http://hoodline.com/2015/11/sf-s-new-homeless-czar-grew-from-grassroots
This article, written by Marjorie Beggs, was originally published in Central City Extra’s November 2015 issue (pdf). You can find the newspaper distributed around area cafes, nonprofits, City Hall offices, SROs and other residences – and in the periodicals section on the fifth floor of the Main Library.
Sam Dodge squeezed a lot into
the half-hour before his weekly
meeting at the Navigation Center
with staff of city departments and nonprofit agencies. He checked in with the
front desk supervisors and the living
room/kitchen coordinator, checked out
the condition of a few center “dormitories”
where up to 75 people can be
housed, and talked on his cell phone,
putting out fires and sounding every
inch the new director of the Mayor’s
Office of Housing, Opportunity, Partnership
& Engagement—HOPE.
Dodge spent most of 2014 as deputy
to HOPE Director Bevan Dufty, otherwise known as the city’s homeless
czar. When Dufty announced his
retirement on Oct. 12th, Dodge was appointed
to take over the slot.
The seven-month-old Navigation Center,
Dodge’s brainchild, has become the centerpiece
of HOPE. Located on Mission
Street off 16th, it will take in entire encampments
of homeless people (plus their pets),
providing beds, food, clean bathrooms
and no strict curfews. And they can stay
until a case manager finds them more
permanent housing, which now is taking
an average of two months.
Overall, clients are staying at the
center an average of 51 days before they
“exit” to permanent housing or shelters, are sent home to the care of family or friends, or have an “unstable
exit”—mostly just walking away back to
the streets.
The center is Dodge’s baby, and he’s
quick to acknowledge its kinks.
“At today’s meeting—with representatives
from DPH, HSA, DPW, SFPD,
Budget Office, the Controller’s Office,
Episcopal Community Services and
HOPE—we spent some time going
over the metrics the controller is thinking
of using for rating the Navigation
Center’s work,” he said. Among them are
weekly stats on housing placements and
exits, and numbers of those still at the
center after a year.
Those at the meeting talked about
individuals who moved out the previous
week and the next groups moving in—six people from two encampments,
in the Cesar Chavez/101 area and
14th and Mission.
“And,” Dodge said, “we also dove into some issues Navigation Center staff
have been grappling with—lack of documentation,
IDs, working with injection
drug users.”
Those are problems and client populations
that the congenial, conscientious
Dodge, 40, has tended to for most
of his career among the down and out.
After two years as a union organizer
for the California Nurses Association
and the SEIU, he became a fixture in the
Tenderloin, beginning in 2000 as a Tenderloin
Housing Clinic tenant organizer. A year later, he founded THC’s Central City SRO Collaborative, supervising 12 staff and 30 peer organizers
who advocated to force SRO
landlords to keep their residential hotels
safe and habitable. They trained tenants in organizing
skills, including how to monitor
for safety hazards, and convened annual
tenant meetings.
An SRO on Sixth Street. (Photo: San Francisco Homeless Resource)
“Sam’s someone I really trust in his new position,” says Sara Shortt, executive director of the Housing Rights Committee of S.F., who was Dodge’s colleague during those years. “He comes from a perspective that’s very aware of the realities of people on the street. He’s also compassionate and a real roll-up-your-sleeves person. He has heart and understanding, plus he’s a pragmatic problem-solver.”
Dodge says his work in Tenderloin SROs primed him for the new job—“SROs are at the nexus between homelessness and housing,” he notes—but what he did afterward honed his skills. He left the city in 2007 and spent a year helping a buddy set up a bee operation on his Oregon farm.
Next stop: New York City, the proverbial city that never sleeps. Indeed, Dodge didn’t sleep much
for the five years he lived there. He took
evening and weekend classes at Columbia
University toward a master’s in public
policy, and much of that time also
worked full-time for the city Department
of Homeless Services in its Manhattan
Street Homeless Solutions unit, which
shelters nearly 60,000 nightly. He got married, and his first child was born.
When he returned to San Francisco
in 2014, Dodge worked as a DPW analyst,
helping investigate issues at homeless
encampments, coordinating with
social services and collecting data. Soon, Dufty tapped him to be his deputy
director.
“My time in New York really set me
up for this San Francisco job,” Dodge
says. He notes that the similarity of the
two coastal cities—super-high rents
that push many into homelessness—is
overshadowed by weather differences.
“The seasons have a big bearing, the
extreme cold and heat there,” he says. “A
court settlement in 1979 gave people
the ‘right to shelter,’ and New York now
has 58,780 people in 255 shelters compared
to 1,200 here.”
Surprisingly, however, the two cities
count roughly the same number of street homeless: 3,500. (San Francisco reported a
total 6,686 homeless in January, but of
those, 3,100 were considered “sheltered,”
living in public or private shelters,
cars, or other places “not designed for or
ordinarily used as a regular sleeping accommodation
for human beings.”)
“To me, the comparable street homeless
numbers say New York’s right to
shelter works,” he says. “But New York
also has a parallel system, transitional
shelters they call ‘safe havens,’ that are
comparable to our Navigation Center.“
New York’s 10 safe havens have more
than 670 beds.
As deputy director of HOPE, Dodge
got the opportunity to use that East
Coast model. An anonymous donor came
to him, he says, and offered $3 million
“with no strings” if the city would “do
something about the street homeless.”
The conceptual idea and framework for
the Navigation Center were his, he says,
and he scouted and found the location,
helped supervise the construction with
DPW and managed the budget. Of the
$3 million, two-thirds went to center
buildout and operations, one-third to
permanent housing for those leaving
the center.
He found the site in December—a
36,000-square-foot parcel with 12 aging
but freshly painted portable buildings,
five of them dorms, ringing a large
courtyard filled with picnic tables under
white tents. The center opened
three months later. Marshall Elementary
School and Phoenix Continuation High
School, previously occupied the site, which had
been vacant since 2002. Dodge credits
Dufty with leading the way in getting
Mission District residents and business
owners to accept the center. “NIMBY is a
big issue—it always is—but Bevan got
them to not only accept, but welcome, the program.”
Photo: Navigation Center
More centers are needed. In September,
the mayor allocated $3 million
in city funds to expand the program, and approved plans to master lease 500
SRO units to house people leaving the
Navigation Center. Dodge heads up that
Streets to Homes initiative, too. Among the SROs slated for that program are the Civic
Center and Drake hotels, he says.
Shortt is confident that Dodge, given
his ability to work within the system,
social justice background and “position
against criminalizing homelessness,” will
get high marks from public and private
stakeholders.
“Sam really cares about housing
and homeless issues,” she says. “My only
reservation is whether he’ll be able to
tolerate the pressures that may come
with the job and the administration he’s
working under.”
On his way into the weekly meeting
in one of the portable buildings, Dodge
stopped in the courtyard to pet a small
dog who was unleashed but sticking close to his
owner. Of the 236 people who’ve cycled
through the Navigation Center since it
opened, 16 percent have brought pets. That’s
about 40 dogs, Dodge estimates.
“I love dogs,” he says. “It’s so nice to
have them in my days.”