By Kate Wolffe, KQED News, July 26, 2019
Roughly 50 San Francisco corporations and organizations, including Airbnb, Google, and the San Francisco Giants, announced their involvement in an ambitious new effort to alleviate the city’s intractable homeless crisis.
The ‘All In’ campaign, which officially launched July 25th during a rally at Duboce Park, aims to mobilize a broad coalition of community members to develop immediate housing solutions for the city’s chronically homeless population.
The primary objective is to secure a total of 1,100 housing units in all 11 supervisorial districts of the city for homeless people to move into.
Unlike a number of other recent efforts in the city to house the homeless, this initiative seeks to identify and fill existing apartments in large buildings that are currently vacant, or to turn space in underused publicly owned buildings and churches into housing.
It’s not entirely clear, though, what exactly the group is planning to do. Some partners may contribute money to subsidize rents and fund additional services. At least one nonprofit service provider has pledged to help identify vacant units and access government housing vouchers for veterans and people with disabilities.