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San Francisco lawmakers just ordered that the city secure more than 8,000 hotel rooms for the city’s homeless population to better protect them from the coronavirus pandemic.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors — which has repeatedly expressed frustration with Mayor London Breed’s approach to housing issues during the pandemic — unanimously approved the emergency ordinance Tuesday. The rooms, which the mayor has less than two weeks to reserve, can also be taken up by frontline workers.

San Francisco has already relocated hundreds of homeless people to hotel rooms and contracted thousands more. But advocates and lawmakers argue the criteria to get a room has been far too limited — favoring those who had tested positive for COVID-19, the elderly, and immunocompromised — and far too slow. More than 8,000 homeless people primarily sleep outdoors in San Francisco and typically only get a warm bed if they choose to stay at a crowded shelter, where social distancing isn’t possible. The city’s largest shelter is also currently experiencing an outbreak.

“This is the public health disaster we have warned about every day for the last month. It was entirely avoidable, but the Mayor was more interested in being tough with homeless people than preventing this explosion in COVID-19 cases. The results are tragic,” Supervisor Dean Preston, said in a tweet Friday, when it was announced that 68 homeless people at the shelter had tested positive.

Preston even personally funded hotel rooms for the homeless himself.

This week, San Francisco recorded a fast-growing outbreak among at least 90 residents at MSC South, the largest “congregate” shelter in San Francisco with approximately 340 nightly guests, according to the Guardian. Advocates continue to demand that cities across California provide hotel rooms for all homeless people before the outbreaks become widespread, and a newly formed organization, No Vacancy CA, plans to personally check homeless people into hotels in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, and Oakland Wednesday.

Breed has cautioned that the hotel rooms aren’t easy to coordinate on a large scale. Before moving people to the rooms, the city has to ensure there’s enough staff and security to care for them. Up until last week, her administration was planning to push nearly 400 homeless people to a large, impromptu shelter in the Moscone Convention Center, though that plan was quashed in favor of more hotel rooms after outrage from the supervisors.

Cover image: Pedestrians walk to the edge of the sidewalk to avoid stepping on people in tents and sleeping bags on Monday, April 13, 2020, in the tenderloin area of San Francisco. (AP Photo/Ben Margot)