{"id":279103,"date":"2026-04-21T20:51:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-21T20:51:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/279103\/"},"modified":"2026-04-21T20:51:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-21T20:51:09","slug":"mayor-lurie-moves-s-f-street-outreach-teams-to-health-department","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/279103\/","title":{"rendered":"Mayor Lurie moves S.F. street-outreach teams to health department"},"content":{"rendered":"

San Francisco\u2019s numerous street-outreach teams<\/a>, which administer to homeless people and drug users in troubled neighborhoods like the Mission and the Tenderloin, are being reshuffled: They will move from working under the Department of Emergency Management to the Department of Public Health, according to the mayor\u2019s office, another signal that Mayor Daniel Lurie thinks addressing health factors is key to fighting public drug use and homelessness.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople struggling with addiction need health care, so we\u2019re putting the Department of Public Health in charge and doubling down on our work to connect people to treatment,\u201d Mayor Daniel Lurie said in a statement.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Around 20 city workers will now report to the health department and 100 contracted workers \u2014 many of whom currently work for the homelessness department \u2014 will now work for the health department.<\/p>\n

Department of Health director Daniel Tsai added, \u201cWe have the structure in place to rapidly provide the health interventions that people with complex needs such as substance use disorders, serious mental illness, and chronic health conditions need to reach long-term stability.\u201d<\/p>\n

The street teams are a key initiative for a mayor who has promised to clean up the streets and has sought to hire more cops<\/a> and expand the ranks<\/a> of non-police \u201cstreet ambassadors.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Lurie first consolidated San Francisco\u2019s street teams<\/a> under the emergency department last spring. Under that framework, six teams were created, each with workers from seven departments: health, emergency, homelessness, fire, police, sheriff, and public works. Five teams were assigned to specific neighborhoods and one team worked citywide.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The consolidated teams were meant to increase coordination between departments so that people who needed multiple types of services \u2014 wound care and homeless shelter placement, for instance \u2014 could receive the help they needed in quick succession.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The streets of the Mission saw marked improvement<\/a> in the early summer, which workers have partially attributed to the new street team model. According to the mayor\u2019s office, preliminary data shows that the neighborhood street-team workers place people into shelters 40 percent quicker compared to the previous organizational model.<\/p>\n

When the street teams were stood up, the emergency department was chosen to house the program because of its experience in coordinating multiple city departments. \u201cThis is what DEM does \u2014 we step into complex situations, build the structure, and get it running,\u201d said Department of Emergency Management executive director Mary Ellen Carroll in a statement.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But with the teams now established, it\u2019s time for the \u201cnext phase\u201d where the health department is in charge, Lurie\u2019s team said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Lurie has emphasized the importance of integrating health care and homelessness. He recently appointed Michael Levine<\/a>, a Medicaid executive at MassHealth, to head San Francisco\u2019s homelessness department.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Levine overlapped with health department head Tsai during his time at MassHealth, and Lurie said the two departments would work closely together. Levine, he said, is \u201can expert in connecting health care and homelessness services.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thus far, Lurie\u2019s administration has \u201cset out to fundamentally transform our homelessness and behavioral health response,\u201d the mayor added. \u201cWe are moving in the right direction because we\u2019ve brought together our homelessness work with our health care work around addiction and mental illness.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Other programs designed to address street conditions have also undergone recent changes including the announcement this week that ambassadors near Marshall Elementary School<\/a>, which sits at the heart of 16th and Mission\u2019s street chaos, are being laid off, and their roles subcontracted out to a nonprofit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"San Francisco\u2019s numerous street-outreach teams, which administer to homeless people and drug users in troubled neighborhoods like the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":279104,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[22459,4735,1493,101,103,102,104,106,105],"class_list":["post-279103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-16th-street","tag-department-of-public-health","tag-homelessness","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279103"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279103\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/279104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}