Healthy Streets Operation Center says encampments down from ~1,200 to below 400 after coordinated outreach

San Francisco's Healthy Streets Operation Center (HSOC) reported progress in coordinating city responses to street‑level health and safety issues and described how the center has scaled up operations to respond day‑to‑day and to serve as an emergency command post if needed.

Commander Lazar told the Disaster Council HSOC began this year as a weekday operation and expanded in July to seven days a week from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., integrating staff from the Department of Public Health, Department of Public Works, Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, the controller's office, Rec and Park, and other partners. He credited the approach with moving people into navigation centers, increasing joint HOT outreach and centralizing 3‑1‑1 call handling into a single operations lane that logged roughly 240 calls a day.

Lazar said encampment counts have declined from around 1,200 two years ago to below 400 today, and that HSOC now operates a related program, the Healthy Streets Intervention Program (HSIP), which pairs police officers, public health and HOT outreach workers to locate and transport individuals to services when appropriate.

Why it matters: HSOC represents a multiagency, sustained operational posture that the city says can convert into an incident command posture during a disaster and supports both routine street‑level management and surge response capacity.

Next steps: HSOC officials said they will keep refining operational procedures, explore best practices with visiting agencies (Los Angeles has requested a visit), and report back on performance as the program matures.

Attribution: Account and numbers are taken from Commander Lazar's report to the Disaster Council.