by Mary Kate Bacalao : sfstandard – excerpt
Mary Kate Bacalao is the director of external affairs and policy at Compass Family Services, co-chair of the Homeless Emergency Service Providers Association, and co-chair of the Local Homeless Coordinating Board.
The Chronicle’s investigation of “unstable, underfunded and understaffed residential hotel rooms” is a sobering indictment of a housing system pushed to its absolute breaking point.
Single-room occupancy hotels, commonly called SROs, are a cornerstone of San Francisco’s supportive housing portfolio. The supportive housing model—which at its heart combines deeply affordable housing assistance with robust on-site services—went national in the 1990s, and in recent years state and local revenues like Project Homekey and 2018’s Proposition C have catalyzed significant expansions to deal with a growing crisis of unsheltered homelessness. The problem is not that supportive housing is a failed model, but that these program expansions are happening on top of a foundation that is crumbling from decades of underinvestment…(more)