View the San Francisco for Wednesday, May 14, 2025
Mayor Daniel Lurie, right, seen in April: “We must tackle the homelessness and behavioral-health crisis we face alongside the historic budget deficit we inherited.”San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie has identified the problem — insufficient beds for the homeless and people struggling with mental health — and has laid out a solution — more beds.
Last week, Lurie announced the official formation of the Breaking the Cycle Fund, which is a publicly managed but privately funded account that hopes to rake in donations from private interests. He has a $37.5 million head start with no end goal. Asked by The Examiner at a press conference announcing the fund, Lurie said there isn’t a specific fundraising target to“We have to meet people where they’re at,” Lurie said. “This is a good start. We’re going to continue to have conversations with more donors.” The absence of a fundraising goal stands in contrast to the specificity of the targets Lurie has set for the expansion of services for people who are homeless, suffering from addiction or struggling with mental-health problems. During his successful campaign for mayor last year, Lurie set a very specific target of opening 1,500 new beds within six months of taking office. It was an ambitious — and very specific — target for a new mayor to meet., a broad vision to reduce drug addiction and homelessness that sets a target of 1,500 interim housing and stabilization or treatment beds. Lurie is hoping to use the Breaking the Cycle plan as a road map — and private funding to pay for as much of it as possible. What he’ll get in return remains to be seen. The administration’s ability to stretch $30 million or more depends almost entirely on thes, which can vary widely depending on the type, a report from the San Francisco Controller’s Office found earlier this year. The Mayor’s Office has made clear that the money will be used for capital costs, such as erecting new shelters, and not operational costs, such as the salaries of staff members who monitor said shelters.r at 1925 Evans Ave., opened in 2021, required about $19.2 million in startup costs, just shy of $95,000 per bed.sparked controversy after capital costs added up to $113,000 per unit, but city officials steadfastly defended the price. The nonprofit Dignity Moves had previously set up a cabin site on Gough Street for $33,000 each, but The City reported that the price was that low becauseMission Cabins, an installation of 60 tiny homes, sparked controversy after capital costs added up to $113,000 per unit, but city officials steadfastly defended the price.Beds with more intensive services, such as detox or behavioral-health treatment, will likely be even more expensive to both build and operate due to stricter regulations. Thus far, the fund consists of a small handful of major donations. The Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation and Crankstart have each chipped in $10 million. Keith and Priscilla Geeslin contributed $6 million, and the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation added $500,000. Tipping Point Community, the nonprofit Lurie founded but no longer runs, has contributed a previously reported $11 million that will be used to support a family homelessness-prevention pilot program. “The Mayor’s plan allows San Francisco to create interim housing that offers families and individuals the stabilization and recovery they need, while we also work on long-term housing solutions,” Gloria Bruce, Crankstart’s program director for housing security and public-private partnerships, told The Examiner in an email. “These crucial efforts support a more effective, compassionate response to San Francisco’s housing crisis, and we look forward to helping the city and providers ensure that people can get housed and healthy.” The limiting factor may not be Lurie’s ability to raise money — something he’s deeply experienced in — but The City’s ability to pay for the not-insignificant cost of operating facilities. Thus far, his administration has signaled that it will base its decisions on what people need, not on what services are cheapest or most efficient to provide. “When we’ve looked at our continuum of assets across interim housing, transitional housing, permanent supportive housing, what we’ve begun to identify is we’ve invested, surely, in a lot of beds in The City over the last several years,” said Kunal Modi, Lurie’s policy chief on homelessness and housing. “We haven’t always invested in the right beds to address the folks who are struggling on our streets today, over 50% of whom have a mental health or drug addiction crisis that they’re trying to work through.” The administration has yet to outline an operational funding plan, though the upcoming budget proposal — due from Lurie on June 1 — should reveal his thinking. Mayor Daniel Lurie meets residents at Dr. George W. Davis Senior Residence and Senior Center at 1753 Carroll Avenue in San Francisco on Wednesday, April 23, 2025. As it builds new facilities, The City will have to figure out a way to pay for their continued operation. San Francisco is facing a two-yearOne tactic Lurie’s administration could use to fund its plans would be to realign the parameters of its Our City, Our Home Fund, which is funded through a controversial business tax approved by voters in 2018. But the fund was set up with strict spending requirements. At least 50% must be directed toward permanent housing and 25% on behavioral-health treatment services. Up to 10% can be spent on shelter, and up to 15% can be spent on homelessness-prevention efforts. Lurie could look to expand shelter funding by pulling from money that would otherwise be earmarked for permanent housing. It might be a hard sell — when former Mayor London Breed attempted to allocate unspent housing funds to support shelter in her 2023 budget proposal, sheBut it’s a new year, and Lurie is a still-new mayor who says he has a mandate from voters to create a safe, clean and thriving San Francisco. “We must tackle the homelessness and behavioral-health crisis we face alongside the historic budget deficit we inherited,” Lurie said. “We must learn to do more with less, and that’s going to require an unprecedented all-hands-on-deck approach, an effort designed to reach across sectors and silos, one that brings to bear all the talents, innovation and expertise of this incredible city.”San Francisco’s housing market seems to be poised for a long-awaited return to pre-pandemic rental-price levels by the end of the summer. Rental-market experts say that the steady return of workers to their offices and increased business activity downtown are helping drive demand for rental properties and jostling San Francisco out of a COVID-induced economic rut that has kept rental prices largely stagnant over the past three years. “We’re shifting back to a landlord market in The City,” said David Chesnosky, an independent rental-leasing broker whose work focuses on San Francisco and North Bay cities.took a nosedive in the year and a half that followed the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. After hitting rock bottom in 2021, prices regained some ground but then largely stagnated over the following three years.Chesnosky said that over his 22 years in the business, this has been the busiest start to a year he’s ever seen. “That was a little surprising,” he said — especially so because the start of most years typically tends to mark a period of relatively slow activity in the highly seasonal rental market., according to the latest figures from rental-listing website Zumper. That’s only a few hundred dollars shy of the pre-pandemic market high of $3,720. Chesnosky said he expects that as the busiest season for the rental market gets underway in the coming months, prices will spike once again, and “by the summer, we’re probably going to be pretty close to the pre-COVID level.” Already, the price increases have made San Francisco’s rental markets among the hottest in the nation. Over the year that ended in April, San Francisco saw a 10.3% increase in its median rental rate, according to figures from Zumper. That’s high enough to put The City within the top eight major cities in the country, with a higher rate of increase than both New York, which saw an 8.4% increase, and Houston, which saw 7.8%. Following the outbreak of the pandemic, tens of thousands of residents left San Francisco, many of them taking advantage of the opportunity to conduct their work online to pull up stakes and move to cheaper locales. As demand for San Francisco’s apartments plummeted, prices fell precipitously as well. The rock bottom came in April 2021, when the median one-bedroom apartment went for $2,600 per month.“The continued rent growth seen over the last few years reflects the city’s ongoing recovery,” Zumper spokesperson Crystal Chen told The Examiner via email. And driving that recovery, she said, has likely been “the widespread adoption of return-to-office policies.” In other words, as more employers take stronger measures to encourage their workers to return to their cubicles, the flow of workers back into The City has driven up demand for nearby housing.Chen credits growth in certain segments of the tech sector for helping to snap San Francisco out of its economic doldrums — especially artificial intelligence companies, which have ridden a wave of innovation and enthusiasm to grow their businesses and also expand their downtown footprints. Last year,Chesnosky said rental-price increases have advanced at different paces in different parts of The City. He said downtown — an area that took an especially hard economic beating over the past several years — is lagging the furthest behind.In contrast, Chesnosky said, the most attractive apartments in The City’s most in-demand neighborhoods — which he identified as the northern neighborhoods of Pacific Heights, Cow Hollow, the Marina, Russian Hill and North Beach — have already seen their rental rates surpass pre-COVID figures.The de Young is part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, a sub-awardee of a canceled, six-figure National Endowment for the Humanities grant that would’ve funded an artwork conservation workshop next year.The de Young is part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, a sub-awardee of a canceled, six-figure National Endowment for the Humanities grant that would’ve funded an artwork conservation workshop next year.Click and hold your mouse button on the page to select the area you wish to save or print. 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