Earlier this month, Mayor London Breed announced the opening of the Garland Hotel at 505 O’Farrell Street in Tenderloin, San Francisco. The project proposal includes the development of permanent supportive housing units. The project is a part of Mayor Breed’s Homelessness Recovery Plan, announced in July 2020, which includes the largest one-time expansion of PSH in 20 years.
Garland Hotel will bring 80 new permanent supportive housing units for adults experiencing homelessness. The plan is on pace to reach 170% of the goal of acquiring or leasing 1,500 units by the end of this fiscal year. Currently, there are 1,490 active PSH units and an additional 1,054 units of PSH in the City’s pipeline.
Former residents of the Baldwin Hotel, a PSH that is converting to a non-congregate shelter, will have the opportunity to move with their current service provider to the Garland Hotel or another comparable PSH site. Every night, the City provides shelter and housing to over 14,000 homeless and formerly homeless people, with more than 10,000 of these individuals residing in City-funded PSH units.
The City has provided funding to Tenderloin Housing Clinic (THC) to master lease and operate the previous SRO hotel, providing long-term affordable housing with on-site social services residents. Additionally, the City has been awarded approximately $140 million in Project Homekey funding, Governor Newsom’s statewide initiative to sustain and rapidly expand housing for persons experiencing homelessness, for the recent acquisitions of the Diva Hotel, Granada Hotel, 1321 Mission Street, and the Eula Hotel, which combined, have added 527 Homekey funded PSH units to the City’s pipeline.
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The San Francisco Chronicle ran a damning piece on the reality of these so-called “homeless hotels”. They are full of squalor, infested with violent tenants, bugs, rats, and are highly unsafe. The non-profit workers who maintain these buildings are under constant physical attack by the tenants. A tenant recently said she set up a tent in her hotel room to keep out the rats and bugs. The sinks and toilets don’t work because tenants are destroying them. These hotels are no better than the streets we are supposedly saving these people from. The tenants have no respect for their spaces and the workers who are tasked with helping them. These hotels more closely resemble psych wards than they do dignified living spaces. And all of this at the taxpayer expense. 0 oversight, and politicians can keep patting themselves on the back for a job well done while increasing the homeless budget year after year. Props to the Chronicle for shedding a light on this very important story.
I first would like to say thst %95 of the time you would be exactly right, however, this time your are completley wrong. Ive lived in supportive housing for 7 years while holding down a job and (not just working the system) its been about 9 months since the THC SRO I was living in The National SRO on Market between 7th 8th across from the civic center plaza burned to the ground were I lived for 5 years and I lost everything. i thought it was bad there and after the fire I was moved to The Baldwin at 57 6th St. and I can honestly describe the conditions at the Baldwin as so bad I can truly say I almost, not quite but almost would have rather been in a tent. After seven months I was blessed with the chance to move to the fully remolded Garland and its like a a dream come true. I have my own kitchen but most of all my own bathroom and that is something that people in regular houses take for granted. imagine sharing 6 bathrooms with 250 people, need i say more. the best part about thee garland is they picked people like myself that aren’t trouble tenants using drugs and just generating problems. as i said the person who wrote the comment above would normally be correct,however, i have to give THC a lot of credit, this is not really even an SRO. It is technically, but i would be shocked if 15% of SRO in sf have a kitchen,bathroom in every fully remolded room that has very affordable rent. I’m so grateful for what i have here at the garland i felt the need to clarify a few things.