Even as San Francisco has been praised in the national press as a model for its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, dissenting voices within the city have continued to raise the alarm on what they see as a slow moving catastrophe taking place within the city’s most vulnerable communities.

“The City That Flattened the Coronavirus Curve,” gushed the headline in an Atlantic piece praising Mayor London Breed’s leadership during the crisis.  But local critics have pointed to outbreaks in shelters and residential hotels as evidence that the city’s reluctance to take more aggressive action risks setting off a time bomb amongst the unhoused population.  

The most glaring example so far has been the outbreak at MSC-South, northern California’s largest such facility, which advocates say the Mayor should have prevented by moving to house the entire homeless population in unused hotel rooms.  

On April 30, several activists—including the Do No Harm Coalition, Public Health Justice Collective, Faith in Action, and Solidarity Forever Collective—held a “die-in” in front of the Mayor’s home, protesting Breed’s continued refusal to shelter the city’s unhoused population in vacant hotels.

“I am just about to embark in the world, into the workforce as a doctor for the first time. I cannot stand by as our city leaders blatantly ignore legislation that is not only essential to preserving public health,  but actively doing great harm,” said Olivia Park, a member of Do No Harm coalition and medical Student at UCSF. “It is a medical necessity that hotel rooms be offered to everyone experiencing homeless. If the COVID-19 pandemic is still such a threat that the shelter-in-place order needed to be extended for housed people, why is it not a threat to our unhoused neighbors?” If anything, we should offer greater protections for our homeless community.”

Weeks earlier, activists held another action on April 13, taking to the streets in a caravan of vehicles, demanding that the Mayor and the involved city agencies take action. Cars adorned with tents and banners, the group honked and chanted as they snaked through the quarantine-emptied streets of South of Market, past the Moscone West Convention Center before crossing Market into the Tenderloin.  

In contrast to the eerie emptiness of the rest of downtown, here in the heart of the city’s homelessness crisis, the sidewalks were more crowded than ever. Residents stood cheek by jowl, some clustered two to a tent, illustrating the absurdity of demands to practice social distancing for those stuck living on the streets. As the caravan wove its way through the district, one unhoused Tenderloin resident approached El Tecolote to vent their frustration that they had not been offered any assistance by the city.  

“In the face of this outbreak, the city still hasn’t shifted gears,” said Jennifer Friedenbach, the director of the Coalition on Homelessness, one of the groups behind the protest. The Coalition has been vocal in their opposition to what they see as Mayor Breed’s conservative approach to preventing the virus’s spread the in the homeless population. 

“We need the city to react yesterday,” said Del Seymour of the Local Homeless Coordinating Board, who was present at the April 13 demonstration. He said that the idea promoted by the city that many homeless people did not want to enter hotels was “The biggest bullshit lie that you could ever think of.  I’ve been working [with homeless people] for 30 years and I have yet to meet that person.”  

On April 14, the Board of Supervisors unanimously passed an emergency ordinance which would mandate the acquisition of 7,000 hotel rooms by April 26. But Breed has so far refused to act. 

The Mayor’s Office did not respond to multiple requests for comment. But she has repeatedly disparaged the idea of commandeering hotels, publishing an open letter on Medium on April 26 regarding the her refusal to sign the legislation unanimously approved by the Board of Supervisors, and  has told the San Francisco Chronicle that “We are not going to be able to solve our homeless problem in San Francisco with this crisis.” When she was asked if the supervisors’ plan was realistic, she simply replied, “No.”  

Several supervisors and activists have denounced the mayor’s inaction. Yet activists are vowing to keep up the pressure until their demands are met. Fifteen local housing organizations, including the Coalition on Homelessness, signed onto an open letter released on April 20 urging the Mayor to implement the Supervisors’ ordinance.  

“At a time when there are more than 33,000 vacant hotel rooms in San Francisco, the Safe Shelter ordinance passed by the Board of Supervisors is practical, feasible, and good public health practice,” said the letter. “Again, we respectfully ask that you sign and carry out the Emergency Hotel Ordinance so that San Francisco can prevent the spread of COVID-19 for all San Franciscans and protect unhoused residents of San Francisco from falling severely ill or dying from the virus.”