They huddled in the cold on a graffiti-covered bench last November, the twin girls dozing in their parents’ laps while the older children buried their heads in their phones.
Most nights, the family of six waited like this outside a San Francisco school gymnasium until it could be converted into a homeless shelter. Once inside, they slept each night on a small patch of the floor, then rose early each morning to secure a spot in one of the three showers shared by 69 people. They had to leave by sunrise so the school gym could be returned to its intended purpose.
Margarita Solito, 36, sometimes wondered if the 3,200-mile journey to San Francisco from El Salvador had been worth it. The family left as international migrants, and now they were migrants of a different sort, moving around their new city all day with nowhere to call home.
A year after arriving in the city, Ms. Solito’s fight for housing would pay off, and her family would be able to put down roots. But their journey shed light on the larger crisis of family homelessness in San Francisco and revealed the daily uncertainty that hundreds of schoolchildren face there.
Despite receiving fewer migrants than other major cities, San Francisco was unprepared for the small, but steady, stream of families who did arrive, many of them, like Ms. Solito’s family, seeking asylum.
As of last week, 528 families, regardless of citizenship status, were on the city’s waiting list for private shelter. It is roughly 300 more than a year ago, and the city has said much of the increase stems from migrant families who have arrived in San Francisco with nowhere to live. The figure rose despite a dramatic reduction in border crossings since President Biden restricted asylum claims in June.
In New York and Chicago, migrant pressures have eased, in part because the state of Texas stopped sending buses there when the border crossings slowed this summer. It is not entirely clear why San Francisco has not seen fewer arrivals, but it may be because the Texas buses never went to the Northern California city.
The school shelter in San Francisco still turns a few families away each day. Nonprofit workers and church groups still hear of families sleeping in vehicles, parks or bus shelters.
Ms. Solito’s family was relatively lucky in the end, although it did not feel that way during the school year. Ms. Solito said she was partly drawn to San Francisco because she had heard it was a “sanctuary city” and thought that meant her family would have a physical home, not just legal protections.
Her dream was simple: one room, with a private bathroom, where her family could spend an entire day and store their few belongings.
“We are not the only family that is practically in the streets,” Ms. Solito said in Spanish through an interpreter.
She and her husband, Enrique Cruz, have 6-year-old twins, Natalia and Adriana. They are also raising Ms. Solito’s children from a previous relationship, Alisson, 10, and Rodrigo, 14. They said they left El Salvador in January 2023 because Mr. Cruz, a deliveryman, had been held up at gunpoint for years by gang members.
The family made stops in Mexico so that Mr. Cruz, 43, could work and fund their journey to Brownsville, Texas. Once they crossed the border, they were bused to Los Angeles under the program created by Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas. An immigration nonprofit then paid for them to fly, in August 2023, to San Francisco.
With help from a local Catholic church and a community organizer, the family made their way to the very unusual shelter at Buena Vista Horace Mann, a school for students in kindergarten through eighth grade, a month after they arrived in the city.
In San Francisco’s public schools, 2,403 children are homeless, about 5 percent of the enrollment, according to the district’s most recent data. Of those, a third are learning English.
Jacqueline Portillo said she helped found the shelter in 2018 because some students at the school were homeless and had nowhere to sleep. It was intended for brief stays, but some families have stayed for months.
Ms. Portillo said she had received six calls on a recent day alone from homeless migrant families, and she had to turn them away.
“I’m crying all the time,” said Ms. Portillo, herself an immigrant from El Salvador. “Everything is full.”
After the doors finally opened the night Ms. Solito and her family huddled on a bench, they sat down to a dinner of rice, beans, chips and lettuce. Staff at the shelter used metal poles and blue curtains to partition spaces for the 23 families staying in the gym. There was no privacy. There was no quiet.
The families settled onto their sleeping mats after dinner. At 9 p.m., a shelter worker hollered, “Buenas noches!” The families responded in kind, setting off an echo of bedtime wishes.
The lights turned off. The same routine continued for months.
For many migrants, getting through each day is enough of a struggle. Ms. Solito, however, felt that she needed to do something more.
“I would like to be a guide for other mothers who are following in my footsteps,” she said.
At several events, including a City Hall news conference and a San Francisco Board of Supervisors hearing, she questioned why the city was paying $160 per family each night at the school shelter when the same amount could have paid for basic hotel rooms with private bathrooms — without kicking people out during the day.
Calculated another way, the city was spending $4,800 a month for Ms. Solito’s family to sleep on the gym floor, more than enough money to rent a large apartment for one family for a month or provide multiple housing subsidies.
She delivered letters to multiple city officials, written with the help of a community organizer, calling family homelessness “an urgent moral crisis.” Hillary Ronen, a Board of Supervisors member who pushed for the creation of the school shelter after learning children at the school were homeless, grew angry during the board hearing and said London Breed, the mayor of San Francisco, must do more.
“In the richest city in the richest country in the world, there are children sleeping on the streets,” she said. “What is the city going to do?”
Slowly, the family’s life began to improve.
The couple received work authorization papers. Ms. Solito was trained as a home health worker while Mr. Cruz found a job installing scaffolding that paid $25 an hour. Their church gave them an old, silver minivan, which they could use as long as they agreed to ferry around other shelter families. Their children began making friends and learning a little English, though Adriana struggled to learn the language because she is hard of hearing.
The younger children attended Mission Education Center, a public school that serves more than 100 Spanish-speaking newcomers.
The principal, Veronica Chavez, said that 40 percent of the students are homeless and that many have acute medical, dental and emotional issues from living in poverty and leaving behind their homes and extended families. The school once predominantly served children from Mexico, but it now has students from across Latin America.
“Honduras, Nicaragua, Peru,” Ms. Chavez said. “Venezuela, Colombia, even Costa Rica, which we hardly ever used to get.”
The school’s staff members are immigrants themselves, and they get outside help for students from some social service providers. But it is difficult, Ms. Chavez said, to serve as educators, clinicians and therapists all at once.
Over several months, Ms. Solito and her family grew close to the other migrants at the shelter, becoming extended family in a city where few of them had relatives.
They celebrated the twins’ 6th birthday together in January. Weeks later, Ms. Solito and Mr. Cruz decided to have a Catholic wedding ceremony in San Francisco. This would be different from the drab civil service version they had in El Salvador. This time, the family went to Ross Dress for Less, where they bought a white dress and heels for the bride and a dark suit for the groom. Ms. Solito got her hair ironed straight and clutched a bouquet of white roses.
St. Peter’s, a grand Catholic church in the Mission District, offers group wedding ceremonies, and Ms. Solito and Mr. Cruz were
among 15 couples who wed under soaring, purple stained-glass windows, as a band played Latin music from the balcony.
The couple spent their wedding night beside their children on the gym floor.
The political pressure paid off this summer.
The new city budget created by Ms. Breed, the mayor, includes $50 million over two years for emergency hotel vouchers and rent subsidies for 1,050 homeless families, the biggest such investment in several years, though much of the help will not be available for months.
Ms. Breed made a point of noting the funding was intended for all homeless families — not just migrant families, but also those who have long lived in the city and face their own crises such as domestic violence. The mayor herself grew up in poverty in San Francisco, raised by her grandmother in public housing racked with vermin and mold.
“While it is crucial to respond to newcomers, the city must also balance the existing demand,” Ms. Breed’s office said in a statement in the spring.
While the influx of migrants in other cities has spurred some resentment among local communities, that has not seemed to play out in liberal San Francisco. Nonprofit workers said they have not heard any complaints by local families that the newcomers are taking what should be theirs.
But plenty did not have the same remarkable stroke of luck as Ms. Solito.
After an entire school year spent living in the gymnasium, Ms. Solito and her family won big in the city housing lottery. They received a three-bedroom, subsidized apartment in a new affordable housing complex on the site of a former funeral home, for which they pay $800 a month. The city, which received nearly 10,000 applications for the 137-unit building, entered each applicant into a random, computerized lottery.
The lottery does not consider a family’s immigration status, but does prioritize those already living or working in San Francisco. Adriana’s hearing loss bumped the family up the priority list; the apartment is equipped with a fire alarm system that flashes bright lights in addition to blaring noise. Other families who were not so lucky must continue to wait, some of them at the Buena Vista shelter.
The family’s last night in the shelter was the Fourth of July.
Friends donated old furniture and “Dora the Explorer” bedspreads. The family scavenged items that were discarded on the street, including a large television.
“It’s a long way from thinking about living in the street. Finally, we are a part of San Francisco,” Ms. Solito said as she sat on her couch, stroking the family’s new Chihuahua, Mailon.
Rodrigo has started his freshman year at Galileo High School, the alma mater of Mayor Breed. The girls have transferred to a Catholic elementary school.
But their American dream is far from realized: The entire family is set to appear in immigration court on July 16, 2026.
The post They Slept on a Gym Floor Until They Won the Housing Lottery appeared first on New York Times.
