Even when cities do undertake to provide services rather than shifting costs, their capacity to provide those services is only a tiny fraction of the national demand. And it's functionally a national or at least regional market because the homeless tend to be a very mobile population due to lack of fixed housing or employment. So you get cities like Portland, OR, where they provide extensive services, but the downtown areas where the services are located have been inundated with homeless people, which has been extremely detrimental to businesses in the area, has strained public safety resources, and damaged the quality of life of many local residents (eg a couple years ago a homeless man made a tent home on the sidewalk outside my apartment and then would scream at the top of his lungs for hours every night for months, making it impossible to sleep, presumably because of some mental illness).

In some ways, it makes zero sense for San Francisco to spend any money at all on the homeless, because it's one the most expensive places in the nation that we could be housing and providing assistance to the homeless population. But homeless people have rights, including the freedom to travel where they want. So they will continue to be attracted to cities that treat them well, at a disproportionate expense to locals (who ironically tend to be the ones most sympathetic to their need), while NIMBYists contribute nothing and experience no detriment. While also generating homeless people at the same rate as the more welcoming areas.

All of which is to say that we need some national policy here, otherwise a few cities will continue to shoulder the burden while most will skate along as free riders. A functioning mental health system would be incredibly helpful, for example, because then mental health services wouldn't be limited to a few locations.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/S-F-spends-recor...

But it's from 2016 so it probably grew since then. A lot of the money goes to social housing towards 'ex' homeless people.

$275M last year, $305M this year. Absolutely no accountability for the spend and no metrics to figure out if it's actually doing anything. It's a complete waste of money.

If you give them the money then all the money goes to the people it's supposed to help and there is no cut for the middle men. But the middle men are the ones with the ability to successfully lobby for programs to exist.

It's the same sort of thing as low income housing subsidies. Landlords lobby for them because they pretend to address high rents when their actual result is to keep rents high. Or even increase rents by stimulating demand without increasing supply.

I mean, if in City A the cops hassle homeless people and the only support offered is bus tickets to other cities, while City B offers good support and humane policing, I'd take the bus ticket from A to B - who wouldn't?