SF Homelessness Director Shireen McSpadden Steps Down

Shireen McSpadden, San Francisco’s director of the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, announced Monday that she will leave her post on June 30, ending a five-year run leading one of the most scrutinized agencies in City Hall.

McSpadden, who has worked in city government for 23 years, was appointed to the role by former Mayor London Breed in April 2021. She took over from founding director Jeff Kositsky, making her only the second person to hold the position since the department was created a decade ago.

“While stepping away from my role is bittersweet, I do so with great confidence in the department and in the extraordinary network of partners who help make this work possible,” McSpadden wrote in a letter to community partners, first reported by the Chronicle. She also thanked Mayor Daniel Lurie for “his leadership and for the partnership of his administration.”

The timing raises obvious questions. McSpadden may have early access to results from the city’s latest point-in-time homeless count, conducted in late January. Those numbers have not been released publicly, but the methodology shifted this cycle. For the first time, the count took place in the early morning rather than in the evening, a change designed to make unsheltered individuals more visible and produce a more accurate tally.

If those numbers show another increase, they will create immediate pressure on Lurie’s administration. The biennial count recorded 7,754 homeless individuals in 2022, then rose 7 percent to 8,328 in 2024. Unsheltered numbers stayed essentially flat over that same period, which represents a persistent failure to move people off the streets and into stable housing.

Lurie earlier this month pointed to a reported drop in the number of people living in RVs on San Francisco streets as a marker of progress. But the full point-in-time count will carry far more political weight, and a third consecutive increase would be a significant liability for his young administration.

McSpadden’s departure gives Lurie a high-stakes appointment to make. Whoever he selects will shape how the administration pursues its stated goals on homelessness and, perhaps more importantly, will signal what kind of approach Lurie actually intends to take. He can stock the department with someone aligned with his priorities in a way that was harder to do while McSpadden remained in place.

The job itself has never been easy to staff. When McSpadden was appointed in 2021, Board of Supervisors President Rafael Mandelman offered a blunt summary of the position: “It is a meat grinder of a job. And it’s an impossible job. The department is under-resourced for what we ask it to do, the politics are intense and crazy-making, the advocacy community is energized, and the supervisors are unforgiving.”

That description has not become less accurate in the five years since. San Francisco spends roughly $670 million annually on homelessness-related services. Despite that investment, visible street homelessness has remained a constant feature of neighborhoods across the city. Federal pressure on municipalities over encampment clearings has also added legal and political complexity to enforcement decisions.

McSpadden previously led the city’s Department of Disability and Aging Services, and she brought a social services orientation to the homelessness director role rather than a law enforcement one. That framing influenced how the department engaged with its network of nonprofit providers and how it approached the balance between shelter, treatment, and enforcement.

Whether her exit was her own choice or a quiet negotiation with the mayor’s office, McSpadden is leaving on terms that appear amicable. Her letter expressed confidence in Lurie’s ability to manage the transition, and there are no public signs of a falling-out.

The city will watch closely to see who Lurie picks next. The choice will say more about his strategy than any press conference could. San Francisco has cycled through approaches to homelessness for years without producing the kind of measurable reduction residents expect. The next director will inherit a department, a strained budget, a dense advocacy ecosystem, and a city that has run out of patience for incremental progress.