A thought…
Perhaps the City of S.F. could take over the mortgages on the Hilton and Parc properties - about 3,000 rooms total - and offer housing to the unhoused. Assuming 2x per room that’s about 6k spaces. The hotel rooms have private baths and locking doors - things most unhoused want more than anything else in a shelter. The properties have commercial kitchens and meeting rooms for any number of purposes. Food service to 6k people won’t be as difficult as in other situations. Entry and exit points can be screened. Parking areas can also be re-purposed as holding bays for some of the unhoused possessions. There’s a great deal of opportunity in these properties providing there is enough vision to see it.
By eventually processing back into society 6-10k persons per year, SF’s homeless epidemic might be pared down within 3-4 years. By that time the City could spin off the properties to a developer that would then strip out the hotels, patch the places back up, and repurpose both properties as condos or apartments.
Of course this assumes that the drug addicted and the mentally ill would be screened and processed quickly into other facilities outside the City. In Southern California, camping bans cannot be enforced until the Counties/Cities have provided enough beds for their indigent population. Once that target is hit (1 bed / 1 indigent) per the Feds, all of the camping laws can be recriminalized. OC at least won’t get to a 1-1 ratio anytime soon, and LA will never reach that ratio. Might SF then be able get to a 1-1 ratio to sooner by aggressively pursuing these two properties? “But there’s no money…” of course will be claimed by the Homeless Industrial Complex - because their funding would stop being wasted on small steps and redeployed more efficiently. Every time I hear it took $300k to house 1 homeless family in temporary living arrangements, I wonder where all that money went - since it didn’t go towards a meaningful solution.
The funds are there, but is the will? What say you?