SF Homeless Czar Touts Streamlined Approach, Urges Patience

By Kevin Fagan 
San Francisco Chronicle 
August 30, 2016 

One tent encampment cleared, 77 more to go — not to mention building an entire department devoted to moving thousands of homeless people off the streets.

San Francisco’s new homeless czar, Jeff Kositsky, spent an hour talking with The Chronicle’s editorial board Monday, and despite his street outreach teamdismantling the biggest encampment in the city that morning, he wasn’t doing much crowing.

The task of combining the efforts of at least five city departments into the newDepartment of Homelessness and Supportive Housing is going to take years, he warned. Clearing one camp — the first operation for his freshly created Encampment Resolution Team, is just one of many, many steps ahead.

Kositsky wants to make sure the people of the city understand that the mere creation of the department, which he took charge of officially on Aug. 15, is not going to change the city’s most vexing problem overnight.

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New SF Head of Homelessness Already has a Game Plan in Play

San Francisco Chronicle 
By Heather Knight
August 12, 2016

For fed-up San Franciscans wondering just what City Hall is doing about the frustrating problem of homelessness, Jeff Kositsky’s office whiteboard provides some heartening answers.
On Monday, Kositsky officially becomes the director of the city’s first Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing. He’s been on the job since June 1, but because of a quirk in the city’s byzantine budgeting system he has technically been deputy director of the Human Services Agency.

Kositsky and his team are squeezed into a small, temporary office on Van Ness Avenue where a whiteboard is filled with 28 immediate priorities and 23 longer-term goals. The latter column is called the “parking lot,” but — considering Kositsky’s obvious determination — the ideas probably won’t be parked there for long.

He’s already making headway on many of the department’s goals, which align closely with the four solutions offered by The Chronicle’s S.F. Homeless Project series in June. As part of a first-of-its-kind Bay Area media project — in which more than 80 organizations participated — The Chronicle outlined ways to create supportive housing, add Navigation Centers and improve traditional shelters, bolster mental health care and provide stronger law enforcement.

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The Man Who’s Trying to Clear the Tents from SF’s Streets

San Francisco Chronicle 
By Kevin Fagan
August 12, 2016

The man tasked with leading the most ambitious effort in years to clear San Francisco’s streets of tents began his mission on his knees.

Jason Albertson knelt the other day before a wary crowd of hard-core homeless campers along the waterfront near Cesar Chavez and Indiana streets after asking them to gather together for a few moments, and as he opened his mouth they didn’t really know what to expect. They knew he’d come to tell them they had to tear down their sprawling camp by the end of August. But they’ve heard orders to clear out before, here and at other camps.
Would this just be a quick heads-up followed by an army of police and street cleaners tearing down their tents?

Not this time. What Albertson, head of the newly created city Encampment Resolution Team, brought to this colony of about 50 people was something new: a straight-up splash of reality, on-the-spot offers of shelter and counseling, and promises to help them get ready for the clear-out day.

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A Formula to Get Homeless Individuals Off the Streets

San Francisco Chronicle 
By Jeff Kositsky
August 9, 2016

Across America, unsheltered homelessness has become an increasingly visible and persistent challenge. San Francisco is far from alone in this — Los Angeles, San Jose, Las Vegas and cities around the country are facing similar challenges. San Francisco has an estimated 3,500 people living on the streets on any given night — up less than 3 percent from 2013.
Accurate data on the size of the encampment population are lacking, making claims about recent growth speculative. However, we all agree that there has been an increase in the visibility of homelessness and encampments. There is a strong relationship between encampment visibility and the city’s ongoing “building boom.” Areas that previously had high concentrations of encampments have either been made inaccessible by development or have become less desirable because of activity in those areas. As people relocate, encampments have begun forming in areas that had previously never seen them. With increased visibility and more elaborate structures, these encampments have elicited growing concern.

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Mother Jones: Homeless People are Older & Sicker than Ever Before

June 30, 2016 

“Everything,” Tom Wesley answers when I ask what’s ailing him. Diabetes. Multiple heart attacks. Chronic liver failure. “They’ve told me I’m dying.”

Wesley, a towering man in a salmon-colored corduroy shirt buttoned just at the top, is only 54. But for most of his adult life, he lived on the streets. He refused to stay in shelters because he didn’t like the structure; he says he also spent a significant time behind bars for heroin possession. “You could say I was using heroin,” Wesley says with a smirk. “But I don’t know who was using who—it sure used me up.”

He quit a few years ago—after losing two wives to overdoses. Around that time Wesley’s health problems started getting worse. Last year, a terrible pain in his abdomen brought him to San Francisco General Hospital, where he says he was admitted, via the emergency room, seven times in a matter of three months. At that point he was already used to the ER, having relied on it instead of primary care. “I wasn’t one for doctors,” he says.  Click here to read the full article.