New homelessness director named

San Francisco just hired a homelessness chief from 3,000 miles away while City Hall is bracing for a $643 million deficit and another bruising budget fight. Mayor Daniel Lurie named Mike Levine on April 8, and Levine is scheduled to start on June 22. (sf.gov) (abc7news.com) Levine is not coming from another city homeless office. He has been running Massachusetts Medicaid, the state health insurance program for low-income residents, a roughly $23 billion system serving nearly 2 million people. (sf.gov) (sfgate.com) That background is the point of the hire. Lurie wants homelessness, mental health, addiction treatment, and medical billing pulled tighter together, and Levine said he plans to chase more state and federal health dollars instead of leaving local taxpayers to cover the whole load. (sf.gov) (abc7news.com) He is walking into a department that already spends at very large scale. San Francisco’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing adopted a two-year budget with $846.3 million for fiscal year 2024-25 and $677 million for fiscal year 2025-26, with 60% of that two-year total going to housing. (sf.gov) The city is spending that money against a problem that is still bigger than the exits it creates. San Francisco’s 2024 point-in-time count found 8,323 people homeless on one night, up 7% from 2022, and the city said roughly three people become homeless for every one person it helps exit homelessness. (sf.gov) That is why this job is so political in San Francisco. If shelter beds close, neighbors notice; if tents move from one block to another, supervisors notice; and if housing placements slow down, advocates notice. (cbsnews.com) (sf.gov) Levine is also arriving during a leadership handoff, not a clean reset. Current director Shireen McSpadden announced in March that she will retire on June 30 after five years leading the department and 23 years in city service. (sfist.com) Lurie has been arguing that the city can show cleaner streets and faster connections to care at the same time. His office says tents were at a record low for the third straight quarter in February 2026 and down 37% from a year earlier, while nearly 100 households were housed through the large-vehicle program. (sf.gov) But the money picture around that strategy keeps getting tighter. KQED reported in January that San Francisco was facing a nearly $936.6 million two-year budget deficit from a December 2025 city report, and state homelessness funding beyond the current round remains uncertain. (kqed.org) So Levine’s real assignment is not just running shelters, contracts, and housing placements. It is proving that a health-policy operator from Massachusetts can keep San Francisco’s homelessness system standing upright while the city cuts costs, hunts reimbursement dollars, and tries to show visible results on the street at the same time. (sf.gov) (abc7news.com)