Sanchez’s new home, on the fourth floor of San Francisco’s Hotel Diva, came courtesy of a state and federal effort to rent rooms for homeless people as COVID-19 spread. The program began in March 2020 at a pair of hotels near the Oakland Airport and at its peak extended to hundreds of properties from Crescent City to San Diego, allowing 35,000 homeless Californians to take refuge from the streets. COVID-19 is the proverbial crisis that became an opportunity — one that advocates and politicians say allowed them to treat homelessness like the national disaster that it has long been. Over the past decade, as the state’s median home value has risen to $700,000, the number of people sleeping on the streets has jumped 40% to about 113,000 residents, or a little over half of the nation’s unsheltered homeless population. This happened despite various multibillion-dollar initiatives to curb it. The sight of freeway-side shanties and parks full of tents has simply become part of the California landscape. But the pandemic, which according to a dire early projection could have killed 25,000 homeless people in the state, added two sorely needed ingredients — federal money and an excuse to move fast. With the travel industry hobbled and stimulus money continuing to flow, Gov. Gavin Newsom has since doubled down by creating a program to buy hotels in hopes of creating permanent homeless housing en masse. “This is going to put us on a trajectory to do in literally a couple of years what would have easily taken us a decade or two,” he said in an interview.