You’ve lived in the Mission for years. After getting laid off several months ago, you’ve applied for hundreds of jobs, facing rejection after rejection. Your savings are all but exhausted as the deadline for making rent fast approaches. 

One day, you pass a familiar building. A flyer on the window beckons: “If you’re at risk of eviction, contact HOMEY (Homies Organizing the Mission to Empower Youth).  We will help you apply for rental assistance.”

Nervous but hopeful, you step inside. A HOMEY staffer, Jose Luis, introduces himself. You’re not alone, he says, motioning to the other folks in the crowded room. He helps you fill out an application for emergency rental assistance. “Are you hungry?” he asks. You head home with a bag of groceries and a flicker of hope.

That story could have been told by any one of the hundreds of thousands of San Franciscans that HOMEY has served during its 24 years of existence. Now the nonprofit, like the people it has helped, is at-risk. In Mayor Daniel Lurie’s proposed budget, HOMEY will lose money from the city’s Emergency Rental Assistance Program.

HOMEY projects it will lay off half its staff, stop accepting rent relief applications, and likely shutter its food pantry. This is what a cut looks like in real life. A cut to community is different than a cut on a spreadsheet. According to a recent civil grand jury report, the city routinely neglects its nonprofit partners and fails to invest in the capacity of trusted community partners like HOMEY. After years of accelerating cuts, the system is now bracing for the fallout from a complete loss of funding.

San Francisco is facing a nearly $800 million deficit. To balance the budget, Lurie proposes to cut about $154 million from the pot of money for grants. Among the programs on the chopping block are food-access programs, cut from $27 million to a scant $2 million, “right-sized” to pre-pandemic levels although food insecurity has risen by 15% since 2019. Others, like free legal aid and neighborhood-based youth programs will disappear altogether.

These are essential programs. For decades, the city has relied on nonprofits to deliver critical services to San Francisco residents. When the city needed to roll out vaccines for the recent COVID-19 pandemic, it turned to nonprofits, one of many examples of its reliance on organizations with expertise often lacking at City Hall. 

Nonprofit workers do the painstaking work of forging  relationships within communities, providing direct aid including food assistance. They help struggling San Franciscans navigate the city's often byzantine bureaucracy so they can receive the aid they desperately need as well as advocate on their behalf with city officials.

The cuts, which will have devastating consequences, are short sighted. Those who are hungry will become unhealthy and find themselves in hospital emergency rooms. Without free legal service and protection against eviction, more people will lose their homes and further strain the city’s social safety infrastructure. The money saved in the short term will inevitably result in exponentially higher costs down the line.

Joe Wilson, the longtime director of Hospitality House, a nonprofit serving the unhoused, agrees. “When there are fewer community-based health options, fewer community-based employment options, fewer community-based housing options, the city pays that cost, and it’s much more costly than the investments we’re already making,” 

Mayor Lurie, eager to cozy up to business leaders particularly those in the tech sector,  seems unwilling to consider the obvious, taxes on the wealthy. Lurie has created two committees to advise him on policy. Among those who have been tapped are Alphabet executive Ruth Porat, Open AI chief Sam Altman and DoorDash cofounder Tony Xu. Also included is Levi Strauss & Co.'s Michelle Gass, representing the company that is the source of Lurie’s billion-dollar fortune.

Those who follow the budget process have long seen the coming storm. It was the impetus for forming  the People’s Budget Coalition. This year, the city isn’t just deciding what to fund, it is determining who survives. Budgets are a reflection of a city’s value. Lurie’s offers a vision of San Francisco hospitable to only the very wealthy.