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"I don't know what you mean by 'coordinating.' No, there is not a single person. I'm not sure of the Housing Authority's role, but I'm sure the Mayor's Office of Housing, the Department of Public Health are providing services," Adleman explained.
According to Housing Authority spokesman Mike Roetzer, just one person displaced by Hurricane Katrina has found housing in San Francisco with the assistance of S.F. city government. Prior to the hurricane, that person had been a recipient of a federal Section 8 housing voucher, under a HUD program providing rent subsidies for private or government apartments. That person is one of five who have requested their federal subsidy be transferred from the hurricane region to San Francisco.
"Presumably, the other four are still looking," Roetzer says.
Meanwhile, of the 22 additional Katrina evacuees who have asked for units in the public housing complexes, "We would expect to make one offer of housing this week. And that process will continue as long as we're able to finish up the screening," Roetzer adds.
Adleman, for her part, left me a message two hours after our conversation saying that I would receive a call from Matt Franklin, director of the Mayor's Office of Housing. I hadn't heard from him by press time, though I left two messages at his office.
Despite the official silence, my inquiries did receive a form of apparent follow-up. By last Friday morning, the SF Gives Katrina-victim-assistance announcement that had dominated Newsom's home page as late as the night before had been removed. Could eliminating the SF Gives advertisement, after the supposed program didn't amount to much, be the mayor's idea of integrity?
When her family arrived in San Francisco, Huntley explains, she received a federal cash stipend of a couple thousand dollars and was placed by the Red Cross in a room at the Mission Hotel, a flophouse on Van Ness Avenue.
"The area is, oh my God, filled with drug users, prostitutes, and what have you. Everything you can think of was in that area. Man. After a while we asked, 'What are we going to do after the 14 days? It's me and my four kids, and my brother and his wife and his two kids,'" Huntley says.
According to HUD spokesman Brian Sullivan, federal assistance programs for Katrina victims created an unusual situation of social engineering in which the first were made last, and the last, first.
HUD "clients" -- that is to say, people living in federally subsidized housing before the hurricane hit -- were made eligible for federally subsidized apartments such as those run by San Francisco's Housing Authority. Under a revised program introduced in mid-October, people who had already been eligible for HUD assistance before the August hurricane could apply for federal vouchers to cover 18 months of the average rent in any city in which they chose to live. For San Francisco, the HUD subsidy is $1,536 for a two-bedroom apartment.
However, people like Huntley who hadn't been poverty-stricken prior to the storm aren't so fortunate. They're in particular trouble if they're lured to an expensive city like ours. Because Huntley and other privately housed folks weren't previous HUD "clients," they don't get HUD aid. Instead, they're eligible for a far stingier FEMA housing assistance program, which provides a cash stipend for only three months' rent equal to a nationwide rent average. For a two-bedroom apartment, that's $785 per month. In this city it takes four to five times that amount to pay first and last month's rent plus the deposit typically required to lay stakes here. For families such as Huntley's, the alternatives were either to obtain help from the local government or spend a month facing the prospect of imminent homelessness with children while crammed into a skid-row flophouse room.
"If you've got $2,300 from FEMA and you're in San Francisco, you're in trouble," notes HUD spokesman Sullivan.
Adds Linda Couch, deputy director of the National Low Income Housing Coalition in Washington, D.C., "It's haphazard; it's piecemeal; it's an insufficient program for the federal government to be relying on small community groups and well-meaning churches. This is a wealthy country with lots of resources and a very sophisticated housing industry, but the solutions that FEMA and HUD have put on the streets are insufficient."
Even given the federal failures, however, San Francisco's pledge to provide housing to Katrina victims might have supplied a safety net, had Newsom launched a serious effort to follow through on his promise. Huntley says she decided to take her family to San Francisco after a Red Cross worker in Mamou relayed news that the city's government had opened its arms to refugees. Indeed, San Francisco was one of the first American cities to announce its willingness to welcome displaced families, "and our Housing Authority Commission was quick to pass a resolution," Roetzer says.
Huntley was shown a unit last month by the S.F. Housing Authority, which had announced that it would set aside units for Katrina victims. But a city background check turned up a criminal assault conviction that Huntley says she earned fending off, with a knife, some women who had attacked her daughter; as a result, she was turned down for housing. Her brother, Tyrone, who has no such record, simply hasn't heard back from the agency after contacting it last month.
"They go through the normal process that anybody going into public housing goes through. We're not making exceptions for Katrina people," Roetzer says.
Jones, the caseworker aiding Huntley, says the Housing Authority employee she spoke to seemed unclear whether Huntley might appeal this decision, or whether Katrina victims could qualify for an exception to public housing screening rules.
"You should have the right to appeal it. I had four Katrina-victim clients who were denied housing because of their background, because of a criminal history in Louisiana," Jones says. "They were sent here with a check card from the Red Cross. There are families with one parent and four kids, and they are in some of the worst possible hotels in the Tenderloin."
