They huddled in the cold on a graffiti-covered bench last November, twin girls dozing on their parents’ laps while older children buried their heads in their phones.
Most nights, the family of six waited like this outside the San Francisco school auditorium until it was converted into a homeless shelter. Once inside, they slept on a small patch of floor each night, then rose early each morning to take a place in one of the three showers shared by the 69 people. They had to leave by sunrise to return the school gym to its intended purpose.
Margarita Solito, 36, sometimes wondered if the 3,200-mile journey from El Salvador to San Francisco was worth it. The family left as international migrants, and now they were a different kind of migrant, wandering around their new city all day, with no place to call home.
A year after arriving in the city, Ms. Solito’s fight for housing will pay off, and her family will be able to put down roots. But their trip shed light on the larger crisis of family homelessness in San Francisco and revealed the daily uncertainty faced by hundreds of school children there.
Although receiving fewer migrants than other major cities, San Francisco was unprepared for the small, but stable, families who arrived, 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. That’s up from about 300 a year ago, and the city says much of the increase comes from migrant families who have come to San Francisco with nowhere to live. The figure rose despite a dramatic drop in border crossings since President Biden banned asylum claims in June.
In New York and Chicago, migration pressures have eased, in part because The state of Texas stopped sending buses there While border crossings slowed this summer. It’s not entirely clear why San Francisco didn’t see fewer arrivals, but perhaps buses from Texas never went to the northern California city.
School shelters in San Francisco still turn away a few families every day. Nonprofit workers and church groups still hear of families sleeping in vehicles, parks or bus shelters.
Mrs. Solito’s family was relatively fortunate in the end, although she did not feel that way during the school year. Ms. Solito said she was drawn to San Francisco in part because she heard it was a “sanctuary city” and that meant her family would have a physical home, not just legal protection.
Her dream was simple: a room, with a private bathroom, where her family could spend the day and store some of their belongings.
“We’re not the only family that’s practically on 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, Alison, 10, and Rodrigo, 14. They said they left El Salvador in January 2023 because Mr. Cruz, a deliveryman, had been held at gunpoint for years by gang members. .
The family stayed in Mexico so Mr. Cruz, 43, could work and fund his trip to Brownsville, Texas. Once they crossed the border, they were put on a bus to Los Angeles under a program created by Texas Governor Greg Abbott. Then an immigration nonprofit organization paid to fly them to San Francisco in August 2023.
With the help of a local Catholic church and a community organizer, the family headed to a very unusual shelter at Buena Vista Horace Mann, a school for students in kindergarten through eighth grade, a month after arriving in town.
In San Francisco public schools, 2,403 children are homeless, about 5 percent of the enrollment, according to the district’s most recent data. A third of them learn English.
Jacqueline Portillo said she helped found the shelter in 2018 because some of the school’s students were homeless and had nowhere to sleep. It is intended for short stays, but some families have stayed for months.
Ms. Portillo said she received six calls on a recent day alone from homeless migrant families, and had to turn them away.
“I cry all the time,” said Ms. Portillo, herself an immigrant from El Salvador. “Everything is full.”
The night after the door finally opened, Ms. Solito and her family curled up on a bench, sitting down to a dinner of rice, beans, chips and lettuce. Shelter staff used metal poles and blue curtains for the 23 families living in the gym. There was no privacy. There was no silence.
After dinner the families settled down on their sleeping mats. At 9 p.m., a shelter worker yelled, “Buenas Noches!” Families responded in kind by setting off an echo of bedtime greetings.
The lights went off. The same routine continued for months.
For many migrants, getting through each day is enough of a struggle. However, Ms. Solito felt she needed to do something more.
“I want to be a mentor to 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 per day for a school shelter when the same amount could have been paid for a basic hotel room with a private bathroom — keeping people out during the day. without extracting.
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 for a family to rent a large apartment for a month or multiple housing subsidies.
She delivered letters to multiple city officials, written with the help of a community organizer, calling the family’s homelessness an “urgent moral crisis.” Hilary Ronen, a member of the Board of Supervisors who pushed for the creation of the school shelter after learning that children at the school were homeless, became angry during the board hearing and said London Breed, the mayor of San Francisco, should have done more.
“In the richest city in the richest country in the world, children are sleeping on the streets,” she said. “What’s the city going to do?”
Gradually the life of the family began to improve.
The couple received work authorization papers. Ms. Solito was trained as a home health worker while Mr. Cruz got a job installing scaffolding that paid $25 an hour. His church gave him an old, silver minivan, which he agreed to ferry around other shelter families until he could use it. Their children began to make friends and learn some English, although Adriana struggled to learn the language because she is hard of hearing.
The younger children attended the Mission Education Center, a public school that served more than 100 Spanish-speaking newcomers.
The principal, Veronica Chavez, said 40 percent of the students are homeless and many have serious medical, dental and emotional problems from living in poverty and leaving their homes and extended families behind. The school once served mainly children from Mexico, but now has students from all over Latin America.
“Honduras, Nicaragua, Peru,” Ms. Chavez said. “Venezuela, Colombia, even Costa Rica, which we rarely get.”
The school’s staff members are immigrants themselves, and they receive outside help for students from some social service providers. But it is difficult, Ms. Chavez said, to serve as teachers, therapists and therapists simultaneously.
Over several months, Ms. Solito and her family grew closer to other migrants at the shelter, becoming an extended family in a town where they had few 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 will be different from the drab civil service version they have in El Salvador. This time, the family went for less in Ross Dress, where they bought a white dress and heels for the bride and a dark suit for the groom. Ms. Solito straightened her hair and held a bouquet of white roses.
St. Peter’s, an elegant Catholic church in the Mission District, offers mass wedding ceremonies, and Ms. Solito and Mr. Cruz were
Among the 15 couples who got married under purple stained glass windows, as a band played Latin music from the balcony.
The couple spent their wedding night on the gym floor next to their children.
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 largest such investment in several years, although most of the help will not be available for months. .
Ms. Breed noted that the funding was intended for all homeless families — not just migrant families, but also those who have lived in the city for a long time and are dealing with their own crisis, such as domestic violence. Meyer himself grew up in poverty in San Francisco, raised by his grandmother in vermin- and mold-infested public housing.
“While responding to newcomers is critical, the city must also balance existing demand,” Ms. Breed’s office said in a statement in the spring.
While in other cities the influx of immigrants has sparked some resentment in local communities, that has not been the case in liberal San Francisco. Non-profit workers said they have heard no complaints from local families that the newcomers are taking what should be theirs.
But plenty didn’t have the same remarkable stroke of luck as Ms. Solito.
After spending an entire school year in the gymnasium, Ms. Solito and his family won big in the city housing lottery. They found 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 gives priority to people who already live or work in San Francisco. Adriana’s hearing loss moved the family up the priority list; The apartment is equipped with a fire alarm system that flashes bright lights in addition to a screeching sound. Other families who weren’t so lucky must wait, some of them at the Buena Vista shelter.
The family’s last night at the shelter was the Fourth of July.
Friends donated old furniture and “Dora the Explorer” bedspreads. The family scavenged discarded items on the street, including a large television.
“Thinking about living on the street is far-fetched. Finally, we are a part of San Francisco,” Ms. Solito said as she sat on her bed, stroking the family’s new Chihuahua, Malone.
Rodrigo begins his freshman year at Galileo High School, Meyer Breed’s alma mater. The girls have transferred to a Catholic primary school.
But their American dream is far from realized: the entire family is scheduled to appear in immigration court on July 16, 2026.
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