On a Monday morning in May, Jeff Kositsky — San Francisco’s newly appointed head honcho of homelessness — zoomed up to his inaugural City Hall meeting with the mayor, and stepped out of a Lyft. Less than a week had passed since Kositsky’s appointment was announced, kicking off congratulatory tweets and Facebook toasts from the city’s politicos, nonprofits, and reporters. In addition to those usual suspects, two major tech companies called — Kositsky won’t reveal which — asking how they might pitch in with his daunting endeavor: ending street homelessness, the most disruption-proof problem of this techified city. Kositsky, the 50-year-old executive director of Hamilton Family Center, was pleased, but not surprised, by the techie attention:
“This is the spirit of the tech community I’ve been working with since working at Hamilton,” he told me.
That mild-sounding claim amounts to fighting words in this climate, in which “the spirit of the tech community” and homelessness have often paired up as schizophrenic frenemies. Beyond bouts of volunteering, the tech community has offered some awkward helping hands: the New York techie who taught a homeless man to code as a modern-day “teach a man to fish” parable, or the South by Southwest misadventure a few years ago, in which homeless people were paid to work as roving internet hotspots. On occasion, the awkward turns to straight-out bullying: startup CEOs writing heartless jokes or screeds about the mentally ill people they see on the street (Backchannel wrote about the aftermath of one such episode).
In San Francisco, tech is caught in a weird cycle of being both irritant and antidote, both villain and saint. The tech boom certainly did not cause the homelessness problem: the city’s homeless count has held steady at around 6,000 for the past 25 years, before America was even Online. But as the tech-fueled economy drives up rents in this housing-strapped city, even the middle class is fleeing out of state or to Oakland. And the poor who end up on the streets due to an amalgam of reasons — job loss, drug addiction, family strife, or the 13 percent of the homeless who cite an eviction for their woes — can’t find a way back indoors.
Once people are homeless, chances are they will again encounter the tech economy, this time as a sort of Daddy Warbucks benefactor: many programs to aid the homeless are pumped up with tech donations or the boom’s tax dollars (however diminished by corporate tax breaks).
Jeff Kositsky is a guy who has been working at the very center of that paradox, and it’s clear he’s not into the blame game: “I still believe that anti-tech dogma is counterproductive,” he wrote me in an email. While tech donors are in every San Francisco fundraiser’s Rolodex, Kositsky spent the last years actually leveraging tech’s money and its outcomes-based mentality to the advantage of the Hamilton Family Center, which whisks homeless families into housing or a shelter. Salesforce hooked up the nonprofit with a cloud computing system to search for housing and coordinate among staff. Twitter bankrolled a computer lab for kids. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and his wife, Lynne, helped fund the rental subsidies the nonprofit distributes. Adobe and LinkedIn kicked in donations and volunteers. Google even sought out Kositsky and produced $1 million to launch a response team for homeless kids in the public schools. Through the Google-fueled program, the nonprofit shrank the amount of time families were homeless from 14 months to closer to 6 months.
Now Kositsky will try to scale up his tech-whispering success citywide. Mayor Ed Lee wants 8,000 homeless people permanently housed by the end of his term in four years. It’s a grand goal for a mayor whose track record on homelessness has mostly been defined by high-profile encampments during the Super Bowl and high-profile street sweeps of them afterwards. San Franciscans in a recent Chamber of Commerce poll named homelessness as the number one problem facing the city, and the mayor’s approval ratings are tanking. As Bevan Dufty, a former homelessness czar under Lee, put it: “I think the administration realized in order for Mayor Lee to be successful, they need Jeff to be successful.”
And for Jeff to be successful, he wants to tap into tech.
Kositsky has spent the last 15 years in San Francisco progressive nonprofit circles and a stint in Latin America, but his restless energy fits just as well in Techlandia. He pulled up his pant leg for the San FranciscoChronicle to reveal a flying pig tattoo and flying pig socks betraying a faith in the flying pig variety of moon shot In a March phones call with me, while still at Hamilton and able to speak more freely than he can now as a mayoral appointee, his optimism about eradicating homelessness for families came across as distinctly Silicon Valley-esque: “Once I hit 50, I’m like, ‘I got a third of my career left at best, I would like to solve a problem. And I have this great opportunity to work on an issue that is eminently solvable.” To get there, he’s willing to take a little heat to ally with tech. In December 2014, he accepted the $1 million in Google money to help out students who were at risk of becoming homeless, enrolling their families in an anti-eviction or rapid rehousing program. “Google thought that was very ‘googly’,” Kositsky told me back in March. But the deal earned him blowback from others in the nonprofit sector and former politicians, who saw Google as exacerbating homelessness in the first place. “I absolutely got creamed on Facebook,” he said in that prior interview.
“In the city, some people think that they’re the ones that have displaced people,” says Kara Zordel, the director of Project Homeless Connect, which also recruits volunteers from tech companies for its one-stop shop for homeless services. Zordel says that she, too, has gotten pushback for accepting computers and volunteers from Google and other tech companies. “But they don’t see the amount of volunteers and donations we’ve received [from the tech sector].”
Jennifer Friedenbach, a nonprofit leader who has been very critical of the tax break the city offers some tech companies and of Mayor Lee, says, “I don’t think if those companies offer X amount of money to get X amount of families out of homelessness, you should give the money back. I don’t think anyone believes that. They just voice frustration about this ironic situation.”
Kositsky also triggered outrage on internet comment b0ards with the news that 59 percent of Hamilton’s clients were using the rent subsidies funded by the city and the Benioffs outside of San Francisco, where rent money goes further. “I’m older and converted to radical common sense,” he told me back in March. Now that he’s going to be in charge of homelessness citywide, he’s willing to look at solutions outside of San Francisco proper. “People at all income levels are very mobiles within the Bay Area,” he wrote in an email, “and if that works for someone, we should support them.”
Kositsky is not the only person working on homelessness who is bullish on tech. Sam Dodge, the current homelessness czar who will soon work under Kositsky, mentions how instrumental the Mormon church’s money has been in stamping out Salt Lake City’s homeless problem. “The tech community may be our Mormon church,” he said, in a statement that, money aside, is not a terrible metaphor (messianic mission, wide-eyed evangelizers, big conferences). “They’ve got a lot of resources and reach, and can play a really leading role in this. They have all kinds of skilled people committed to changing the world for the better, and this is a very tangible way to do it.” The city is forcing some of that, by requiring help of tech companies benefiting from the “Twitter tax break,” given out to settle in what were vacant office spaces in the city’s skid row. Now it’s the place where you can best witness the income inequality that rivals Rwanda’s by one World Bank formula, as tech employees decked in Startup Casual pass the homeless and hustlers. As part of the tax break deal, each company signed a binding “community benefit agreement” to help the surrounding neighborhood and nonprofits.
Yet in the past couple years, city government has discovered the limits of tech’s largesse. “Google is in a very different stage where they’re branding themselves through social justice, while unicorns are stampeding, worried that the bubble is going to burst,” says Dufty, the former city official. “Smaller startups that are fighting are much more likely to pay for dry cleaning for employees than underwrite a [residential] hotel,” and gift it to the city for homeless tenants.
But maybe a bigger company would care to step up? “My fantasy is Jack Dorsey would buy two to three hotels,” muses Dufty.
Friedenbach says tech donations tend to be one-time events, so the city should push for more taxation of the tech sector. “This administration needs to get aggressive about not just asking for handouts, but forcing them to pay their fair share. It needs to be sustainable, not just one-time.” She concedes that the tech boom has swelled the city’s coffers, but “we’re still continuing to spend less than 3 percent of our budget on this issue.”
Kositsky already has tech-centered plans once he starts his job officially on June 1. He’ll oversee the creation of a citywide homeless services tracking database. (This is a long time coming, first proposed by a city controller in 2002, according to a 2006 Chronicle story, that quotes Kositsky, saying, “It can’t happen soon enough.” In city government, “soon” can mean a decade.) Right now most of the city’s octopus of services works with no knowledge of what else is happening in the system. The new arrangement will track each homeless person as they bounce from shelters, to health appointments, to agencies in the city, “so you don’t have to tell the same story over and over again,” Kositsky reasons. He also wants to aim higher with data analytics: he would like to employ machine learning for the national assessment tool for measuring a person’s housing instability. “Maybe we find out that a homeless single adult who’s experiencing a first incidence of homeless will do better off in X shelter, or with X intervention. That way the assessment tool is essentially making itself better.”
Kositsky says he still thinks family housing is solvable by 2020, but that they’ll have to look at the very different homeless populations — veterans, youth, seniors, chronic — and set goals for each one.
With so much excitement surrounding Kositsky’s new post, it’s worth asking if a scrappy, results-driven nonprofit chief whose voice cracks while talking about family homelessness can maintain his fire once he enters the lumbering government. “If anyone can do it, it’s Jeff,” says Zordel, the Project Homeless Connect director. “He’s not looking to be a bureaucrat.”
He’ll be situated at the top of a brand-new mega department, conjoining parts of what were once three disparate city offices, but he’ll still be answering to the mayor while wrangling 110 employees and a $165 million budget. Will he be able to scale the tech investment for the city writ large?
Kositsky says he wants to brainstorm alternative housing options for what has become the most expensive real estate market in the country. Sonoma County is trying tiny houses. A Hawaiian church has plastic igloos. A San Francisco techie suggests geodesic domes. “The Mayor is very excited about the use of alternative construction methods to save time and cost,” Kositsky wrote in an email. “I hope we can do some prototyping during the next year.”
We’ll see if pigs fly, after all.
Photographs by Connor Radnovich/San Francisco Chronicle/Polaris
