San Francisco kept tens of millions in annual funding flowing to HomeRise — one of the city's largest operators of permanent supportive housing — long after its own auditors and nonprofit monitors had flagged the organization, even as women inside its buildings said a case manager was sexually harassing and assaulting vulnerable residents without consequence.

A joint investigation by the San Francisco Chronicle and UC Berkeley's Investigative Reporting Program, published this week, details allegations against Salesh "Sal" Prasad, a celebrated figure in the city's homelessness-advocacy world. But the deeper story is one The Dissent has tracked across the city's nonprofit sector: even when San Francisco's own oversight machinery — a Controller's audit, a nonprofit-monitoring watchlist, a Civil Grand Jury — is flashing red, the contracts and the public dollars keep flowing. The department that polices HomeRise reports to Mayor Daniel Lurie, and the city attorney has opened an inquiry into the nonprofit.

San Francisco kept tens of millions in annual funding flowing to HomeRise — one of the city's largest operators of permanent supportive housing — long after its own auditors and nonprofit monitors had flagged the organization, even as women inside its buildings said a case manager was sexually harassing and assaulting vulnerable residents without consequence.

The allegations against Salesh "Sal" Prasad, laid out this week in a joint investigation by the San Francisco Chronicle and UC Berkeley's Investigative Reporting Program, land on a man who had become a celebrated figure in San Francisco's homelessness-advocacy community after narrowly avoiding deportation upon his 2021 prison release. But they also expose what critics call the city's recurring failure: an inability to hold social-service nonprofits to account even when its own auditors and monitors have already sounded the alarm. The department responsible for overseeing HomeRise and the city's other supportive housing providers reports directly to Mayor Daniel Lurie, and the city attorney's office has opened an investigation into the organization.

Prasad's biography reads like a redemption script tailored for San Francisco. Raised around gang culture in Modesto, he was convicted of murder in his early 20s and served decades in prison before being granted parole in 2021 at nearly 50. Immigration agents detained him the day of his release and moved to deport him to Fiji, the country he had left as a 6-year-old. He became a cause célèbre; advocates and city officials rallied to his defense, he avoided deportation, and this April a short documentary about his turnaround screened at an international film festival.

He took a job at HomeRise as a case manager, working directly with formerly homeless tenants. Inside the buildings where he worked, the Chronicle and UC Berkeley reporters found a far darker account.

Complaints that reached managers — and stopped there

The accounts the Chronicle gathered are not the story of a single missed warning. Eight people — five former HomeRise employees and three residents — described pushing their concerns up the chain over roughly two years, in conversations with supervisors and in emails that left a paper trail. What they reported escalated from repeated harassment to sexual assault. Several said that Prasad, while on duty, propositioned residents and colleagues for sex and offered cash, drugs, or food donated for the nonprofit's clients in exchange.

What HomeRise did next, according to the investigation, is the heart of the accountability question. After a resident at its Treasure Island site reported in 2023 that Prasad had sexually assaulted her, the organization treated her psychiatric history as reason to set the complaint aside — and then gave Prasad a fresh placement. He kept his case-manager title and moved to Jazzie Collins, one of HomeRise's newest South of Market buildings, where, residents and staff told the Chronicle, the same conduct followed him.

Prasad, who no longer works at HomeRise, denied the reporting in a text message to the Chronicle. "These disturbing accusations are all false," he wrote. "I am proud of my work as a case manager, helping people who are formerly homeless or who struggle with substance use, mental health, and severe trauma. I met every challenge with professionalism, treated the people I served and my colleagues with respect, and left HomeRise on good terms."

The city's own paper trail

None of this unfolded outside the city's view. HomeRise operates close to a third of San Francisco's city-funded supportive housing units; an April 2024 audit by the Controller's Office, first reported by The San Francisco Standard, found "gross mismanagement" and wasteful spending — six-figure bonuses, raises of 20 percent or more, and more than $6 million in vacancy losses — across a four-year window. As of late 2022, the city's loans, subsidies, and grant agreements with the nonprofit topped $240 million across 19 properties. "No matter the extenuating circumstances, HomeRise had an obligation to ensure public funds were managed appropriately," Controller Greg Wagner said when the audit was released.

The warnings did not stop with the audit. The city's 2025–26 Civil Grand Jury, in a report titled "At Scale, At Risk," examined the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing's oversight failures and described the Controller's "tier 3" monitoring designation — the watchlist tier the Chronicle reported HomeRise has carried for much of the past two and a half years — as "equivalent to a flashing red light, signaling that the controller perceives a significant risk to public funds and client services." This spring, as Chronicle reporters were already examining a separate episode — a HomeRise resident found dead and decomposing in his unit nearly two weeks after he was last seen — the city attorney's office disclosed it had opened a formal investigation. HomeRise's CEO has since announced plans to step down.

Accountability under Lurie

The agency that oversees supportive housing providers like HomeRise answers to Mayor Lurie, and this is not the first city-funded nonprofit to draw scrutiny on his watch. The Dissent has documented the Dream Keeper Initiative scandal, the MEDA bailout-and-layoffs episode, and self-dealing allegations in Fillmore public housing — a pattern that points to oversight machinery that is either under-resourced or slow to act, even as it stamps "severe concern" on the organizations it funds.

With the city attorney's investigation underway and HomeRise's CEO on the way out, the question now falls to the Lurie administration: how does a nonprofit its own auditors and monitors flagged for years keep its public contracts — and keep vulnerable residents exposed to conditions the city's own records show were not safe?