S.F.'s budget woes could kill programs that help the city's most at-risk tenants

San Francisco Chronicle​

2 days ago

Long regarded as a critical supplement to the work done by city building inspectors, two community-based code enforcement outreach programs that target some of the city's most at-risk tenants could soon cease to exist as San Francisco's Department of Building Inspection looks to trim costs.
Emails sent to about half a dozen local housing nonprofits on Monday informed them that the decades-old Code Enforcement Outreach Program, or CEOP, is facing complete erasure due to the city's budget woes. Among the supports offered by the nonprofits that receive funding through CEOP and the SRO Collaborative program, another DBI-administered initiative focused on residents of low-income single-room occupancy hotels (SROs) that's also at risk, are multilingual outreach, housing counseling and disaster preparedness services. In the past, the programs have united advocates representing landlords and tenants.
And yet, both are on the chopping block under DBI's proposed two-year budget plan, which suggests cutting the department's annual $4.8 million allocation for the programs as Mayor Daniel Lurie seeks to eliminate $185 million in grant and contract spending in order to close a looming $800 million two-year city budget shortfall.
'We greatly value and respect the work we've done together, but any grant is dependent on having sufficient funding in our budget. As such, we are invoking the termination stipulation in Section 2.3,' a DBI representative said in the emails sent to nonprofit leaders on Monday, which the Chronicle obtained. The Chinatown Community Development Center, or CCDC, the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, the San Francisco Apartment Association, Dolores Street Services and the Housing Rights Committee, are among the groups that will be impacted by the programs' elimination.
Monday felt like 'groundhog day' to service providers who, for the second time in two years, were told that the programs would be defunded. They pushed back against cuts planned by DBI in 2023 under then-Mayor London Breed, and were successful in getting the funding reinstated.
Those interviewed by the Chronicle Tuesday said they were blindsided by the news, given that DBI's own commission recommended keeping the programs in place and fully funded earlier this year.
'We were shocked in 2023 and we are shocked this year, mainly because around February we were advocating at the commission as we were expecting about a 25% cut in total,' said Lisa Yu, a policy analyst with CCDC, a local affordable housing developer. 'Everything is in jeopardy.'
DBI requested that the recipients of the code enforcement outreach grants 'plan for an end date for your services' on June 30. The move will impact an estimated 15 outreach workers across the list of nonprofits that are funding through the grants, the Chronicle has learned.
'The mayor talked about cutting some nonprofit contracts that emerged during COVID. But CEOP started in 1996. The collaboratives have been here for more than 25 years. These are programs that no one's ever had a negative word to say about,' said Randy Shaw, director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, a low-income tenant advocacy organization that stands to lose roughly $900,000 for its Central City SRO Collaborative program and CEOP.
The funding cuts appear to thwart recommendations made by DBI's Building Inspection Commission, which penned a letter to the city's Board of Supervisors in March requesting that the code enforcement outreach grants be fully funded.
That letter, obtained by the Chronicle, suggested that Lurie and the Board use general fund dollars to continue to support the programs, and that DBI could increase the inspection fees it charges across the board by 1.5% to 'compensate for the proposed General Fund reductions in support.'
'These providers go to the tenants as well as take complaints. Reduction in outreach services will not mean a reduction in need, it will mean more tenants leave inhabitable apartments and end up homeless or people will suffer health conditions as a result of uninhabitable housing,' the commission warned in its letter.
Neither DBI nor Lurie's office immediately responded to the Chronicle's inquiries for comment on the programs' planned elimination.
Last week, Lurie unveiled his $15.9 million budget proposal, which he said prioritizes the city's core services, including clean street and public safety. Declaring an end to what he described as the ' era of soaring city budgets,' his plan includes slashing 1,400 city jobs. The proposed cuts come as the city's revenues remain impacted by high commercial vacancy rates and sluggish tourism downtown.
CEOP and the SRO Collaborative program were previously placed in jeopardy under former Mayor London Breed, who sought to patch a growing budget deficit in 2023 by ordering city departments to trim their budgets. The funding was ultimately restored, though the total allocation for the programs was reduced by 10%, according to Yu, of CCDC.
She said that the nonprofit providers expected another 15% funding cut for the outreach programs.
'We're all really confused on what happened, because we weren't expecting a 100% funding cut when the issue was presented to the Commission in February,' Yu said.
CEOP has received about $1.7 million from the total grant allocation, while the SRO program received about $3.8 million. The nonprofits that have historically received the funding are operating on five-year contracts that are due to expire next June.
Yu said that CCDC runs the SRO Collaborative, for which it receives about $1.5 million in annual funding. It also receives about $272,500 for CEOP.
'We have housing counseling, and we provide fire prevention workshops. For home visits alone, we visit about 43 SROs in Chinatown with about 80 SRO families total,' Yu said, adding that the nonprofit assists about 86 clients per quarter with housing counseling services.
'About 183 tenants attended our fire and disaster preparedness workshops per quarter,' she said.
About 16% of the Housing Rights Committee's total budget, or $617,000, comes from the DBI grant, according to the nonprofit's executive director, Maria Zamudio. HRC has long provided housing counseling and advocates for tenants rights in San Francisco.
'We provide language access to tenants who are not going to be able to just connect directly with a building inspector, or are not able to navigate the DBI website. We also ensure that there is support for (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development) tenants, who have some of the most egregious habitability conditions in the city,' Zamudio said.
'In this political moment, with all of the attacks on immigrants and all of the attacks on HUD funding at the federal level, to feel those attacks locally and in a way that doesn't need to happen … really shows where the priorities for this new administration are,' she said.
Tenant advocacy organizations aren't the only ones impacted by the proposed cuts. The San Francisco Apartment Association advocates for property owners on a 'shoestring budget,' according to spokesperson Charley Goss. The organization faces a funding reduction of close to $150,000 if the code enforcement outreach programs are cut.
'There are difficult decisions that have to be made with regard to the budget. But, from our perspective, these are maybe the only programs where you have tenant groups and landlord groups working together for a common goal, which is to improve living conditions in apartment buildings,' Goss said. 'We've seen firsthand that the programs work … and we believe they also save the city money. We have nonprofits doing the work to get buildings up to code, which saves the city money via their inspectors. The inspectors don't have to do that work.'