The San Francisco Chronicle investigated the city’s efforts to give homeless people housing in former hotel rooms and found that many of the rooms are often vacant. In some hotels up to half the rooms are vacant. The Chronicle blames the problem primarily on the mayor’s referral process, but the story itself suggests significant problems with the tenants and with the nonprofits the city pays to keep the buildings maintained.

Emails and records obtained by The Chronicle show that, on average, about 990 supportive housing units in San Francisco were unoccupied last year — 10% of the city’s housing stock for its homeless population…

The units remained unfilled because of a few chief factors, reporters found in a new investigation. About 60% were empty due to a slow and convoluted referral process operated by Mayor London Breed’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH), and because approved tenants were still gathering paperwork to move in or had declined a placement offered by the agency.

The other 40% of rooms were offline and unavailable, mostly because they were uninhabitable — dirty, in disrepair, or sealed shut by the city medical examiner after someone had died inside. Nonprofit housing providers, responsible for the day-to-day maintenance of the units, have failed to stay on top of much-needed cleaning and repairs at some SROs.

This sounds like two separate but related problems. The first is that many of the rooms are empty because of filth and violence. The accommodations are so bad that even homeless people don’t want to be there. One homeless person who was staying at a city Navigation Center told the Chronicle, “I’d rather stay in a tent than go to an SRO.” Another who was staying in one of the hotels said this:

“This building is a toilet,” said Raiford Houston, a tenant at the Seneca Hotel on Sixth Street, which is managed by the Tenderloin Housing Clinic. The SRO had nearly two dozen vacant units in December, most of them due to maintenance or janitorial issues, records show…

Reporters found that many buildings are beset by housing or health code violations and violence, and a steady procession of overdose deaths traumatized tenants and staff members…

Prior investigations by The Chronicle found that nonprofit operators who neglect their properties face few, if any, repercussions from HSH. The result is rampant disrepair in many SROs, making the buildings undesirable to prospective tenants. Documents and interviews show that unreliable bathrooms forced people with disabilities to use portable toilets inside their rooms; pest infestations became so bad that residents fled their units; and leaky pipes spread mold and mildew, causing ceilings to collapse.

Homeless people given referrals to some of the worst hotels decline them because they don’t want to be there. It quite literally looks worse than the streets to them.

Even when HSH did get prospective tenants slotted into the building, many turned the placement down.

After touring the Aarti, these people said they would prefer to remain homeless or in transitional housing…

So problem one is that the buildings are awful. Problem two is that the mayor isn’t filling vacancies in these filthy, violent hotels quickly enough. On that point, the Chronicle notes in passing that the current computer system was designed to be more “equitable.” I’m not sure what that means exactly in this case but it seems to be part of the problem.

Of the two problems the first one seems to be playing a role in the second. Even if the mayor fixed the referral process, many people who saw these rooms wouldn’t want them. Just in general, shoving people into terrible hotels with sub-prison quality plumbing and bug infestations doesn’t sound like it would be much of a win for anyone involved.