homelessness. Is this a good investment . I called this hearing to understand how does the department of homelessness think about, quote, success . Success looks different to different people and i want to make sure we are on the same page and were getting a good solid return on our investment. So, im going to frame this hearing in three different parts. Im interested in three top issues. First, getting people off the streets. In particular i want to know how many people have we moved into the theyre congratulations centers Navigation Centers . How many go back on to the streets after their maximum 60day stay . Do any people return to Navigation Centers after the 60day stay . I want to understand the services that are being offered. Whats the percentage of people what percentage of people are taking advantage of services and which services are they taking advantage of . Does that percentage increase on a second visit and how are we measuring their efficacy . And how are Navigation Centers affecting neighborhoods that are hosting them . That is important so we begin to talk to other neighborhoods and people that are considering bringing in a Navigation Center. Im sure member peskin would be interested. He has identified a source. And i want to be able to show you some examples of solid data and positive response. Weve had one in district ten and district nine. But i think we need to quantify that so stories arent just anecdot anecdotal. Does trash increase . And i think thats a fair question to ask and interested in the specific metrics we are using to evaluate our success. I want to make sure were not just measuring the inputs, meaning the number of centers or number of social workers or folks that are just going through the door. And were not just numbering and measuring output to the people that were serving. Im looking for a quantity theyive shift in the quantitative shift. And we are moving them into longto determine housing. Thats a value we share. Finally, i want to realize the Software System is new. Theres a new Software System for those that dont know that the department of homeless is working with. We may not have great data but i would like to establish a firm baseline. We need to be more data driven and develop an empire empire empirical process. I would like to thank the director and emily cohen from the department of homelessness for presenting today, as well as i cant pronounce this. Im sorry. I cant pronounce this. Last name is patel. Thank you. Good to see you both this morning or this afternoon. Good morning. Sorry you have to endure me twice in one committee hearing. Thank you for calling this hearing and i couldnt agree more with what you said in your remarks, supervisor. Our framework which is available on the website speaks about using the considerable investments the city has made in addressing homelessness towards a data driven system to get people to exit homelessness. That is the most important and the only really important metric is how many people do we help move from homelessness to housing, whether it is through city funded housing, through their own efforts or through programs like homeward bound. Theres clearly a crisis on our streets with 7,500 people homeless on any given night. 58 of them sleeping outdoors and finding temporary solutions for them is also important. Not only for people who are homeless, but also for people who are living in neighborhoods where theres high concentration of homelessness. As you see in the first slide, the count said 7,500 people on any given night, theres about 21,000 people in any given year experiencing homelessness in San Francisco. 8,000 are newly homeless in every year. Supervisor cohen are really homeless . Newly homeless. Supervisor cohen okay. However, you will see on the far right we help about 2,000 people a year exit homelessness through a environment of different programs, through homeward bound and permanent Supportive Housing and rapid rehousing rent subsidies. But nonetheless with 8,000 new Homeless People every year and only helping 2,000 people exit homelessness, thats a big channel were trying to address. It is important we not just focus on Navigation Centers which are really a very small part of our system. We think about how do we solve this problem from a system wide level to better use our resources effectively. We already shelter 7,000 people a year. 6,000 hot team clients are served every year. 2,000 people served in the nav centers within the 7,000. 1,500 people receiving homeward bound or eviction prevention. And thats in addition to the nearly 10,000 people housed in our permanent Supportive Housing units that we have. Nav centers are an important part of that system, but they are just that, a part of the system. This is just a quick snapshot of homelessness in the city and how it is directed. Primarily in districts six, ten and nine. And on the next slide you see this is the distribution of housing shelters, nav centers and all Homeless Services in the city, again concentrated primary in districts six, nine and ten based on the where the populations are. Then theres housing spread throughout the city. In some cases just one or two facilities there. Im going to skip over slides. This isnt a presentation about our strategic framework. But there are many components to it. Maybe a couple i should highlight. One being we talk about problem solving, which is because we have so many people coming into the system every year, we need to find ways to divert them out of the system as quickly as possible. And problem solving is things like eviction prevention, flexible grants. Just the other day we helped a family who was about to become homeless because the father was driving for a Ridesharing Company and he needed the side view mirror fixed so he could get back to work. 300 bucks and we prevented them from becoming homeless. To make sure before people get into the system they are being offered problem solving. And even though we have 74 hundred units of Supportive Housing, only 800 units become available. We have this new Housing Program to help residents move out into the private market with section eight vouchers or housing choice vouchers. Next year instead of having 800 units of housing turn over, we will have a thousand units become available, which will make a significant difference. And you spoke about data. On the next slide here, we are using data the data we have as well as we possibly can and are modeling for how are we going to achieve specific goals we have. And how are we going to reduce chronic momlessness by 50 . We have a fairly robust data model that weve developed that shows how housing replacementses we need to make and how many people we need to prevent from becoming chronically homeless versus the new flow. I think we are moving in that direction and we have special teams specific goals for ourselves around family youth and adult homelessness. Those are the standards by which we need to judge the efficacy of our system. And this is a visualization of what our new system looks like. You will see theres a lot of components to it. And temporary shelter is just one part of it. Den, temporary shelter only solves peoples problems and nav centers and the like on a temporary basis. Lets talk about the inventory. People send to focus on nav centers. But theres 2,300 shelter beds in our system. And they range from Emergency Shelters where you can stay one night and the others where you can stay longer. Again, we try to measure our success based on how our system is doing. Not how one particular program is doing. The program on the temporary shelter side is much bigger than nav centers. I think Everybody Knows at this point what nav centers are. I like to refer to them as shelters as they should be. There are essentially shelters but there are some unique features that dont exist in other shelters. They allow people to bring in pets, partners and their possessions. The services on site are more robust and theres deeper partnerships with h. S. A. And the department of health. It is a much Higher Service enrich environment than you will see in a shelter. Their open 24 7 so people can go. They allow people who are working or for whatever reason just want to step out to do so and not have to sort of come in and be governed by rules that some of our larger shelters have. I think its a bet every way to provide shelter and it is more attractive to people on the streets who have been in the shelter system and feel they didnt work for me. Im not comfortable being with 300 other people. That environment doesnt work for whatever reason. So, when were outreaching and offering People Places to go, they are much more attractive to individuals who maybe have had p. T. S. D. Or have been in jail and dont do well in these large settings. They are also more expensive to operate. Shelters ranges from 40 to 60 a night. Nav centers range from like 90 to 95 night. They are smaller and they have more services. A couple of things important to clear up about nav centers, theres misinformation swirling around about how long you can stay, how they work. They are really very flexible shelters we use in a environment of ways. We have nav center beds participating for one night. We have a few of those beds available. We see about five 17 people a week is our goal. We will see a couple of beds every night for folks getting ready to reunify with a family member. We have emergency beds, about a dozen, that are only sevenday stays and used for emergencies. If we get a call in the middle of the night, somebody on the street really suffering or the paramedics pick somebody up, they can call to see if there is a bed available. We dont have that flexibility in most of our shelter systems. The option are we take people to the Sobering Center and now weve the nav center beds. And we have time limited beds which people can stay in for 60 days. However, if they are working on housing or they are trying to get shelter or theres a clear path forward for them, we will extend the stay to help facilitate them getting the job or shelter bed or getting the housing. But in many cases, not everybody is using those beds for that purpose. And because we have so many people who need access to shelter and because we dont have permanent Supportive Housing for everybody, letting all those beds with time unlimited wouldnt make very much sense. The places who do that like new york city, for example, end up with 60,000 people in their shelter system with very Little Movement out of the shelter system because the investments havent been made in housing. So, we dont let people stay indefinitely. We have pathway to housing beds. We have about about 110. So, almost half of the nav centers beds are called pathway to housing beds i thought the previous slide said 352 . Yes. A little over a third. Sorry supervisors. Im probably doing the math wrong. About 150 roughly are pathway to housing beds and those are for individuals who are long term homeless who have some form of disability who will be prioritized into our housing. We just dont have housing for everybody. We prioritize the housing for that population. When we identify those individuals either on the streets or in a nav center, we will put them in that bed and stay there until they get housing. But having all these beds available until they get housing when theres not enough housing doesnt make sense because they will end up living there permanently in the nav centers. So, you are saying those 150 beds are 60day stays that can be extended . Those are 60day beds but if youre working towards housing yep. Or you have made a shelter reservation and you are going to go into a 90day shelter or moving into transitional housing and we have gotten you a slot in a Substance Abuse treatment program. We are not going to interrupt the path and say your 60 days is up. Go back out on the street for a week and then you can go into the shelter. That makes zero sense to do that. But we have, frankly, folks who are not on that pathway. And when their 60 days are up, they have to leave. What im hearing when i talk to someone who works at a Needle Exchange program and provides shelter to homeless folks, it is somewhat traumatizing when people are taken out of encampments where they have formed community. But that is ameliorated when you are taking folks and providing a safe place where they can get services. But 60 days later, if they dont get a path and theyre suddenly back on the street, their community is gone. Their whole way of being organized on the street is disrupted. And youve like traumatized them twice because now they are dumped back on the streets. So, that amplifies whatever mental or Behavioral Health or Substance Abuse issues they had before they were connected with the system. You have actually exacerbated the situation and those circumstances. You put people back on the street without their community, without their support and made them more vulnerable and more traumatized. I think it is a cycle that ends up with more negative consequences. If we get someone off the streets why we cant keep them off the streets . Hopefully the numbers i shared with you prior explain the answer to that question. We have 21,000 people experiencing homelessness in the city on any given year. Only have the resources to help about 2,000 people exit homelessness. If we allowed everybody to stay in our temporary shelters permanently, we would end up a street homeless problem the city has not seen since the 90s. Very large encampment in front of city hall. This is a heartbreak and difficult decision we have to make because we are having to ration resources where we dont have enough of. I would argue that somebody who has been homeless in San Francisco for ten years or longer, who grew up in San Francisco perhaps and who has a Severe Mental Health issue and is on our streets needs to get prioritized for housing versus somebody who maybe shows up two weeks ago and sets up in a tent and we end up responding to a neighbors complaint because that person is unhoused. We put them in a nav center and that person because they happen to have triggered a complaint and a response they end up getting permanent Supportive Housing when we have so many people on the streets suffering. These arent easy decisions to make. But folks who have been so, they are just not easy decisions to make. But weve got a system that is based on successes that we have seen in other communities, including houston which saw a 75 reduction in homelessness in about ten years. Using coordinated entry and using data and making decisions on how to effectively ration what you have. Not a perfect solution by any stretch of the imagination. And difficult decisions have to be made. Thats the reason why. The numbers just are what they are. I would also argue that whereas i have seen encampments where there is a sense of community and where people have come together to really create to care for one another. The vast majority of them are not that. They are very unsafe and very unhealthy. Theres violence. The police have indicated to me that they estimate that four out of five of the women in the encampments have been subject to violence against them and that theyre not in good places. And that using nav centers as a tool to redirect folks to more healthy environments has been a successful one. It is really a balancing act between how do you deal with a limited amount of resources, how do we address concerns that citizens have about large encampments in their neighborhoods versus and then the other thing that i will say to answer your question, supervisor, is that theres a ton of data that shows when people come indoors even if it is for 30 days, their cortisone levels drop, they gain weight and if they have serious mental illness, their thinking becomes more organized. Where i dont disagree in some cases this hasnt been a positive experience and they lost something, i would argue that in the vast majority of cases, people and theres lots of data to back this up, medically shows it is good for people to get a break from the streets and help them lead towards more maybe to resolve their homelessness on their own. So, you put a woman back on the street who four out of five have been sexually assaulted to allow them to be revictimized. And the person who came and set up a tent on the sidewalk might be a queer kid, trans kid whose life is in danger i dont get the sense that some humans are better than others. Half the young people on our treats are lgbqt it is just a concern. I would also say theres 21,000 people coming in the streets every year. About 40 of them will be women. So, yes, we may end up having a person end up bag on the streets again. Back out on the streets but theres somebody behind them able to use the bed and maybe get reconnected to a family member. Theres no easy solutions. I think its just important to remember that its not just about the person who is right in front of you. But its about looking at the system and using the resources we have to make wise decisions. As were getting more organized in how we use the resources, we have an Assessment Tool that factors in three things. Eleventh of homelessness, disability as well as like mshlg situations that people emergency situations that are people are in. If it is Domestic Violence or you just got out of the hospital and you have been discharged out on to the streets. It is not as straightforward as the length of homelessness. Theres multiple factors we use to determine and unfortunately to ration the services we have to help as many people as we possibly can. Right now, each Navigation Center bed can serve four people a year roughly. If we followed a policy in which youre going to stay here until you get housed, each Navigati