San Francisco needs over 200 beds for people struggling with mental illnesses, but it’s going to cost the city a fortune, according to a new report. While not everyone who needs a bed is homeless, many of them are.
The city controller estimates that purchasing a building with 65 beds for the city’s most mentally ill patients would cost roughly $390,000 per bed or $25 million total. Operating the facility would cost up to $20 million annually.
In total, the Department of Public Health estimates that it needs between 152 and 225 new beds to treat people with varying degrees of drug addiction and mental illness. The city already budgets $687.7 million annually on behavioral health and operates roughly 1,861 beds.
Officials at a Wednesday mental health meeting bristled over the price tag. Still, they largely acknowledged the need for more treatment options as mental illness rates have skyrocketed among the city’s homeless population.
“Clients have become more complex,” said Hillary Kunins, the city’s director of behavioral health services, explaining that many providers are unable to meet clients’ needs.
Many of the psychiatric beds currently funded by the city are operated by external organizations, which can refuse patients who may be violent or otherwise difficult to care for, Kunins said. This often leaves mentally ill people languishing in local hospitals and jails while they wait for a treatment facility to accept them. For this reason, some experts at the meeting urged the city to run the proposed facility on its own.
“It will be more expensive, but no matter how much we pay now, we can’t get people to take them,” UCSF psychiatrist Mark Leary said.
Supervisor Rafael Mandelman said he thought the controller’s estimates of annual costs were low. But, even so, he said the city should consider the investment.
“That seems like a number that — if this is an important city priority, as I think it should be — we could make it work,” Mandelman said.
The estimate was based on grant applications from other cities, which saw costs ranging from $1.5 million per bed in Riverside to $200,000 in Monterey. San Francisco currently funds 101 locked psychiatric beds and must compete with other counties for another 39 beds it has access to.
But Mandelman told The Standard after the meeting that the state government has largely left individual counties to fend for themselves, making accurate data on the crisis hard to come by.
“I don’t believe that 55 to 95 beds will actually be enough over time,” he said during the meeting. “But we’ll only find out when we move on it.”