DATA STORY
People Receiving Homelessness Response System Services
Tracks how many people access services like homelessness prevention, shelter and housing
Measure Description
This measure shows how many people the San Francisco’s Homelessness Response System (HRS) serves. The goal of San Francisco’s HRS is to make homelessness rare, brief, and one-time. The HRS includes many programs, such as prevention, street outreach, coordinated entry, temporary shelter, and permanent housing.
This page includes two charts:
- Monthly number of people receiving all HRS services
- Annual number of people receiving HRS services, broken out by program type
Why This Measure is Important
San Francisco uses the Point-in-Time (PIT) Count to understand how many people are experiencing homelessness on a single night, but this doesn’t reflect everyone who needs help throughout the year. The PIT Count also does not include the number of people living in permanent supportive housing since they are no longer homeless. These people continue to receive support from the Department of Homelessness & Supportive Housing (HSH) to stay housed.
This measure gives a broader picture of the number of people HSH serves. It includes people who use temporary shelter or housing programs, as well as those seeking help to avoid becoming homeless. Tracking monthly and annual service use helps the City better understand the overall demand for homelessness services in San Francisco.
This page also shows the number of people accessing each program area in the HRS each fiscal year. Displaying data by program area shows the program areas that serve the most clients each year. This also helps illustrate which program areas the City prioritizes.
Monthly Number of People Receiving Homelessness Response System Services
The chart’s legend is below:
- Y-axis: Number of people
- X-Axis: Month and calendar year
Navigating dashboards with a keyboard
- Control + Enter to enter the dashboard
- Tab or Arrow to move between visuals
- Control + Right arrow to enter a visual or filter
- Escape to exit a visual, filter or dashboard
Navigating within a visual or filter
- Tab or Arrow to move around a table or visual
- Enter to select within a table or visual
- Spacebar to select or deselect a filter
Data notes and sources
Visit DataSF to access the scorecard data.
Data is updated monthly.
Data lag time: 3 weeks.
HSH tracks each person receiving services in the ONE system. The department pulls the number of unique clients monthly. This data may undercount the total number of people served in prevention programs. Prevention applications are tracked by identifying the head of household and a count of people in the household. Any households that receive prevention services multiple times within a reporting period are deduplicated by head of household and if household sizes differ between applications, the largest number is counted. Because the City does not track the details of other individuals within the household, if the members differ between applications the deduplicated data would not reflect the total number of people served by prevention.
Annual Number of People Receiving Homelessness Response System Services
This measure tracks the number of people receiving services in each program area of the HRS, specifically:
- Coordinated Entry: the “front door” to the HRS that assesses and matches people to services and housing. Includes HSH’s Housing Problem Solving program, which helps rapidly exit people from homelessness
- Homelessness Prevention: financial support and services to reduce the number of people who become unhoused
- Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH): long-term affordable housing with a range of supportive services
- Rapid Rehousing (RRH): time-limited subsidies to help people become stable in housing
- Services-Only: stand-alone services such as childcare, employment assistance, and transportation services
- Shelter and Transitional Housing: provide temporary places for people to stay while accessing other services and looking for housing
- Street Outreach: outreach and response teams engage people experiencing homelessness
Clients may participate in multiple programs within one fiscal year, so one client may be counted in multiple programs. This chart also shows all unique clients who receive services each fiscal year, de-duplicated across programs.
Navigating dashboards with a keyboard
- Control + Enter to enter the dashboard
- Tab or Arrow to move between visuals
- Control + Right arrow to enter a visual or filter
- Escape to exit a visual, filter or dashboard
Navigating within a visual or filter
- Tab or Arrow to move around a table or visual
- Enter to select within a table or visual
- Spacebar to select or deselect a filter
Data notes and sources
Visit DataSF to access the scorecard data.
Data is updated annually after the close of the fiscal year.
Data lag time: 3 weeks.
HSH tracks each person receiving services in the ONE system. The department pulls the number of unique clients monthly. This data may undercount the total number of people served in prevention programs. Prevention applications are tracked by identifying the head of household and a count of people in the household. Any households that receive prevention services multiple times within a reporting period are deduplicated by head of household and if household sizes differ between applications, the largest number is counted. Because the City does not track the details of other individuals within the household, if the members differ between applications the deduplicated data would not reflect the total number of people served by prevention.
Additional Information
- View additional information about programs on HSH's website.
- Read more about the Homelessness Response System.
- Learn more about San Francisco's strategic framework to address homelessness.
City Performance Scorecards
This page is part of the City Performance Scorecards.