San Francisco built many specialized teams and departments to confront homelessness, addiction, and street mental health crises, producing overlapping roles and a confusing array of acronyms. Street outreach often required calling multiple teams in sequence to address wounds, prescriptions, and shelter needs, creating delays and coordination problems. City workers long recognized the coordination challenge. In early January Sam Dodge, hired in 2022 as director of street response coordination, sent a memo proposing consolidation into one team for homelessness and street cleanliness and another for medical concerns, including mental health and drug issues, to simplify operations and improve responsiveness.
It's no surprise that an incoming mayor with no government experience might be dumbfounded. What's more, when Mayor Daniel Lurie walked through the Tenderloin or the Mission, he discovered that tending to someone sprawled on the street often required calling up workers from several of those acronyms - preferably in the right order - so that the person could get a wound tended to, a prescription filled and, possibly, a shelter bed.
A group of professionals who had been working on the city's homelessness problem for years noticed this in his campaign literature, and, as one of them said, "leaned into it." In early January, Sam Dodge, sent a memo to Lurie outlining how the many street outreach teams could be consolidated. City workers had long-known that coordination between street teams was a problem, so in 2022 Dodge had been hired by the Department of Emergency Management as director of street response coordination.
Collection
[
|
...
]