SF police alternative taking vast majority of homelessness calls, mayor says

When San Francisco launched one of its newest street-homelessness response teams last year, its director said The City viewed it as an audition. The Mayor’s Office touted it as a successful one this week.

Mayor London Breed said Thursday that the Homeless Engagement Assistance Response Team , a collaboration between the Department of Emergency Management and Urban Alchemy to address the vast number of 911 and 311 calls being made each day related to homelessness, responded to nearly 14,000 calls for service in The City — or more than 80% of such calls in San Francisco — in its first year of existence.

“Having a dedicated team of outreach workers, trained and equipped to help people experiencing homelessness, access resources and support they need while addressing community concerns that help free up critical police resources is making a difference,” Breed said.

Eighty percent of calls from the public were related in some way to blocked sidewalks, and 70% involved small encampments of people experiencing homelessness, according to Breed’s office.

Ross Mirkarimi, the director of HEART, said the program is made up of four teams of Urban Alchemy staff, many of whom have struggled with poverty, addiction and homelessness themselves. Operating seven days a week, HEART offers an alternative to police responses to these homelessness-related calls, which can range in scale from individual tents blocking sidewalks to small encampments.

“People were calling in with concerns or issues, and then the response to that was not happening,” Mary Ellen Carroll, executive director of the Department of Emergency Management, told The Examiner. “It took so long that ... by the time police were able to get out there, the problem either wasn’t there or it had escalated.”

There are nine street teams in San Francisco , each of which focuses on a different aspect of the shared goal of addressing homelessness. All nine are managed by either the Department of Public Health, the Department of Emergency Management, the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing or the San Francisco Fire Department.

While HEART’s focus is on answering service calls, the teams all aim to connect those who need housing or other services with the resources they need, even though certain challenges remain.

“We undercount our beds in terms of placing people because we do not have an allocation of beds from the Department of Homeless and Supportive Housing,” said Mirkarimi, a former San Francisco supervisor and sheriff, of connecting unhoused residents to shelter.

Instead, he said, team members will take those who are seeking shelter through the process themselves, standing in line with them during intake and even taking them to shelters outside of the coordinated entry system run by The City.

“There are other shelters where there might be other resources that are not directly in the coordinated entry system,” Mirkarimi said. “Just recently, we placed a mother with three children in a shelter that wasn’t available in the main system.”

Carroll said the HEART team is also able to call on the several other street teams working in The City for help in these instances.

“They are fully connected to all the other teams and can reach out to say, ‘Hey, we have somebody here who really needs a place,’” she said. “And we can see if we can get those resources to them.”

Breed’s office touted HEART’s efforts hours before releasing The City’s preliminary data from the 2024 Point-In-Time Count , which measures a one-night snapshot of homelessness in San Francisco. Overall homelessness rose 7% from the last count in 2022, with officials recording 8,328 people experiencing homelessness on the night of the count. The City tallied fewer people living in tents, structures or on the streets than any point since 2015.

Sheltered homelessness rose 18%, with 48% of The City’s unhoused population staying in shelter on the night of the count. The San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing said that proportion was higher than ever.

City officials said they were happy with HEART’s performance. Carroll, the Department of Emergency Management’s executive director, told The Examiner the program “worked out better than we even probably could have imagined.”

“We’re working with the mayor’s office, and we’re hoping to get funding to continue at least at the level where we are now,” Carroll said.