The number of people sleeping outdoors dropped to under 3,000 in January, the lowest the city has recorded in a decade, according to a federal count.
And that figure has likely dropped even lower since Mayor London Breed — a Democrat in a difficult reelection fight this November — started ramping up enforcement of anti-camping laws in August following a U.S. Supreme Court decision.
Homelessness in no way has gone away, and in fact grew 7%, to 8,300 in January, according to the same federal count.
But the problem is now notably out of the public eye, raising the question of where people have gone and whether the change marks a turning point in a crisis long associated with San Francisco.
Tracking homeless people is extremely difficult and where all the people once living on San Francisco’s streets have gone is impossible to know.
We all know where they went. Oakland and Richmond.
Don’t forget Sacramento. I hate the sweeping under the rug without fixing the problems.
Sacramento?
That sounds like the best possible solution, send them to the state capital so the state actually has to deal with them.
Honestly makes sense. As messed up as it sounds, it 100% must be cheaper for the city to offer a bus ticket out of town than to actually address why people are homeless. Capitalism is an asshole.
Not just capitalism. Also NIMBYism.
Homelessness in no way has gone away, and in fact grew 7%, to 8,300 in January, according to the same federal count.
Oh, good, who needs to address a problem when you can ignore it?
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This isn’t a partizan issue, just like immigration, Democrats are fucking horrible on homelessness too.
So why is the number at a decade low under a democratic mayor???
How are you in the comment thread of an article that says homeless camping is at decade low, with a Democrat in charge, and saying the Democrats don’t care?
I guess you’re just that dense.
And that figure has likely dropped even lower since Mayor London Breed — a Democrat in a difficult reelection fight this November — started ramping up enforcement of anti-camping laws in August following a U.S. Supreme Court decision.
The mayor isn’t helping the homeless. He is driving them away so they can be someone else’s problem.
Wouldn’t be surprised if they also changed the definition of homeless
Many were driven there in the first place from cities like Las Vegas. The truth is California has been investing in temporary shelters and tiny home communities. It’s more than I’ve seen in other states
She.
Whoops, thought it was Landon.
She. And part of her platform as mayor is a massive increase in homeless shelter beds, specifically to get homeless people off the streets and into safer environments.
So… She’s actively not “driving them away,” near as I can tell.
Aside from lots of blue state tax dollars that feasibility could be spend on homelessness and other infrastructure projects subsidize red states.
And any truly effective solutions can’t be at the city or state level, else homeless folks will migrate there for a better life, thus overwhelming the local system. It has to be federal. That means republicans get to shoot it down yet again, with how tight congress is.
Republicans simply want to push the problem into other communities. Half of the Democrats want to do the same. There are a good chunk of faux progressive politicians that recognize a grift opportunity and then get money funneled to NGOs that have no oversight. But there is at least a small percentage of Democratic politicians wanting to actually solve the problem. In my county, the county bought up several hotels/motels and are housing a couple thousand homeless. In LA, they did something similar except they gave the money to an NGO that was supposed to buy up hotels and make them usable by the homeless. Instead, the NGO decided it would be a good idea to also borrow a bunch of money also to purchase the properties, couldn’t repay the loan and then the properties were repossessed and house zero homeless.
Dang, man. I was making a joke! 😮😬🙊
I never realized how Orange the thumbs up was…
Ah yes, the Covid strategy employed by many.
I mean,
How do you read the article, see that the number of people sleeping outside is as low as it’s been in a decade, dropped from a number that was increasing, and then say nothing is being done about it?
Your gymnastics are of the type brought to the Olympics by the Russian team.
Homelessness in no way has gone away, and in fact grew 7%, to 8,300 in January, according to the same federal count.
Then YOUR gymnastics are at the Russian elite spy level in a Bond movie.
The story goes on to say that numbers are incredibly hard to count, they’ve put a lot of work into what is supposed to be transitional shelter (single occupant units, repurposed hotels, etc), and work is ongoing to make these transitional housing options truly transitional by working toward affordable housing options in/around the city. Part of the solution is to get people off the “street”, but there’s more work to be done to ensure there are options for those who can’t use the current temporary housing (due to drug use, breaking the housing rules, not comfortable with the mandatory checks, etc). Also still work to be done to, like one person in the story mentioned, ensure that this temporary housing is indeed transitional and not permanent. Their funding is less this year so there’s concern the progress being made will be difficult to improve upon.
San Francisco has increased the number of shelter beds and permanent supportive housing units by more than 50% over the past six years.
Read the article before commenting next time.
You skipped the “and permanent housing units” part of my comment. Shelters are a step to getting off the street. They give homeless access to information and resources to improve their position. It is in no way “ignoring the problem” like you claim. Short of singlehandedly solving poverty, what do you expect a mayor to do?
Shelters are not permanent living accommodations. They don’t let you stay in them long-term. On top of that, everything from just basic theft to sexual assault happens in shelters.
Also, if you have a dog, you can’t bring the dog with you. If you’re a woman alone on the streets, having a dog around to protect you is a pretty good idea.
So increasing the number of shelter beds doesn’t do shit. Permanent housing units, fine. But touting shelters is just bullshit.
The article specifically describes the housing options that are single-occupant with doors that lock and accommodation for pets. They are also working on solutions for couples to help keep them together where possible. It’s not ideal, and it’s not a permanent fix, but they interviewed someone that’s staying in the safe, clean, cabins while attending a 2 year college program to get a better paying job.
There is definitely more that the state could be doing as a whole, but they are investing a lot of money into programs and housing with free or heavily subsidized rent to help people get back on their feet. The article specifically mentioned a model where “rent” costs 30% of the resident’s income and the rest is covered by a rental assistance program.
“We’re seeing much cleaner sidewalks,” said Terry Asten Bennett, owner of Cliff’s Variety store in the city’s historically gay Castro neighborhood, adding that she hates to see homeless people shuffled around.
Caring more about how it ‘looks’ than how unhoused people are surviving is peak 21st century bs.
I get your point, but the owner is just making an observation and even says they hate seeing people shuffled around in your quote.
Gotta clear the encampment location for the incoming waves of foreclosure homeless people!
They’re all turning up where I live across the bay
From my time with a county government: homeless tend to cycle between being within municipal city limits, unincorporated county, and state/federal lands like Dept of Transportation lots with highway overpasses and such.
Shuffling between jurisdictions keeps legal proceedings ever going anywhere.
That’s it exactly, move them around like whackamole.
They probably are doing what a lot of places in the country do and just bus the homeless people out of their city and send them to another.
That’s how they all ended up in SF in the first place.
This is so sick. Instead of doing something about the rising homelessness problem, they just shoo them away so rich people don’t have to see them anymore. Making life even harder for those who already have it rough.
Way to kick the one laying on the ground.
Eh. Using public well used spaces as your own personal living space is selfish and disrespectful of everyone else. You got a tent, go out and live in the woods.
There is no reason to be in the city if you’re homeless other than access to drugs.
Or doctors. Or jobs. Or grocery stores.
You’d be surprised how many homeless or car bound are employed.
There is no reason to be in the city if you’re homeless other than access to drugs.
Unless you are homeless and unemployed. Which is a thing. Especially in cities with ridiculously high rent like SF.
You can’t really think that all the homeless people in cities are drug addicts.
Using public well used spaces as your own personal living space is selfish and disrespectful of everyone else.
Tell that to every person parking their car in public. It’s an insane waste of space and massive subsidy to the already privileged. We give free/cheap rent to cars EVERYWHERE but far far less for actual humans.
If we ban cars, we would probably double the amount of land available housing. Not to mention the benefits in terms of imperialism, pollution, violence, equity, wastefulness, etc.
Eh. Using public well used spaces as your own personal living space is selfish and disrespectful of everyone else.
Hopefully you support a ban on private vehicles then? Special big trucks and SUVs.
Aren’t you a peach. I hope your username stands for Dick-karma and I hope that karma of being a dick comes back to you tenfold.
I pity you. People like you don’t deserve pity but I pity you regardless.
How DARE people not respect others’ right to live in hell without resources of any kind!
Leaving them to play fortnite in ditches isn’t better than actually trying to do anything, you just think it is because then they aren’t your responsibility.
Do you have any idea how many homeless die daily in those encampments? No clean water, no medical care, violence.
And while 90-95% are just trying to survive, the last 5-10% are often violent, and brutalize the others.
If you want to designate zones and have some form of law enforcement around to deal with the bad ones, great, but your argument is to put them in a big pot, with some truly violent ones, and just pretend everything is OK.
Where is your pity? Oh, it’s not your problem, you’re blessing them with their freedom to suffer out of your sight.
Despite your wacky description of how you imagine being unhoused…
I’m pretty sure people want to stay where they’re living rather than being violently attacked, evicted, and disappeared.
They want to stay in their dirty ditch rather than: https://kdow.biz/news/national/more-shelter-beds-and-a-crackdown-on-tents-mean-fewer-homeless-encampments-in-sa/c5dad968b8fafaab83b51433a204c9ea
I’m glad you know they would rather stay in filth than actually have a clean, private space.
You’re not from California, I’m fairly sure you’re not American either.
I am a Californian, and am not able to read your linked source because there is no option out of their cookie settings.
Also those shelters have been closing during the middle of the day “because of high heat” for the last month here in San Diego. They also aren’t what I would consider to be remotely “clean.”
Housing first is the way to go, we have 50 years of various studies that prove this. Shelters pretty much only help the people that own them.
“The only thing in a city is drugs”
I hope you never become homeless.
Or maybe I hope you do, just enough so that you can understand what those people are going through.
There is no reason to be in the city if you’re homeless other than access to drugs.
And access to literally everything else, which is why most people live in cities. Drugs are also very common in rural areas because young people have nothing better to do and there’s lots of open space to manufacture them.
I’m certainly not a fan of people pitching tents on sidewalks, but let’s at least stick to legitimate arguments.
In a podcast docu-series, a woman qualified for free housing and was afraid to take it. She had mobility issues and someone in her unhoused community fetched her prescriptions. She was afraid of not being able to get medication. Now imagine how that feels losing your support system and still sleeping outside.
There’s a popular idea that homeless people don’t want homes.
I’m sure that’s true in isolated cases, but I don’t know if it’s generally true.
Yeah I think that normally boils down to a choice of having condescending assholes run your life and force you to jump through endless difficult hoops while massively restricting your life where they take away everything that helps (including pets, relationships, etc) then when people don’t want to put up with that the system washes its hands and says ‘see, they want to he homeless!’
It’s like someone telling you that if you don’t eat the chips they’ve pissed on you don’t ever want to eat again.
Sure there are people and groups that do want to live in a van or moving between worksites, friends and camps but generally they’re not often counted as homeless because they have a postal address (family, friends, or work) through which they’re registered - my brother would technically fall into this as he lives undocumented and illegally in a caravan behind his workplace but is legally registered at our parents, if he didn’t have somewhere to register his bank account, etc then he’d be classed as homeless though that’s verry different to being a ‘rough sleeper’
But yeah if the question asked was ‘do you want a safe and comfortable place to sleep where you’re allowed to live your own life’ then you’ll get a different response to ‘would you like to go to a kind of prison but it’s less safe, more annoying, and we’re taking your dog away, your gf or friends can’t come over, etc etc etc…’
SF has been trying to solve the problem your way for 20 years and it’s only gotten worse.
Incredibly incorrect. SF has done less than nothing to solve the problem for 20 years, and is shocked when doing nothing did nothing.
I guess you’ve never lived in or even bothered to research SF at all. That’s the only possible way you could make such a wildly, ridiculously wrong statement. San Francisco has spent a BILLION DOLLARS on homelessness. Billion.
Per year, for the last several years.
What a ridiculous lie. “Done nothing”. Christ, a single Google search would prove you wrong. That’s a “the sky is yellow” level of absurd lie. It’s insulting.
Spending money while not doing Anything any research group has ever recommended is the same as doing nothing. They’ve spent a billion on 1930s era “solutions” that make conservative liberals feel like theyve accomplished things while doing literally not one thing to actually solve the causes of homelessness. If they spent a million on new city owned no rent housing, that would be more than the entirety of all their other projects combined.
If they spent a million on new city owned no rent housing
…they would get laughed out of the room? That barely buys a single condo in an existing building in SF.
If they did literally nothing else, and ignored all the people who overdose and die of exposure and end up sick etc etc…just did absolutely nothing and saved their budget for 10 years, MAYBE they could approach a partnership to THINK about breaking ground on a single building. Which would take 20 years to build.
Building new homes is just such an expensive approach that it’s not worth considering in SF.
That’s possibly the dumbest take.
Oh yeah? Why?
… a major london breed is running the city? :|
Living on the Southern Atlantic seaboard here, a lot of our homeless are from New Jersey and Maryland… usually get a big wave of them come winter; local governments in the northeast shipping them down so they don’t die from exposure in the colder months.
They could put them all in Sausalito and Bay Farm. That would precipitate a solution quickly, I’m sure.
Similar thing going on in Seattle.
Yeah, I’ve been wondering about that… any theories?
Sweeps by police mostly. Lots in jail, others pushed to suburbs (especially since they combined the Seattle homelessness initiatives with king county resources), and a few put in temporary housing.
I just went to Dreamforce last week and was told they push the tents further away from the conference while it’s happening.
I don’t know what it looked like before but there are still PLENTY of homeless in San Francisco and it’s very sad to see.
Saw the same thing in Hollywood last year, Walk of Fame was clear, but man, one block after it ended, tents everywhere.
Dreamforce has always paid San Francisco a ton of money to block off entire streets around Moscone Center. There was no way the city would allow a speck of dirt or homeless people within walking distance of the area. You drift out of the zone, though, and reality comes crashing down.
