Gimme Shelter: Counting Down to 90

It takes about three weeks for a homeless person in San Francisco to secure a 90-day bed in the city-funded shelter system, an independent analysis of the the recently instituted 311 shelter reservation waitlist shows.

The numbers were crunched by a client who is in the system.

After Peter Ogilvie, 52, a former technical staff consultant at the Oracle Corporation, examined more than 3,000 requests for a 90-day reservation wia the 311 telephone system, he figured out the average waiting time a single homeless adult can expect to land one. The result: 23 days.

Furthermore, Ogilvie also determined it is virtually impossible for the waitlist to be tampered with so that any client could move higher up the list.

Before the 311 customer service center started assigning reservation in February, four reservation centers were charged with giving them out on a first-come, first-serve basis. Clients seeking 90-day beds lined up outside the centers, sometimes overnight. Stakeholders in the system — including service providers, city officials, advocates and clients — spent two years developing the waitlist. Now, people who are registered in the CHANGES homeless database can sign up by phone and are assigned a unique-identifying number.

Using 3,000 such numbers — also known as seniority numbers — Ogilvie factored each one with a day fixed on the Julian calendar year in formulating the average waiting time.

Initially, Olgilvie doubted this new distribution system would work. He was once offered a 90-day bed for $100 in cash and observed others competing for a spot in line hoping to luck into a reservation.

"I was skeptical," he said. "I thought 311 would be subject to cronyism and corruption." Using publicly available data on the waitlist, Ogilvie sought to determine if clients or 311 customer reps could game the new system.

"The only way I could do that is to build software where I could look everywhere if CHANGES ID numbers moved arbitrarily ahead of others," he said.

Ogilvie and his wife, Sara, lost their housing after a long legal battle with their landlord and entered the shelter system one year ago. Previously, he worked in the computer industry for over 15 years — including an 11-year stint at Oracle — before moving to San Francisco.

Like many others before 311, the Ogilvies waited outside MSC South early in the morning and signed for the daily lottery, in hopes of getting a 90-day reservation. After he heard about the switch in the reservation system, Ogilvie started compiling data in March, mostly to compare his and Sara's progress on the waitlist to others.

The 311 system acts as the city's customer service department for an array of services. Under the new method, clients who sign on eventually receive voice or text messages prompting them to call 311 for an open spot.

A crew of 74 customer representatives answers calls at a single facility, said call center manager Kevin Dyer. "All of our reps take calls for individuals who want to get on the waitlist, want status on the position on the waitlist or have general questions about the procedures," he said. "We do have a CSR or two assigned to make the actual reservations in the system when beds come available."

Before the advent of 311 reservations, anecdotes suggest that people faced a waiting period of four to six weeks. Using a formula based on waitlist data, Ogilvie calculated the average waiting time to be 23 days.

But what surprised him was that the integrity of the new system held: He couldn't find any sign of fraud or unfairness in the new allotment of beds on the part of 311 operators.

Ogilvie also observed from the data that more people are going back to the waitlist after their reservations expire. Out of all shelter-related requests to 311 as of Aug. 31, about three-fourths of the CHANGES ID numbers are new to the waitlist, leaving the rest as re-enlistees into the system.

Ogilvie also found existing waitlist info that most clients fall between ages 50 to 62. Before press time, the latest version of the waitlist as of Sept. 12 shows the oldest seeker of a 90-day bed is an 83-year-old. The city's Human Services Agency has also detected an aging pattern among the shelter population in its recent point-in-time homeless counts.

Because most shelters segregate by gender and the wait for a family shelter is at least six months long, the Ogilvies stay at different shelters. The shelter systems regimentation, hours-long waits for basic services and impersonal treatment from staff are among the indignities they and their houseless brethren suffer.

"Over and over, the message from the shelter system I got was my time was worthless, therefore I was worthless," he said. "It's a kind of currency of homelessness. It's a suffering I find quite unacceptable."

Ogilive added that the delegation of reservation duties to 311 carries an added psychological benefit to clients. "My experience is that it's so refreshing to talk to someone and be treated professionally and courteously and not feel patronized," he said. "It's such a completely different experience from the staff at the reservation centers."

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