You still have to hopscotch over human feces. And now you have to hopscotch over the people who have been pushed out of their homes, too.
A lot of the homelessness in SF is not visible. You see the ranting person in the street off their meds, but not the families who are in and out of shelters.
https://sfgov.org/lhcb/sites/default/files/2015%20San%20Fran...
Obviously higher rents are making it harder to get out of homelessness (and the survey acknowledges that many times), but they are not the reason most of the chronic homeless ended up being homeless in the first place, by their own account: "Nearly one-third of chronically homeless respondents reported alcohol or substance abuse as the primary cause of their homelessness; this was in contrast to 14% among non-chronic respondents. Fewer chronically homeless respondents reported economic factors as the primary cause of their homelessness. For example, 19% reported job loss as a primary cause compared to 27% of non-chronic respondents."
According to the survey (same pages), the chronically homeless are less likely to be in shelters and accept government assistance than the general homeless population. They therefore comprise a significant number of the homeless seen on the streets.
Also, according to the survey, among the chronically homeless in San Francisco, there were only 18 families in 2015 (page 50).
And let's not sugar coat it. Some are mentally ill, but many others have serious drug/alcohol addictions. You only need to stroll through the Tenderloin or Civic Center at any time of day to see that first hand.
But read the SF survey linked twice in this thread. It's got lots of actual answers. The homeless you see on the street are not really representative of the problem. There's a bigger population of precariously housed people who cycle in and out of homelessness.
28% said no permanent address
20% said alcohol or drug use
17% said disability
14% said age
13% said need for clothing/shower facilities
...
9% said mental health concerns
Source: https://sfgov.org/lhcb/sites/default/files/2015%20San%20Fran...
Many people will deny their circumstances because they are mentally ill and don't realize it, or are simply in denial, or because they think they will get more help if they hide their problems.
From what I've read, at the national level the incidence of serious mental illness in the homeless population are around 20 - 25%. So the numbers for San Francisco seem reasonable.
There's another option - we can not rely on self-reporting and just acknowledge that we don't know. It's not satisfying, but it sucks less than creating public policy based on bad/misleading information. I doubt very much we can fix 28% of homelessness by handing out free PO boxes.
It's literally like any other disease. We don't know how many people actually get the flu every year. We only know how many people self-report getting the flu, and how many people seek treatment. Self-reported surveys are used all the time in epidemiology and we manage to form effective public policy based on that.
So sure, there's definite bias when it comes to self-reporting, but your suggestion is to ignore what data we do have and form public policy based on what? How you feel? First principles?
I genuinely would like to see that.
Homeless people move to SF (and California in general) because it's relatively rich and temperate and tolerates homeless people crowding thoroughfares and shitting on the streets.
How is this claim "malicious"?
The reason I call it malicious is that it serves a Malthusian argument where doing more to help the homeless will just attract more homeless people to San Francisco, so we might as well not do anything.