On the City of San Francisco website, the Homeless Oversight Commission displays a list of seven appointees, four selected by the mayor and three by the Board of Supervisors. Six of the seven seats expire between 2027 and 2029, except for one, which expired May 1, 2025. The box reads, “VACANT. Term expired 5/1/25. Holdover member-Christin Evans.”
Perhaps Evans was busy banning Harry Potter books at her bookstore on Haight Street — or, in a perfect world, she decided not to reapply after realizing Mayor Daniel Lurie’s administration doesn’t believe “Permanent Supportive Housing” (a.k.a. “free housing forever for drug tourists”) should be a thing. More than likely, though, Evans just got comfortable like the rest of San Francisco’s mostly useless commissioners and forgot that her term was up. Meanwhile, a seemingly qualified candidate applied for her spot: Thomas Rocca, who stated in his application that he was homeless in 1986, is now a successful real estate developer on the West Coast with projects including the 257-unit Yerba Buena Commons, a single-room-occupancy affordable-housing complex in San Francisco’s Yerba Buena neighborhood, and San Jose’s Cinnabar Commons, a 245-unit affordable housing project.
The Rules Committee was set to take up Rocca’s appointment July 7 when Evans applied for reappointment “within an hour of being notified of the meeting,” but it was too late to be added. That should have been the end of it, but committee chair and lame duck supervisor Shamann Walton took time away from doing comedy shows in Alaska and his “100% Real” podcast to defer the appointment and allow Evans to slip back into consideration. With the exception of Walton, Democratic Socialist Jackie Fielder, union beholden Connie Chan (and occasional wildcards Chyanne Chen, Bilal Mahmood, Danny Sauter, and Myrna Melgar), the board is slightly more moderate than it was when Evans took the seat in 2023. Besides the board makeup, her late entry, and her refusal to acknowledge that fentanyl is the real root of the problem, Evans has serious conflicts of interest regarding the money the commission oversees.
THOUSANDS OF TENTS AND A GET OUT OF JAIL FREE CARD
Evans is probably best known for supporting former District 5 supervisor Dean Preston and the radical harm reductionist group Homeless Youth Alliance (HYA), which hands out, along with clean drug paraphernalia, brochures on how to shoot up and get the most out of it (“Inject slowly so you can feel how strong the dope is!” … “Enjoy your high!”).
In 2019, HYA, Preston, and Evans, with help from cohort Jennifer Friedenbach and her Coalition on Homelessness, handed out 1,000 tents on Haight Street, much to the horror of business owners and residents who found those tents full of transients living in front of their buildings. It wasn’t the first time or the last time — in a March 2020 tweet, the Coalition said, “Tents comin’ in & tents going out to unhoused folks who need ’em. Keep ’em coming!!” and thanked Evans as part of their “tent team.” On April 11, 2022, the Coalition posted they had “ordered 39 2-person tents and 39 3-person tents! Distribution to come soon,” followed by the party popper emoji. A search for “tent” on the Coalition’s Twitter (now X) page brings up multiple other posts bragging about handing out hundreds of tents to the homeless.
The City was soon overwhelmed with tents blocking sidewalks and businesses, and when officials decided it was time to remove them, the Coalition sued. This week, after a three-year battle, the City Attorney’s Office agreed to pay a whopping $2.8 million in “attorney fees.” Like legal costs for the case, if the Board of Supervisors approves the settlement, it will come courtesy of San Francisco taxpayers. Since the ACLU Foundation of Northern California represented the Coalition and two individual plaintiffs pro bono, Friedenbach posted a statement on the Coalition’s X page trying to soften public perception, stating that the money will allow the “ACLU to continue doing this work and monitor compliance with the settlement.”
And how much will the two “plaintiffs” receive? $11,000 each. One of the plaintiffs, Molique Frank, has an extensive criminal record going back to 2014 that includes possession of drugs (both for use and for sale), grand theft, burglary, and shoplifting, with his latest arrest in April of this year. He’s currently living at the Monarch homeless shelter (again, at taxpayer expense).
Both Friedenbach and Evans tirelessly stumped for Democratic Socialist Preston, a fellow multimillionaire trust fund baby married into a family of residential landlords (Evans’ father is an aluminum magnate, while Friedenbach comes from an almond dynasty). Evans maxed out her personal monetary contributions to Preston’s supervisor campaigns. In turn, Preston used his power to help and reward his friend.
In 2021, when Evans, as a volunteer with the Coalition on Homelessness, was arrested for interfering at an encampment removal, Preston called on the police chief to spring her (oh, the irony, coming from two police abolitionists). An even bigger reward, of course, was nominating her to that sixth seat on the Homeless Commission in 2023, which, according to bylaws, “shall be held by a person with significant experience providing services to or engaging in advocacy on behalf of persons experiencing homelessness.” If handing out tents and being arrested for interfering with their removal is “significant experience,” then I guess Evans would be the right fit; however, she has zero expertise in the field, admitting that she “educated herself” about San Francisco’s homeless service system.
Another focus for the board should be Evans’ conflicts of interest, which stem from her long relationship with Friedenbach and her Coalition on Homelessness, and the fact the two lobbied together for the proposition that brought in the very money they now oversee.
BILLIONAIRE BENIOFF ON BOARD
In 2018, Friedenbach drafted a plan to raise $300 million a year for “homeless services” by increasing gross receipts taxes 0.5 percent on San Francisco businesses making more than $50 million annually, and she chose Evans as her spokesperson. One night while Twitter surfing, Evans came across a post from Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of software company Salesforce, referring to San Francisco as the “Four Seasons of homelessness.” Outraged, she tweeted back, “Did @benioff just compare SF’s homeless services to a luxury hotel chain? How out of touch can a billionaire be?!?!”
Intrigued, Benioff reached out to Evans and the two exchanged private messages. By the end of their chat, Benioff supported the measure. He and Salesforce donated a combined $8 million to the campaign (the most ever spent on a local ballot measure so near to election day), and Benioff became Proposition C’s biggest champion, chastising fellow CEOs for “not caring about homeless people.”
Benioff also found a cheerleader in then-San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight, who posted smiling photos of the two, wrote glowingly about Friedenbach and Evans, and defended Prop. C on social media. “I’m talking about getting [the homeless] off the street in San Francisco and into housing. The city economist’s report says Prop. C will make a big difference in the conditions on our streets because 4,000 new units will be created,” she tweeted on Oct. 28, 2018.
When Twitter user “Bluoz” pointed to a grand jury report stating that housing wasn’t the answer, Knight snapped, “Yes that’s what they said 10 years ago. I’m writing about conditions now and how they should improve with passage of Prop C.” If you’re wondering where I stood back then, I was on the right side of history: I endorsed “No on Prop. C” in the Marina Times, but I was no competition for the Dream Team of Benioff, Knight, Evans, and Friedenbach, and the measure passed.
After fending off a lawsuit filed by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, funds were released and The Our City, Our Home Oversight Committee (OCOH) was set up to ensure those funds were used “effectively and transparently,” but once again, Preston helped a friend, and the Board of Supervisors appointed Prop. C’s biggest lobbyist, Friedenbach, to the committee.
In May 2023, the Homeless Oversight Commission was launched to oversee the floundering Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, and to “receive advice and recommendations from OCOH on the administration of Proposition C funds.” When Preston got Evans appointed to the oversight commission, it set up a fox guarding the henhouse scenario, with Prop. C lobbyists Friedenbach and Evans having an outsized say in how the money would be spent. Voters had no way of knowing what a stranglehold Friedenbach and Evans would eventually have on the money, with strict percentages implemented to match the pair’s ideology. “Permanent Housing is a central component … with at least 50% of the Fund allocated for this service area,” the website explains.
From fiscal years 2021 through 2024, the city appropriated a total of $1.1 billion to the OCOH Fund and spent $821.7 million. In the 2024 fiscal year, the city expended $316.8 million in OCOH Funds across all service areas, a growth of $21.1 million in spending from the 2023 fiscal year. According to OCOH, this net increase was “largely driven by growth in the Permanent Housing Operations service area ($22.9 million increase) and Mental Health Operations service area ($11.7 million increase).”
For $822 million, OCOH says it “funded programs that added and sustained around 5,300 total units of capacity” since the fund’s inception in fiscal year 2021, with a net 807 units of capacity added in the 2024 fiscal year. The executive summary is light on detail (for example, who are their “clients” and where are they now?) and spins the crisis in the streets as a housing issue, which it is not.
IT’S THE DRUGS
Friedenbach and Evans are proponents of “housing first,” which means moving people behind closed doors with no barriers. Drug and alcohol use are permitted. So is crime: a cross-check of publicly available criminal records with publicly available names of supportive housing clients over the past three months shows 100 criminals currently living in taxpayer-funded programs.
Harm reduction activists like Friedenbach and Evans believe giving people sober living options is more dangerous than being surrounded by drug dealers and users, but utilizing data from the Medical Examiner’s Office, Mothers Against Drug Addiction & Deaths cofounder Gina McDonald was able to prove that of San Francisco overdose fatalities between January and April of 2025, nearly 60 percent occurred indoors.
In an Aug. 2024 opinion piece for the San Francisco Standard titled, “San Franciscans awaken to the cruelty and futility of homeless sweeps,” Evans doesn’t mention the words “drugs,” “overdoses,” or “fentanyl” at all. She does whine that the city is “short several thousand beds” to provide emergency shelter or transitional housing to the 4,300-plus homeless people in San Francisco and is “overtaxed with an inflow of the unhoused.” She goes on to cite migrant families with minor-age children (nearly all here illegally) “who arrive without access to housing.” That’s rich considering since 2023, she has approved spending nearly $1 billion in OCOH funds. Evans is so far out of touch that she doesn’t get the Field of Dreams analogy: build free housing and they will come — from other cities, other states, and other countries.
On July 6, Evans told NBC Bay Area that OCOH “stood up 600 new shelter beds in the last 2 years,” and “it’s just not been enough to keep up with the growing rate of people experiencing homelessness.” Bringing it back full circle, Friedenbach chimed in, “The city has been taking away people’s tents.”
Watching Evans and Friedenbach blame city officials for a problem they helped to create while spending $822 million to solve nothing would be laughable if people’s lives weren’t at stake.
Anyone looking at the streets of San Francisco can see that Prop. C dollars spent under the tenure of Friedenbach and Evans have been an abysmal failure, yet both opposed Mayor Lurie’s proposal requesting $88 million from the OCOH fund to pay for temporary shelter over the next three years. The Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to approve $34.8 million — over $53 million shy of what Lurie wanted. (Apparently, they are still afraid of Friedenbach.) Separately, they voted 8-3 to allow the Mayor’s Office to spend up to $19 million of the fund’s excess revenue without supermajority approval from the board over the next two fiscal years. You read that right: OCOH is sitting on millions in excess revenue while grumbling about the city not doing enough to house every homeless person in perpetuity.
“Looking back on what we’ve done with those funds over that time, I think that those allocations pushed us to overinvest in permanent supportive housing relative to other types of homelessness interventions that we could have invested in during that time,” Board of Supervisors President Rafael Mandelman said. Let’s hope he and the other seven semi-sensible supervisors remember that and vote to keep Evans off the Homeless Oversight Commission.
Follow Susan and the Marina Times on X: @SusanDReynolds and @TheMarinaTimes.
