San Francisco officials have created a cycle of dependency regarding drug use, contributing to the city’s homelessness crisis, as nonprofits under lucrative contracts have little incentive to solve both problems and are not being held accountable, according to a local homeless advocate and a former San Francisco County supervisor.
“A lot of the homeless nonprofits we have in San Francisco, they are given all this money, but they’re not actually given an audit of how they are actually spending the money,” Mr. Ortega said during the episode.
Nonprofits, such as those offering so-called safe consumption sites, are enabling a “vicious cycle” of dependency, Mr. Ortega said. That, along with cheap drugs—including fentanyl at $1.50 a pill—and a lack of enforcement of laws have attracted many on the margins to the city.
“We have become a prime target for the homelessness to come here,” he said.
While the city has a budget of billions to fix such problems, paying hundreds of nonprofits to do so, Mr. Ortega says the organizations never have to show results and have little impetus to do so.
“When you are being paid to solve a problem, you have a financial incentive to make problems worse in order to come back the next year and say, ‘I need more money, the problem’s gotten worse,’” he said.
Mr. Ortega describes the city he says he loves, as one that cares deeply about people in need, but says the city has misjudged what many homeless people actually need.
“We are the most compassionate city. But at the same time, we’ve got to have a limit on what we are doing because we are only encouraging more homelessness. We are not actually fighting homelessness,” he said.
Mr. Hall agreed.
Like Mr. Ortega, he said the city is only enabling drug use, which leads to more homelessness, and nonprofits’ actions are contributing to the problem.
“The nonprofits in the game, they don’t want to end drug use,“ he said. ”They want to keep it going. That’s what they are getting paid for.
“If you ended drugs, they are out of work.”
However, he says the nonprofits aren’t to blame. They are only doing what they’ve been contracted to do.
“It’s the elected person that employs them,” that’s the problem, he said. “Where does the buck stop? It stops with the elected official who is responsible for the nonprofit being in business. That elected official has to be held accountable.”
Homelessness and Drug Use
According to the most recent point-in-time homeless count for the city of San Francisco, which was conducted in 2022, there were 7,754 homeless people in the city, a 3.5 percent decrease from 2019. However, the number of homeless people has also increased by 13 percent since 2017 and by 43 percent since 2005.The next count will be in 2024.
Mr. Ortega—who said he never used drugs as the stigma of being homeless was enough for him—said he turned his life around due to the sheer fear of dying on the streets.
It was that, as well as “the fear of being forgotten. The fear of not making a positive impact. The fear of being invisible,” he said.
He said he became involved in advocacy work for the homeless after he toured a so-called sobering center, run by a nonprofit, and he asked what he called hard questions—like how many people did it help and how many became clean and sober?—which its staff could not answer.
“That was a red flag for me,” he said.
Since then, when pressing for solutions or accountability on such issues with San Francisco elected officials, he said some have been quick to call him “uncompassionate” or “mean-spirited.”
He said he has challenged city leaders on various policies, including the so-called “housing first” model, meaning placing a homeless person in a home without requiring treatment for other issues such as drug use.
He said such is misguided and magical thinking.
“Taking a person who is drug addicted and stuffing them in a room is not going to solve their addiction,” he said.
He also said the city’s policy of putting some of its homeless in hotels during COVID only caused more financial chaos for the city, as tourism plummeted and some hotels were destroyed, leading to costly lawsuits.
“It’s trying to fix one problem by making two more for the city,” he said.
Mr. Hall agreed, saying the city’s elected officials are proposing programs that are unrealistic and won’t solve problems.
“They are coming up with pie-in-the-sky programs,” he said, which will not change, “until people in power, elected power,” want things to change and “have the guts to make it happen. Then there will be change. Then the city will change. It’s not going to happen otherwise.”
He said elected officials do such to get their “10 seconds in the sun” so they can tout they are least doing something, but only so they can run for higher office.
He additionally said he is not against nonprofits, but there is abuse in some, and he thinks charities—funded with private donations not government contracts—are better suited to solve the city’s problems.
“Nonprofits are great, if the stated mission is actually fulfilled,” he said. But if the nonprofits’ “existence is to [only] get more contracts, it should be done away with.”
According to Mr. Ortega, something must change.
“The definition of insanity is to do the same thing again and expecting a different result,” he said. “We’ve been doing this year after year. We need to try something new.”
He said the city needs to audit the nonprofits it has hired, take funding away from those who are not succeeding, and use that money to invest in housing and for drug addiction treatment.
Finally, he said drug dealers must be taken off the streets.
“The problem with our city,” he said, “is we have mistaken compassion for tolerance. You can be compassionate ... but you also have to hold people accountable.”
The city, he said, doesn’t want the responsibility of solving its worsening problems, so it has handed off the work to nonprofits.
That, he said, must change.
“We need to go back to holding the government accountable,” Mr. Ortega said. “We need to hold them accountable for the problems they’ve allowed to fester in the city.”
