No More Children Living in the Streets
Stop the Evictions of Homeless Families from City Shelters!
Please email Mayor Daniel Lurie and your Supervisor to ask them to end the policy of evicting families with children from city homeless shelters!
If you live in D9 or D11, please email your Supervisors to thank them for already supporting our request, since Jackie Fielder (D9) and Chyanne Chen (D11) already publicly committed to supporting us!
Mayor Daniel Lurie’s email is Daniel.Lurie@sfgov.org.
To find your Supervisor’s email, click here.
Thank you!!
– The Recently Arrived Families Committee of Faith in Action Bay Area
In 2024, the Recently Arrived Families Committee of Faith in Action Bay Area won a $50 million increase in the San Francisco City budget to address the needs of homeless families (read more about this important victory below).
Instead of ensuring that these new resources are being invested effectively to end child homelessness, the new Mayor Daniel Lurie is allowing the City’s Department of Homelessness to pursue an experimental policy of evicting families with children from City shelters after a 90-day limit.
Media Coverage:
S.F. homeless families to be evicted despite reassurance from Lurie (Mission Local)
March 10, 2025 https://missionlocal.org/2025/03/sf-homeless-families-eviction-daniel-lurie-shelters/
Shelter families say City officials ‘don’t care what happens to us’ (SF Examiner)
San Francisco group rallies to protest evictions at homeless shelters (KPIX CBS Channel 5) February 5, 2025 https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/san-francisco-group-rallies-to-protest-evictions-at-homeless-shelters/
For full media coverage, please click here.
Victory! $50 million for unhoused families in San Francisco!
In a tough 2024 budget year when the San Francisco city government was cutting hundreds of millions of dollars, there was one notable increase—an additional $50 million to address the needs of homeless families. This new investment was the direct result of our collective organizing efforts!
There are over 400 homeless families on the waiting list for shelter in San Francisco. After nine months of organizing by Faith in Action Bay Area leaders, the City is finally taking action with this investment to implement the plan designed by the homeless families themselves, which includes:
80 new emergency hotel vouchers, bringing the total to 115, to ensure that no child has to sleep in a car, on MUNI, or under a bus shelter
165 new rent subsidies, to expedite the movement of families out of shelters and into more permanent housing
The campaign for this important victory was led by the Recently Arrived Families Committee of Faith in Action Bay Area, comprised of directly impacted asylum seekers who are currently living in shelters or on the street. Its success depended on the involvement of so many of you, who donated to the Emergency Fund, sent emails to public officials, and attended our public actions—including the big one on March 7—to show city officials that it’s not OK for children to be sleeping on the street in our Sanctuary City.
Testimonies from the March 7 community meeting
LISTENING
The Recently Arrived Families Committee began organizing in September 2023 when several asylum-seeking families connected with Faith in Action Bay Area organizers through a local church and our community response hotline. We went together to the city’s Access Point, where we were shocked to find that after a 90-minute intake process with many personal questions, the families were told, “Sorry, you haven’t been homeless for long enough, so we have nothing for you. The shelters are all full. There are hundreds of people on the waiting list.” They were sent away with nothing but a handful of bus tokens.
We sprang into action and began raising money through our Belong Emergency Fund to get the kids off the streets (thank you so much to the many of you who donated!). After advocating with city supervisors, several families got into the city-funded hotel voucher program—but it only lasted a few weeks, and in late September, they faced eviction from the hotel, so we organized a media event where the families spoke out. In the middle of the press conference, we received a call from the city Department of Homelessness saying they had suddenly located available space in a family shelter, starting that very night.
From the beginning, the leaders were clear that their goal was not just to help themselves and their kids, but to ensure that people who came after them would not have to suffer the same way. So they began doing outreach to other families in the shelters, at churches, and at their kids’ schools, working with teachers and social workers to connect with new families. Soon we had a committee of two dozen parents meeting weekly, building relationships and developing a plan to address what was clearly a failure of the city’s homelessness system.
RESEARCH
After building relationships with other homeless families and hearing their stories, the Recently Arrived Families Committee began meeting with City Supervisors and representatives of the City’s Department of Homelessness, to understand why children were being allowed to sleep in the street, and what could be done about it. They discovered the following:
- Guaranteeing same-day access to shelter space or a hotel voucher is the only feasible and humane way to ensure there are no more children living in the streets of San Francisco.
- Hotel vouchers are a cost-effective way to keep children off the streets.
- A major reason the family shelters are full is due to the slow progress in moving families out of the shelters and into more permanent housing.
- Valuable public resources already funded by taxpayers are not being distributed to families in need
- The voters of San Francisco want immigrant families, and all homeless families, to receive shelter and basic supports
Based on this research, the families develop a simple and cost-effective plan to end family homelessness in San Francisco:
- We call on the Department of Homelessness to guarantee shelter space or a hotel voucher the same day that any family with children arrives at a City Access Point.
- We call on the Department of Homelessness to expedite the movement of families from shelters into more permanent housing, with an online public dashboard where families and the public can monitor the waiting list and movement of families into permanent housing.
In mid-January, the leaders sent a letter to Shireen McSpadden, Director of the Department of Homelessness, urgently requesting a meeting and proposing concrete solutions. Director McSpadden responded by emphasizing the Department’s lack of resources, and she did not respond to the families’ proposals or request for a meeting.
ACTION
Because Homelessness Director McSpadden would not meet with the families, they decided to organize a public community meeting, to hold the city government accountable and push for action. On Thursday, March 7, 2024, over 350 San Franciscans representing 40 congregations, schools and organizations gathered at St. Anthony’s Catholic Church in the Mission. The leaders ran the meeting, giving powerful testimony about the reality and laying out their proposed solutions. Supervisors Ahsha Safai and Dean Preston, along with Supervisor Hillary Ronen (who was unable to attend), committed to supporting the families’ demands.
“People told us that San Francisco was a Sanctuary City where they protected immigrants, and that was one of the main reasons we wanted to come here,” said Karla Margarita Solito, who arrived from El Salvador last summer with her four children after gangs threatened multiple times to kill her husband. “But the reality has been different.”
Jenifer Carcamo, another asylum seeker from Honduras, explained, “I thought we were going to have stable, safe housing, but at the City Access Points, they just tell us that they are full, the shelters are full, there is no space. Even with my one-month-old baby, there is no response.”
The audience included teachers, social workers, doctors, clergy, and many concerned San Francisco residents. “I moved here in 1982 with the man who is now my husband,” said Jim Lichti, who attends First Mennonite Church of San Francisco. “This city has been a welcoming city, a place where so many of us have found sanctuary. It breaks my heart to see these children having to sleep in the street. That’s not what San Francisco stands for.”
A few days after the community meeting, Supervisor Ahsha Safai responded to this display of people power by introducing a resolution at the Board of Supervisors supporting the Faith in Action Bay Area leaders’ demands. Four Supervisors attended a press conference we organized on the steps of City Hall to challenge the mayor to increase support for family homelessness.
Introduction of the resolution on City Hall steps March 12
REFLECTION
After the City budget passed the Board of Supervisors with the new investment, the Recently Arrived Families Committee celebrated and reflected on what they had learned. A few of their reflections were:
Before we were intimidated by the system— and now we’ve learned how to navigate it. This gives us the power not just to help ourselves, but also to ensure that others don’t have to experience the same problems.
No one is going to do for us what we can do for ourselves. San Francisco calls itself a Sanctuary City, and people do want that, but the system doesn’t work that way—unless we speak up and shine light on the truth, and do the work to make it real.
Only by being united and organized can we create the change we need to see in the world.
In recent weeks, the leadership committee has begun another round of listening and outreach to newly arrived families. They met several families living in vehicles who went to City Access Points and were turned away. It was clear that the $50 million in new funds was not yet being used to ensure that children do not have to sleep in the streets. One of the leaders commented, “That’s how the system works. We’ve been too passive in the past weeks, we’ve let the government forget about us. We need to redouble our efforts and keep organizing to ensure that money acutely gets to the people who need it!”
Special thanks to all of the organizations that were represented at the March 7 community meeting and helped make it a success!
- All Hallows Catholic Church
- Buena Vista Horace Mann School
- Calvary Presbyterian Church
- Cathedral of St. Mary of the Assumption
- Church of the Epiphany
- Congregation Sherith Israel
- Episcopal Church of St. Mary the Virgin
- First Mennonite Church of SF
- Francisco Middle School
- Galileo High School
- Grace Fellowship Community Church
- Innovate Public Schools
- Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity
- John Muir Elementary School
- Latino Task Force
- Mission Dolores Church
- Mission Education Center
- Mission Graduates
- Mission High School
- Mission Language and Vocational School
- Or Shalom Jewish Community
- Plaza 16
- RISE-SF
- Sanchez Elementary School
- SF Friends Meeting
- St. Agnes Catholic Church
- St. Aidan’s Episcopal Church
- St. Anthony’s Catholic Church
- St. Charles Catholic Church
- St. Dominic’s Catholic Church
- St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church
- St. James Episcopal Church
- St. Paul of the Shipwreck Catholic Church
- St. Peter’s Catholic Church
- Sha’ar Zahav
- The Kitchen SF
- Thurgood Marshall High School
- TODCO
- UCSF Center for Excellence for Immigrant Child Health and Wellbeing
- United Educators of San Francisco
