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‘New wave of homelessness’: Can regionalism, prevention fight tsunami of unsheltered in Bay Area?

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Peter Laimont, left, in his room where he displays artwork by his son at the Henry Robinson Center in Oakland, Calif., on Tuesday, January 14, 2020. Laimont will soon move out of the center into more permanent housing with the help of the Bay Area Community Services and All Home, an organization that seeks to create a Bay Area-wide network for homeless individuals.
Peter Laimont, left, in his room where he displays artwork by his son at the Henry Robinson Center in Oakland, Calif., on Tuesday, January 14, 2020. Laimont will soon move out of the center into more permanent housing with the help of the Bay Area Community Services and All Home, an organization that seeks to create a Bay Area-wide network for homeless individuals.Photos by Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle

Elester Shelton spent 20 years off and on in the streets of San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley — sometimes housed, always poor even though he often worked as a roofer, always hoping for help. It wasn’t until he landed at a homeless aid center in Oakland a year ago that things began to turn for him.

The Bay Area Community Services case managers he found there searched the databases of their nonprofit’s offerings throughout the region to find out where he’d been and what might best fit him, and they came up with subsidized housing and counselors that were just right. He stayed in transitional housing until this winter when, at age 63, he moved into his own place for the first time in many years.

“I’ve been through a lot of programs that didn’t do much for me, and I would have been off the streets quicker if they’d been able to talk to each other,” Shelton said. “Face it, we can’t figure this stuff out by ourselves. We need all these places that try to help us to get together somehow and work things out.”

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That’s exactly what a new nonprofit has in mind.

All Home, which officially opens its doors at the end of January in San Francisco, has the ambitious goal of persuading city and county governments throughout the Bay Area to reach across their borders to keep people like Shelton from tumbling into homelessness — and to help them out of the street once they do.

Factors contributing to homelessness

Two-bedroom rent as a percentage of extremely low-income household incomes by county:

San Francisco: 162%

San Mateo: 112%

Contra Costa: 92%

Alameda: 105%

Santa Clara: 98%

Homeless people in San Francisco’s Point in Time counts who cited inability to afford rent as their main reason for being unhoused:

63% in 2019

56% in 2017

48% in 2015

Source: All Home, S.F. Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing

Despite billions of dollars spent on the crisis, three newly homeless people are estimated to hit the streets in the Bay Area every time one is pulled into shelter or housing. All Home argues that without fixing that dynamic, officials won’t be able to make a dent in the crisis. The new nonprofit argues that the region may be on the verge of seeing a tsunami of unsheltered people because the more than 740,000 extremely poor people here are increasingly losing their fingernail-thin hold on stability as housing costs rise and wages stagnate.

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The nonprofit’s argument is that a lot of new homelessness can be prevented if different jurisdictions mutually track who uses poverty services to prevent wasteful duplication (tracking systems are mostly kept just local now), and if they cooperate to build more ultra-affordable housing and job opportunities for the very poor. It has compiled statistics to outline the challenge and set the ambitious goal of raising $50 million a year by 2023 for prevention efforts including rental aid and preservation of housing units for those on the lowest economic rung.

Lester Shelton speaks to his fellow residents of Henry Robinson Center as they talk about their housing situations in Oakland, Calif., on Tuesday, January 14, 2020. Lester hopes to soon move out of the center into more permanent housing with the help of the Bay Area Community Services and All Home, an organization that seeks to create a Bay Area-wide network for homeless individuals.
Lester Shelton speaks to his fellow residents of Henry Robinson Center as they talk about their housing situations in Oakland, Calif., on Tuesday, January 14, 2020. Lester hopes to soon move out of the center into more permanent housing with the help of the Bay Area Community Services and All Home, an organization that seeks to create a Bay Area-wide network for homeless individuals.Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle

The nonprofit has examined five counties — San Francisco, San Mateo, Contra Costa, Alameda and Santa Clara — and intends to expand to the rest of the nine-county region.

Among the numbers All Home compiled: 41% of those 740,000 extremely poor people hold jobs, but virtually none of them can afford typical rent.

The gap between the median rent for two-bedroom units and the monthly income for poor households grew from $100 a month to $400 a month in the past decade, according to research by the Boston Consulting Group for All Home. In San Francisco, that translates to a poor household needing to spend 162% of its income on rent. In Alameda County it’s 105%.

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The 740,000 population number is extrapolated from the 265,000 households in five counties listed as extremely low income, according to U.S. census figures. Extremely low income is 30% or less of the median household income, which comes to $34,000 or less.

Living that close to the edge exponentially increases a person’s chances of becoming homeless, according to studies last year by the California Policy Lab at UCLA and the Bay Area Council. Both urged regional efforts to prevent homelessness, and All Home intends to delineate specific tactics for that in the coming years.

“People talk regionally, but they act very locally when it comes to homelessness,” said All Home’s founder, Tomiquia Moss, who until September ran Hamilton Families, the leading family shelter provider in San Francisco. “But this feels like the moment to actually do this. We can do this.”

She said the effort will address how to more quickly create area shelters; loosen zoning and funding for extremely low-income housing; provide rental help; and conceive other strategies that bridge borderlines around the Bay Area. She plans to convene regional conferences and has assembled a Bay Area-wide advisory board that includes Destination Home CEO Jennifer Loving in the South Bay and Amie Fishman, head of the Non-Profit Housing Association of Northern California.

Regional cooperation has been suggested for decades by mayors and nonprofit leaders, but All Home is the first organization to profess that as its single goal. And with Gov. Gavin Newsom pushing regionalism as an imperative for addressing homelessness, it may have some momentum.

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Peter Laimont, left, stops to talk with Mary Castro and her dogs Mama, Tutu, and Phatphat as they wait for the elevator at the Henry Robinson Center in Oakland, Calif., on Tuesday, January 14, 2020. Laimont will soon move out of the center into more permanent housing with the help of the Bay Area Community Services and All Home, an organization that seeks to create a Bay Area-wide network for homeless individuals.
Peter Laimont, left, stops to talk with Mary Castro and her dogs Mama, Tutu, and Phatphat as they wait for the elevator at the Henry Robinson Center in Oakland, Calif., on Tuesday, January 14, 2020. Laimont will soon move out of the center into more permanent housing with the help of the Bay Area Community Services and All Home, an organization that seeks to create a Bay Area-wide network for homeless individuals.Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle

All Home is already advising Newsom’s statewide homeless task force. Moss and Gail Gilman, two of the most prominent homeless service providers in San Francisco of the past decade, lead the organization, giving it credibility.

“Look, you don’t need a passport to go from San Francisco to San Mateo, but we treat all of our social welfare, all of our safety net, all of our homeless services as if we do,” said Gilman, who until July was head of Community Housing Partnership, one of the Bay Area’s leading supportive housing agencies. “But the fact is we are an integrated community, so we have to have a regional approach if we are ever going to make real headway.

“If not, and if we don’t help (extremely low-income) earners stay housed, we are very concerned that they will become a new wave of homelessness.”

The total number of homeless people in the nine-county Bay Area surged 24% from 28,200 in 2017 to 35,005 in 2019. Until this past year, homeless directors throughout the region said two new people hit the streets for every one who got housed — but with the acceleration of homelessness, they now say it’s three.

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Frank Mecca, a member of Newsom’s homeless task force, said All Home’s input is in sync with what his panel is trying to promote throughout the state.

“Regionalism is hard. One size does not fit all for addressing homelessness, and doing this is going to be uncomfortable for cities, counties and the state,” said Mecca, executive director of the statewide County Welfare Directors Association. “But the cities, counties and state are already uncomfortable.

“And unless we all link arms and push ourselves beyond our comfort zones and do everything possible, this will not get solved.”

All Home is being funded by donations from foundations and organizations including Tipping Point Community, Salesforce and the Tides Foundation. It has raised $3 million.

The nonprofit’s numbers and goals have impressed the directors of UCSF’s homeless research arm enough for them to agree to help out with advice and research.

“I don’t think regionalism is impossible at all,” said Dr. Josh Bamberger, associate director of the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative. He said he’d like to promote more aggressive use of surplus government land — such as turning the state’s vacant, 800-acre Sonoma Developmental Center into an area-wide workforce development hub — and chances are better now for cooperation on projects like that than they would have been years ago.

“The data is stronger now to support regional efforts,” said Bamberger, who has worked with chronically homeless people for decades. “When it was just San Francisco, Oakland and a little of Santa Clara County coming up with numbers, that was one thing. But now that every county is tracking programs and people, and recognizing the economic failures that have created this problem, there’s more motivation.”

Kevin Fagan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kfagan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @KevinChron

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Kevin Fagan is a longtime, award-winning reporter at The San Francisco Chronicle, specializing in homelessness, enterprise news-feature writing, breaking news and crime. He has ridden with the rails with modern-day hobos, witnessed seven prison executions, written extensively about serial killers including the Unabomber, Doodler and Zodiac, and covered disasters ranging from the Sept. 11 terror attacks at Ground Zero to California’s devastating wildfires. Homelessness remains a core focus of his, close to his heart as a journalist who cares passionately about the human condition.

He can be reached at kfagan@sfchronicle.com.