San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous city in California, with 808,437 residents, and the 17th most populous city in the United States as of 2022. The city covers a land area of 46.9 square miles at the end of the San Francisco Peninsula, making it the second-most densely populated large U.S. city after New York City and the fifth-most densely populated U.S. county, behind only four of the five New York City boroughs. Among the 92 U.S. cities proper with over 250,000 residents, San Francisco was ranked first by per capita income and sixth by aggregate income as of 2022. Colloquial nicknames for San Francisco include Frisco, San Fran, The City, and SF.
Arthur Christ Agnos is an American politician. He served as the 39th mayor of San Francisco, California from 1988 to 1992 and as the Regional Head of the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development from 1993 to 2001.
Care Not Cash was a San Francisco ballot measure approved by the voters in November 2002. Primarily sponsored by Gavin Newsom, then a San Francisco supervisor, it was designed to cut the money given in the General Assistance programs to homeless people in exchange for shelters and other forms of services. The major intent of this measure was to prevent the cash grants given to be used for purchasing drugs and alcohol, and to strongly encourage homeless people to enter shelters or housing and obtain counseling and other services.
Travelers Aid International is a global network that serves as a human services support system worldwide by facilitating interactions between social service agencies, airports, train stations, and other transit hubs in order to help children and adults who become stranded while traveling or are in distress or at risk of harm as a result of travel.
Housing First is a policy that offers unconditional, permanent housing as quickly as possible to homeless people, and other supportive services afterward. It was first discussed in the 1990s, and in the following decades became government policy in certain locations within the Western world. There is a substantial base of evidence showing that Housing First is both an effective solution to homelessness and a form of cost savings, as it also reduces the use of public services like hospitals, jails, and emergency shelters. Cities like Helsinki and Vienna in Europe have seen dramatic reductions in homelessness due to the adaptation of Housing First policies, as have the North American cities Columbus, Ohio, Salt Lake City, Utah, and Medicine Hat, Alberta.
Raphael House is a shelter in the Tenderloin, San Francisco, California, that provides transitional housing and support programs for parents and children who are experiencing homelessness.
Glide Memorial Church is a nondenominational church in San Francisco, California, formerly a United Methodist Church congregation, which opened in 1930. Since the 1960s, it has served as a counter-culture rallying point, as one of the most prominently liberal churches in the United States. Located in the city's Tenderloin neighborhood, an area affected by drug addiction and homelessness, Glide is known for its social service programs, as well as the Glide Ensemble, its Gospel choir. The church building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2022.
The Tenderloin is a neighborhood in downtown San Francisco, in the flatlands on the southern slope of Nob Hill, situated between the Union Square shopping district to the northeast and the Civic Center office district to the southwest. Encompassing about 50 square blocks, it is historically bounded on the north by Geary Street, on the east by Mason Street, on the south by Market Street and on the west by Van Ness Avenue. The northern boundary with Lower Nob Hill has historically been set at Geary Street.
The Coalition on Homelessness is an American homeless advocacy and social justice organization that focuses on creating long-term solutions to homelessness, poverty, and housing issues in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1987, the group also founded the newspaper Street Sheet and the Community Housing Partnership. It is based on Turk Street in the Tenderloin district.
The Reverend Glenda Hope is a Presbyterian Church (USA) minister in San Francisco, California, United States. She heads San Francisco Network Ministries, a charity serving the Tenderloin district of San Francisco.
Rocket Dog Rescue is a volunteer nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, California, devoted to pet adoption and animal rescue. It is the most prominent of several local private organizations that save dogs from euthanasia by caring for them and finding new families. The program places dogs from animal shelters in the San Francisco Bay Area into foster homes while awaiting adoption. It also treats medical and behavioral problems such as socialization issues, neuters and spays the animals, and provides vaccines, so as to make their animals adoptable.
Randy Shaw is an attorney, author, and activist who lives in Berkeley, California. He is the executive director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, a nonprofit organization in San Francisco that he co-founded in 1980. He has also co-founded and is on the board of directors of Uptown Tenderloin, Inc., a nonprofit organization that spearheaded the creation of the national Uptown Tenderloin Historic District in 2009. Uptown Tenderloin, Inc. is also the driving force behind the Tenderloin Museum, which opened in the spring of 2015. Randy is also the editor of Beyond Chron, and has written six books on activism.
Hospitality House is a house of hospitality-type center that serves the homeless and poor of San Francisco, specifically those of the Tenderloin district of the city, where it is located. At a drop-in day center it provides counseling, instruction, computer access, medical triage, and other forms of assistance. It also runs a 30-bed shelter, two Employment Resource Centers, and a fine arts studio. Its main office is located at 290 Turk Street. It has been in operation since 1967.
HOPE Atlanta, the programs of Travelers Aid of Metropolitan Atlanta, is a non-profit organization that has served the metro-Atlanta area for 112 years. Since its inception in 1900, the organization has provided services to over one million people in need throughout the counties surrounding Atlanta, Georgia.
Welfare in California consists of federal welfare programs—which are often at least partially administered by state and county agencies—and several independent programs, which are usually administered by counties.
The San Francisco Bay Area comprises nine northern California counties and contains four of the ten most expensive counties in the United States. Strong economic growth has created hundreds of thousands of new jobs, but coupled with severe restrictions on building new housing units, it has resulted in an extreme housing shortage which has driven rents to extremely high levels. The Sacramento Bee notes that large cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles both attribute their recent increases in homeless people to the housing shortage, with the result that homelessness in California overall has increased by 15% from 2015 to 2017. In September 2019, the Council of Economic Advisers released a report in which they stated that deregulation of the housing markets would reduce homelessness in some of the most constrained markets by estimates of 54% in San Francisco, 40 percent in Los Angeles, and 38 percent in San Diego, because rents would fall by 55 percent, 41 percent, and 39 percent respectively. In San Francisco, a minimum wage worker would have to work approximately 4.7 full-time jobs to be able to spend less than 30% of their income on renting a two-bedroom apartment.
Family Promise is a national 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization in the United States, founded by Karen Olson in 1988. Family Promise primarily serves families with children who are homeless or at risk of homelessness, with the mission of "help[ing] homeless and low-income families achieve sustainable independence through a community-based response."
Civic Center Plaza, also known as Joseph Alioto Piazza, is the 4.53-acre (1.83 ha) plaza immediately east of San Francisco City Hall in Civic Center, San Francisco, in the U.S. state of California. Civic Center Plaza occupies two blocks bounded by McAllister, Larkin, Grove, and Carlton B. Goodlett, divided into a north block and south block by the former alignment of Fulton Street. The block north of Fulton is built over a three-story parking garage ; the block south of Fulton lies over a former exhibition space, Brooks Hall.
Dean E. Preston is an American attorney and member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. He founded Tenants Together, a California tenant advocacy organization. In November 2019, Preston won a special election to finish Mayor London Breed's term on the Board of Supervisors. He was re-elected in the November 2020 election.
