That night, they got four beds. Soon after, they got something else: acceptance into a program that would get them into a full-time, permanent home.

Now, with a year of finance and life management sessions under her belt, Breitenbach, 36, and her now four children have a two-bedroom apartment in Buena Park. Breitenbach said rent is covered for three months and, after that, she’ll pay a below-market $1,230 a month with the help of federal funding. She’s looking for work.

“It helps me with the deposit, Edison, gas,” she said. “There’s not too much to complain about.”

Breitenbach’s story is an increasingly common solution for homeless people in Orange County, as some local and federal homeless agencies shift their focus and their money from temporary shelters to subsidizing full-time, below-market-rate housing.

It’s not yet clear if the policy shift will work. The relatively new idea hasn’t yet generated long-term data to show whether permanent housing keeps people off the streets forever. And many homeless agencies continue to emphasize temporary shelter, not housing, because that’s still where some federal money is available.

Experts also point out that a shift away from temporary shelters can add to the housing shortage, making it harder for some people to get off the streets.

Still, the shift represents one of the bigger changes in years in the fight to end homelessness.

If somebody is homeless, the best answer might be to get them a home.

“We can serve more families and move them along, but the critical need in the county today is really all about affordable (permanent) housing,” said Margie Wakeham, executive director of Families Forward, an Irvine agency that helps the homeless.

PHILOSOPHICAL SHIFT

Local groups that help people get into permanent dwellings – groups such as Pathways of Hope, the Fullerton-based organization that helped Breitenbach – are following the federal government’s lead.

For the past couple of years, the Department of Housing and Urban Development has shifted money away from temporary shelters to a rapidly growing pool of money allocated for permanent dwellings. The department’s relatively new rapid-rehousing program offers temporary subsidies for below-market-rate rents for people like Breitenbach.

At the same time, HUD has been giving more money toward supportive housing programs, which provide indefinite leasing or rental assistance and other services, for people who are both homeless and disabled.

The concept of offering full-time housing grew out of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which included $1.5 billion for homelessness prevention.

One short-term study hints at success.

In July, HUD released data showing that among 2,282 homeless families surveyed over 18 months, the people who’d been helped with permanent housing were less likely to wind up back on the streets than those who were offered other interventions, including transitional housing.

The study also suggested that the cost of subsidies for permanent housing was comparable to, or substantially less than, other forms of intervention.

The federal department has used that study and others to justify its new philosophy about fighting homelessness.

“We have incentivized people to move in the (rapid re-housing) direction because that is what the data shows works,” said HUD spokesman Brian Sullivan.

And how HUD views homelessness affects virtually all publicly financed housing agencies.

Now, when seeking HUD money for housing, local agencies increasingly need to offer a plan that puts some of their clients into homes on a full-time basis.

Sullivan said that if an agency in a big, urban place like Orange County wants money for housing that’s not permanent, “they may not be funded at a level they really want to be funded at.”

Based on statistics from 2014, about 84 percent of HUD money to the county was for permanent housing; 12 percent was for transitional, or temporary, shelter.

A NEW APPROACH

The permanent shelter trend is picking up steam locally.

Last month, a partner of Pathways of Hope, Mercy House, got approval from the city of Santa Ana to convert half of Joseph House, historically a transitional housing shelter, into permanent supportive housing.

“What we expect to be able to do is to actually increase the number of persons that we’re serving,” said Larry Haynes, the nonprofit’s executive director.

And Wakeham’s group, Families Forward, recently sold one of its 26 transitional housing condominiums, in Irvine, to help pay for a fourplex in Lake Forest that will be used for permanent, below-market-rate family housing.

The fourplex opened last month. Now, Families Forward is rejiggering seven of its remaining 25 condos into below-market-rate housing. Wakeham said her group is keeping the rest of the condos as temporary housing “because we have very few family (emergency) shelter beds in the county.”

Others point out there is still a place for transitional shelters, the kind of help Breitenbach and her kids got during the year between sleeping at the shelter in Fullerton and moving into their Buena Park apartment.

In August, Yazmin Cerda, a Families Forward client and single mother of two, moved from transitional housing to a below-market-rate apartment in Irvine. She said both housing types are important.

Cerda, 36, said that while in transitional housing, she learned skills that helped make her ready to earn enough to stay in a permanent, though subsidized, home. She’s paying rent of $1,100 a month while studying to become a registered nurse, resuming a career she lost three years ago when she worked at a hospice.

Without that help, Cerda said, “I think I would be just renting a room with my kids because there’s no way I can afford to pay $2,000 for the apartment that I have right now.”

RESISTING THE CHANGE

Not everybody agrees with prioritizing permanent shelter.

Huntington Beach-based Colette’s Children’s Home, which serves homeless single women, mothers and children, is resisting the shift. The agency has nine emergency shelter units, 14 below-market-rate housing units, 22 permanent supportive housing units and 28 transitional housing units in Huntington Beach, Anaheim, Fountain Valley and Placentia. The agency is hoping to keep its transitional stock.

A lot of agencies “are putting all their eggs in one basket,” said Colette’s founder Billy O’Connell. “(But) there’s no data that supports some of the prerogatives that they’re moving to.”

O’Connell has written more than 30 letters to members of Congress on the importance of transitional housing.

“Do we accept whatever policymakers are giving us, or do we stand up and challenge them?” O’Connell said. “We’re going to continue to advocate for what we do and what we believe, and if we have to send out another round of letters to every congressperson in our county, we will do that.”

Orange County does not yet have a comprehensive study comparing success rates between transitional housing and permanent supportive housing, said Karen Roper, director of OC Community Services.

“The bottom line is our 10-year plan to end homelessness was never designed to be a one-size-fits-all plan,” Roper said.

“To end homelessness, different best practices and strategies are needed to effectively serve the different … populations.”

STILL WARY

Breitenbach, who has lived at her Buena Park apartment for a few weeks, said that “it’s hard to say” whether transitional or permanent housing should be the funding priority.

She offered herself as an example of a person living in a permanent apartment who still might wind up back on the streets.

“I’m still unemployed. Right now, I’m still needing to pay rent and try to secure a job,” she said.

“If there was more funds for rapid rehousing, it would help so much more to give that person more time transitioning from transitional housing into their own housing.”

O.C. SHELTER INVENTORY IN 2015

1,103 emergency shelter beds
1,578 transitional housing beds
3,466 permanent housing beds
Source: OC Community Services

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/housing-699379-permanent-transitional.html

Danny Haber, 26, and Alon Gutman, 27, first became involved in their communal housing setups last year with a live-work property at 200 12th St. called The Negev Twelfth. The property became a model for at least two other tech-infused dorm-style housing projects in SoMa that have recently sparked a series of investigations and a lawsuit.

The duo started The Negev Sixth at 219 Sixth St. early this year. It has been cited for possible habitability, hotel-conversion ordinance and room-count violations. They also have The Negev Folsom at 1040 Folsom St. that opened this past summer and is facing the same issues along with a lawsuit from displaced tenants.

Haber and Gutman championed The Negev properties as an innovative way of living amid scarce and expensive housing in The City. For $1,250 to $1,500 a month, tenants can rent a spot on a bunk bed in a single-room-occupancy unit or a single unit for about $1,700. Tenants also have access to common areas with a kitchen, games and a fratlike hacker-house atmosphere. The rents — targeted at tech workers and newcomers mostly in their 20s — overall are much higher than the rates at the properties before Haber and Gutman leased the buildings.

To create The Negev Twelfth, Haber and Gutman subleased a live-work space from the owner of an attached restaurant. The restaurant leased the entire building from the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corp., a housing and services provider for low-income San Franciscans.

The organization, through a donation from the St. Anthony Foundation in 1996, was gifted the parcel that includes the live-work space, restaurant and 12 units of below-market-rate housing at an adjacent space on Howard Street, which were renovated with a loan from the Mayor’s Office of Housing.

When the organization took over the property, one lease covered the live-work space and restaurant, and it was never separated so the restaurant had to lease the whole thing.

HISTORY OF COMPLAINTS

A complaint filed by a city resident in May about the number of people living at 200 12th St. led Donald Falk, the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corp. executive director, to discover what had become of the live-work space.

Brian Fernando, owner of the Sri Lankan restaurant 1601 Bar and Kitchen, had subleased it to Haber and Gutman.

“They pay the rent all the time. I mean, that’s kind of all you want in a tenant,” Fernando said. “They’ve had some issues with the neighbor next door with noise late at night but … apart from that, they’ve been fine.”

The sublease, Falk said, was done “without our permission or knowledge.”

“As soon as we found out, we issued a notice to our tenant to cure or quit,” he added.

The Planning Department launched an investigation in July after receiving complaints that there were a dozen tenants living at the live-work space zoned for only four people, and that the place was being advertised as a short-term rental on Airbnb.

During the summer, Falk said the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corp. worked with the Planning Department to rectify violations. He said that Haber — who takes the lead on the business side while Gutman fronts the technical side — was “extremely cooperative in every respect from the moment that we brought the parties together to tell them that the status quo needed to change.”

The Planning Department closed the case Oct. 29 because Haber proved that the remaining tenants were staying more than 30 days, said Gina Simi, spokeswoman for the department.

“A number of people left because their lease was up and it just wasn’t renewed. Some were already leaving. There’s no way to really pinpoint who was doing what, but nobody was evicted,” Simi said of the reports that more people were living at the property than zoning allowed.

Falk said he hired an architect to inspect 200 12th St. to ensure the electrical, plumbing, chemical and physical elements were up to code, and explore what would be required to separate the live-work space from the master lease with the restaurant.

“If we were going to do that, we would have to do some renovation work to make that legal,” he said, adding that he has not heard complaints since the investigation closed.

Rent from the live-work space and restaurant allows the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corp. to keep the Howard Street apartments affordable to low- and extremely low-income residents, Falk said.

“It helps us keep the rents lower at the 12 units next door because it’s all one property,” he said. “The money all goes into one pot.”

But on Nov. 6, the Department of Building Inspection received a new complaint that 200 12th St. was being operated as a hostel with up to 15 people, that the makeshift bedrooms had no egress or windows, and plumbing work was done without permits.

Haber could not be reached for comment.

‘AN AWESOME IDEA’

Jared Smith moved to The Negev Twelfth to participate in a coding boot camp and serve as an intern at the payroll company ZenPayroll. He said about 22 people were living there while he stayed from June 2013 to February of this year.

The ground floor was an open space with couches and a kitchen, while the upstairs had a main room with seven bunk beds divided by sheets, a large walk-in closet with two bunk beds separated by a curtain and two more rooms with two bunk beds each, Smith said.

Smith said he found The Negev Twelfth on Airbnb and paid Haber $2,186, which included cleaning and service fees, for 65 nights.

Eventually, Haber stopped using the Airbnb platform to find tenants. Smith said he was charged for the entire month of February while living there only two weeks.

“In the beginning, The Negev was an awesome idea because housing is too expensive and you really meet new friends,” Smith said of the living quarters. “But towards the end, it seemed more like just a way to make money.”

http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/first-negev-tech-commune-in-sf-also-faced-legal-problems/Content?oid=2913251

That could change in just a couple of days.

As “Wednesday, September 25, 2013 6:01 AM” fast approaches, the Lees cannot ignore the “Notice to Vacate” posted last week in a court order and delivered in the mail Friday.

Speaking in Cantonese, Gum Gee Lee, 73, said, “We raised our family here and we paid rent for more than 30 years. This new landlord knew we lived here when he bought the building. But he did not plan to keep us. He started to evict all of the tenants right away.”

The Lee family’s case is among the most egregious examples in The City of a rising number of evictions using the Ellis Act, a state law adopted in 1985 that allows a landlord to evict tenants in order to get out of the residential rental market.

Matthew Miller bought 1506 to 1510 Jackson Street for $1.2 million in January 2012. Within four months, he had offered buyouts to the Asian longtime residents there.

Miller did the same in North Beach at 32-40 Varennes St., which was renovated into luxury tenancy-in-common units listed starting at $439,000 each.

The Lees’ attorney, Omar Calimbas of the Asian Law Caucus, has represented almost all the other tenants in the complex. He suspects that Miller, like other landlords, has used the state law to turn a profit.

“It’s the same business model — he bought the property with the purpose to flip it from rent control to luxury TICs, sell it and move on,” Calimbas said.

However, the California Superior Court determined that Miller has acted within his rights.

“The law with respect to the Ellis Act is quite clear and it requires, as my client has complied with, going out of the business of being a landlord in the building,” said Miller’s attorney, Jeffery Woo. “And it is irrelevant what subsequent use is.”

Ellis Act evictions and the alternative — buyouts — have tripled since the beginning of the year, with high numbers in Chinatown and North Beach, according to Ted Gullicksen, director of the San Francisco Tenants Union.

“There’s really no defense for this type of eviction,” Calimbas said.

The driving factor pushing housing demand above supply is once again a red-hot tech industry, which was the case in the late 1990s as well.

“There is much more wealth to go around, so these old rental buildings are being targeted and turned into condos and TICs,” said Norman Fong, executive director of the Chinatown Community Development Center, which has been providing housing counseling to the Lees. “This strategy, we and affordable-housing advocates call ‘gentrification.'”

Census data in recent decades has shown a decline in families and children in Chinatown and North Beach in favor of the single, white, under-30 demographic. The 2010 results showed a continuation of that trend.

“The cost of housing has gone up everywhere, not just in the core of Chinatown, so it’s imperative for leaders to work on, ‘How do we keep families, neighborhoods vibrant?'” said David Lee, executive director of the Chinese American Voters Education Committee. “For that, you need the old, the young, people of different socioeconomic backgrounds. That’s what makes The City vibrant and makes people want to live here in the first place.”

Tenant advocacy groups see a 10-year moratorium on The City’s condominium conversion lottery adopted by the Board of Supervisors in June as one way to help stave off conversions of rent-controlled properties into condo units. The ordinance does not, however, stop real estate speculators from using the Ellis Act.

“We have seen an extremely troubling pattern of Ellis Act evictions in recent years, and without changes in state law, we need to counteract with local San Francisco policies to address the affordability challenges,” Supervisor David Chiu, whose district includes Chinatown and North Beach, said of the Lees’ case and others.

Chiu, whose political career began at the Chinatown Community Development Center, said he’s working with the organization to introduce legislation that would give Ellis Act-evicted tenants priority in other housing options.

But with waitlists growing for affordable-housing facilities like the under-construction Broadway Sansome Apartments, more residents are moving to the East Bay, Daly City and elsewhere.

Come Wednesday and their scheduled eviction, the 79-year-old Poon Heung Lee, speaking in Cantonese, said he doesn’t know what his family will do.

“If the police come and they take us to the sheriff’s office, I guess that is what will be,” he said. “We have not been able to find a place; what can we do?”

http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/ellis-act-evictions-changing-landscape-of-san-francisco-housing/Content?oid=2585077