Last week, officials from the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH) appeared before the Board of Supervisors’ Budget and Finance Committee to ask for a five-year extension of a provision authorizing HSH to enter into no-bid contracts with homeless nonprofits. Though technically in place since HSH’s inception in 2016, use of the provision massively increased around 2019, when no-bids jumped from 1 to 43 percent of total department contracts. At the time, Mayor Breed championed the increase, arguing that the usual bidding process unduly slowed the city’s response to an increasingly dire homeless crisis.

On Monday, nearly five years later, Breed took to social media to defend the proposed extension. “This law has expedited thousands of units of housing, shelter, & prevention resources…[it] is one of the reasons we saw a 15% reduction in unsheltered homelessness,” she wrote on X, in response to supervisors who expressed misgivings about no-bids. “The choice here is to bring more people indoors quickly or leave them out on the streets indefinitely.”

There is so much wrong with this line of reasoning it’s difficult to know where to begin. At a high level, we could critique the “Housing First” philosophy which says the best way to fix homelessness is not by giving temporary shelter and care, but permanently subsidizing housing for all — an unworkable policy whose perverse incentives have all but ensured the crisis worsen as HSH’s budget balloons.1