Few people understand how difficult it is to secure affordable housing in San Francisco better than Maria Zavala.
The Honduran mother of four arrived in the city in September of 2023 seeking medical help for her daughter Samara, now 8, who has a rare inflammatory disorder that affects her nervous system. But after reaching San Francisco, Zavala said her family faced a second battle: finding a stable place to live.
Over the next two years, as Samara received ongoing medical care, Zavala said she, her husband and their three children lived in a car and slept in empty spaces in their friends’ homes. After Samara’s first surgery, they secured a city-provided hotel voucher for over six months and then spent nearly a year in a family shelter, periodically completing the city’s intake assessment to see if they scored high enough to qualify for housing support.
During that time, Zavala became involved with Faith in Action Bay Area (FIABA), joining a group of homeless mothers advocating for expanded resources amid shelter bed shortages and stricter policies.
But it wasn’t until after Zavala hosted her own press conference in late August — sharing her daughter’s medical story publicly — that her family was connected to housing of their own. A month and a half later, they received the keys to their new home.
While advocacy for unhoused families in recent years has focused on expanding shelter stays and increasing housing subsidies, the supply of affordable housing remains severely limited, even as San Francisco’s poverty rate rises. Facing this shortage, many families with unstable housing describe the process of qualifying for help as opaque and emotionally exhausting.
“A computer determines whether you’re eligible, and it doesn’t have feelings,” Zavala said. “I wish it could understand and see our suffering.”
In the meantime, hundreds of families and their children remain in limbo, facing chronic stress, instability and compounding health risks as they wait for housing.
How families are prioritized for housing
To get support from the city, families experiencing homelessness can visit one of three Access Points. These access points run the city’s Coordinated Entry System, a navigation system required by the federal government that connects unhoused people to the resources it determines they need, including housing assistance.
San Francisco offers several types of rental support through federal, local and private funding sources. These include:
- Rapid rehousing, typically offered to people exiting shelters and can last up to five years;
- Shallow subsidies, income-based and that taper over time for households likely to secure stable income soon after moving in;
- Prevention assistance for people at risk of eviction;
- Permanent supportive housing, with a limited stock of 1,667 units for homeless families with children.
“The idea is to kind of stop the revolving door,” said Jennifer Friedenbach, director of the Coalition on Homelessness. “Some families, they’re able to get their subsidy and take over the rent on their own. And that’s fantastic. And then they leave the program and then somebody else can take over that subsidy.”
The problem, Friedenbach said, is that there are too many families in need with not enough places for them to live. From July 2024 to May 2025, 1,826 families were assessed for rental support. Only 30 were placed into housing — less than 1.6%.
Given this scarcity, whether a family receives help, and how quickly, often comes down to a numerical score calculated during an intake interview known as the Housing Primary Assessment. In this survey, families are evaluated based on factors including disabilities, barriers to housing and the length of time they have been experiencing homelessness. Answer choices are weighted depending on the severity or duration of a condition, and tallied up. Scores range from 0 to 160, with higher scores prioritized first, depending on housing availability.
According to a June 23 memo by the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH), families scoring between 90 to 114 may qualify for subsidies aimed at rapid rehousing, while those scoring between 115 to 160 are eligible for permanent supportive housing units.
Families that don’t score high enough can take another assessment every three months, so long as a provider or case manager requests an administrative review on their behalf. It cannot be requested by the families themselves.
Emily Cohen, the Deputy Director for Communications for HSH, said the system is designed to prioritize families based on need in a context where “demand exceeds available resources.”
But as the need for housing has grown, the city’s system has made it harder for families to qualify for help. Publicly available records reveal families now need nearly double the score they needed in 2022 to qualify for temporary subsidies, and a much higher score for long-term supportive housing.
In this context, many families say that it is very difficult to understand how their answers translate into a score, or why some crises don’t seem to count. Some families with young children, illnesses or histories of domestic violence report that they don’t score high enough to qualify for assistance. Others say that as they work to find their own housing solutions, including securing work or temporary shelter, their likelihood of receiving support can decrease.
Héctor, a 23-year-old father of two living in the Bayview, said he completed an intake interview in September and was told that because his family’s RV had a kitchen and a bathroom, he did not score high enough for a housing subsidy.
“They said they could move me from an RV to a shelter,” he said. Hector declined, worried about his young daughters’ privacy. He planned to take another assessment in late December to see if it better reflected his current reality.
Similarly, Zavala said that one time she took the assessment, her family’s score actually dropped because they had received work permits and her husband had found a job that increased their monthly income.
“Instead of giving you points once you achieve something, your score goes down,” Zavala said. Now that she has housing, her husband’s job at Recology is what now allows them to pay their below market rate rent.
Immigration status and the coordinated entry system
Many families experiencing homelessness in San Francisco are recent immigrants, some arriving after the pandemic or seeking sanctuary amid the Trump administration’s intensified immigration raids.
Cohen says the city doesn’t prioritize homelessness resources based on immigration status. In fact, since federal funds can only be used by citizens and certain groups with permanent legal status, housing advocates say the city relies on a mix of local and nonprofit funds to ensure that everyone can access support.
San Francisco also does not ask families about immigration status during the Coordinated Entry process. But in practice, some of these families say the assessment fails to capture hardships connected to their experiences as immigrants.
Julia V., 26, an immigrant mother using only her first name because of her pending asylum case, has been on the family shelter waitlist for four months, and has been trying to qualify for a subsidy since August, after fleeing domestic violence and losing her home.
The Salvadoran mother said she immigrated to Los Angeles from El Salvador with her young daughter a year and a half ago. After spending four months there, they moved to San Francisco to live with a partner, where they spent nearly a year before fleeing abuse.
As she began rebuilding her life with help from community organizations, Julia applied for asylum. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) placed her on an ankle monitor and told her to provide a home address.
But Julia doesn’t have one.
She has tried to explain her situation to city staff at family access points, hoping to secure a shelter bed for herself and her daughter. But she remains on the shelter waitlist, and her score of 24 is far below the threshold needed to qualify for any housing subsidy.
“They said there’s a long list of people who have the same score as me, so they can’t give me priority,” said Julia, who currently sleeps in a friend’s car. “I’m really worried because I feel like I’m at risk [of being deported] because I don’t have an address.”
In a 2022 report on the Coordinated Entry commissioned by the city, Focus Strategies found that Latino families scored, on average, lower on the Housing Primary Assessment than other ethnicities, raising questions about whether the “information requested of participants accurately reflects their need.”
Advocates say cultural and language barriers make it harder for monolingual Spanish speakers to score as high. Trauma and mental health struggles can also be difficult to quantify. Certain parameters of the test, such as length of homelessness, also tend to disadvantage newly arrived immigrants, Friedenbach said.
“If you’re a newcomer, for example, an asylum seeker in San Francisco, you’re going to score very low,” she said. “You basically have to be homeless in San Francisco for a very long period of time before you start scoring higher.”
At the same time, immigration status often limits families’ ability to earn income, making it more difficult to afford the city’s cost of living. Although asylum seekers are granted work permits as part of their application, severe case backlogs mean work authorization can take months. This year, the Department of Justice fired more than half of San Francisco’s immigration judges, worsening what is already the largest case backlog in California.
“In an ideal world there would be no child that sleeps outside at night and there would be shallow subsidies available for everyone who needs them,” said Megan Rohrer, policy director at Compass Families, which operates one of the city’s family access points. “[But] a lot of that also requires a healthy functioning immigration system.”
A slow process, even once qualified
Once families score high enough to qualify for housing support, access points pair them with a housing navigator to secure a unit.
But even these families often wait months for an available apartment. HSH reports that during the 2024-2025 fiscal year, the average wait time for prioritized families was 142 days — nearly five months.
One major barrier that access points face is finding landlords willing to accept city subsidies, particularly for immigrant tenants.
“The kind of federal rhetoric right now implies that people will be in trouble if they care for immigrants,” Rohrer said. “The normal discrimination that people faced, even prior to this administration, is amplified.”
Some families who qualify for subsidies try to find housing on their own, searching listing sites like Craigslist. But without stable jobs, credit histories or work authorization, many hit a wall.
“We have around three families with subsidies that let them look for housing,” FIABA leader Brenda Córdoba told El Tecolote earlier this year. “And they’re there, looking and looking.”
The city has recently ramped up its efforts to recruit more landlords. In November, Mayor Daniel Lurie announced in an Instagram post that the city would pay one month’s rent to landlords who agreed to rent to qualifying RV residents. Still, Rohrer said, “the ability to place families is not keeping up with the number of families who are needing housing units.”
Federal funding needed for some of these subsidies is also increasingly unstable. In November, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development shifted funding away from permanent housing toward temporary shelter. Although the policy was temporarily blocked in federal court, San Francisco’s $65 million housing grant remains in delicate balance.
“There’s a lot of concern that rapid rehousing support is going to dramatically decrease at the same time that the number of families in the shelter system is rapidly increasing,” Rohrer said.
The toll of waiting
Families seeking housing support through the city’s access points may be offered emergency shelter after taking their assessment. But with more than 404 families on the shelter waitlist, many are left to find makeshift housing in cars, RVs or overnight school gymnasiums. While living in limbo, parents say winter conditions take a particular toll on children’s health.
“The hardest time for us was the first part of 2024, when the rains happened,” said Zavala, whose family was at the time sleeping in a closet, a living room and sometimes in a car. “I had to walk with Samara on the street.”
Julia said she and her daughter currently experience something similar. They alternate between sleeping in a church-run overnight shelter and sleeping in a friend’s car. During the day, they walk around the city, exposed to the elements.
“She’s sick a lot because of the weather,” Julia said of her daughter. “She’ll have days where she has a cold, a fever, an infection, things like that.”
The instability also takes a toll on families’ mental health. Zavala said her husband experienced panic attacks while the family lived in a shelter, worried they would get evicted and end up back on the street under the city’s then-enforced 90-day stay limits. Her oldest daughter, meanwhile, struggled concentrating in school, which educators say is common among children experiencing homelessness.
Families living in RVs face similar challenges. Héctor said his RV has no heating and is not well insulated. Sometimes, when it rains, their personal belongings get soaked and their bathroom floods.
“The situation is a bit stressful, more than anything for my daughters,” Hector said. “Everything is very uncertain, but this is what we have for now.”
Now, he hopes to secure support through the city’s Large Vehicle Refuge Permit program, which allocates 65 subsidies to families living in RVs, as part of a policy that now bans oversized vehicles from parking on city streets for more than two hours. However, he’s competing for a subsidy against more than 300 other permitted RV households also waiting for housing.
“If the city doesn’t have enough resources to place a family, then they should find an empty space where they let us park safely, with water and electricity,” Hector said. “They could ask us to collaborate to help with its maintenance.”
The immediate impacts of stability
For families who have secured housing, like the Zavalas, the long fight towards stability, though frustrating, has also been transformative.
“I did this because I love my children,” Zavala said. “And I was supported by many organizations [and] by many people who encouraged me.”
Still, she wonders why her family ultimately received help when others remain waiting.
In their last intake interview before her press conference, Zavala said her family had scored 75 — 15 points lower than what’s required to qualify for housing assistance. But after she shared her daughter’s story publicly, new opportunities emerged.
When she returned to the shelter, Zavala said staff told her she now qualified for a housing subsidy and would begin the placement process. A few days later, however, she said she received a call from the management team of a building with affordable housing units.
Zavala said they invited her to apply to their units’ upcoming affordable housing lottery, which is also run by the city, but through a portal known as DAHLIA. This is a different system than Coordinated Entry. Staff also helped her understand the documents required for the application process.
Two weeks after applying, Zavala learned she had won the lottery. She explained that she chose the affordable housing apartment because its long-term stability tied to income, rather than a time-limited subsidy. And tTwo weeks later, her family moved in.
Now living in a new three-bedroom apartment that costs nearly $2,000 a month with utilities, Zavala said she’s already noticed positive changes in her children.
“They’re more relaxed, they’re happier. And we feel more safe,” said Zavala. “We’re not waiting to get a notification that will tell us we have to get out, or have to keep looking.”
Yesica Prado contributed to the report.