PWX 2019

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Navigation Centers – A Different Approach to Shelter the Homeless (Room 602-603)

Cities across the United States are dealing with homeless encampments and struggling to move people off the streets and into more stable living situations. In 2015, San Francisco opened its first Navigation Center designed to shelter San Francisco’s long-term homeless people who are living on the street and are often fearful of accessing traditional shelter and services. Since then some half-dozen more Navigation Centers have opened and San Francisco Public Works – best known for cleaning up encampments – has been at the forefront of developing all of them. Unlike traditional shelters, people with partners, pets and possessions are welcome. The Navigation Center model allows people to bring their pets and belongings with them, and they can move in with others living in their encampments. Once in the Navigation Center, they are offered intensive case management, and connections to health care, drug treatment programs and benefits programs. There are no curfews and they’re open around the clock. San Francisco Public Works does not operate the Navigation Centers, but the department’s architects and landscape architects design them and usher them through the regulatory approval process. At some locations, Public Works carpenters, plumbers, electricians, sheet metal workers, general laborers and cement masons helped build them. The Public Works team also has identified potential sites, many of them pioneering: next to freeway ramps, atop a road, in re-purposed buildings, including a school, warehouses, an office complex and a residential hotel. All of them have welcoming interiors and a landscaped outdoor areas. The crisis of homelessness in our cities is complex and challenging and cannot be solved with just one solution or model, but requires innovative, outside-the-box ideas. The Navigation Centers won’t end the problem of homelessness but they offer a viable alternative to the streets.