Housing to End Homelessness

Challenge

San Francisco has one of the largest populations of unsheltered residents nationwide. High costs, complicated entitlement processes, and financing constraints result in an insufficient and too-slow delivery of new housing for individuals exiting homelessness.  It’s not unusual for a homeless housing development to take ten years to complete in San Francisco! 

Solution

HAF has partnered with Tipping Point Community to tackle the problems of time and cost and implement scalable solutions.  By using philanthropic capital up front, linking to public sector financing at construction completion, and pursuing factory-built housing’s promise of faster and less expensive housing production, we’re under construction with our partner Mercy Housing California on a homeless housing building that is on track to achieve significant cost and time savings. Cities and counties around the state can replicate these financing and construction innovations to deliver more housing faster. 

Impact

Our prototype project, Tahanan Supportive Housing at 833 Bryant Street, is scheduled to open in fall 2021, creating 145 units of Permanent Supportive Housing faster and for less than traditional projects. 

We also partnered on the City of San Francisco’s purchase of two hotels to rapidly convert to supportive housing, leveraging awards of grant funds from the State of California’s Homekey program.

Permanent supportive housing is a proven intervention to ending chronic homelessness, and we are committed to creating more of the homes our unsheltered neighbors need to stay safe. In total, the Housing Accelerator Fund has financed the acquisition and development of over 550 units of permanent supportive housing.