That is really ignoring the fact that people move to these cities with dreams and no plans, come from great falls Montana with money for a place to stay for one month, and then are homeless afterwards. Also, collecting statistics on homeless is notoriously noisy; eg in Seattle they did a survey that found most of the homeless lived in Seattle before they were homeless, but when asked where they lived, most put down pioneer square....

I found that fact surprising so I looked at that socketsite but their link to the original source is a dead link.

There is an issue with SF report (idk about LA one)

1) It was self-reported

2) "Lived in SF" in report meant they were SF residents and this is requires just any bill with city address within 30 days (consider cases like: moved to SF with hopes of better opportunities, out on the streets in couple of months - but sf resident for a short term prior).

Yes, but the details completely determine whether or not it is any good. A real right to shelter plus police action against homeless camps _could_ be reasonable, but if the police action is real and the right to shelter isn't, it becomes evil again.

So, I've never been homeless, but I do work in mental health. We see a lot of patients that are chronically homeless, and they view shelters as a place to dip into briefly when they have to show that they've got a physical shelter (so that we can do a "safe discharge"), and then promptly bounce. Some won't even make it to the shelter, and have their ride from the hospital pull over and let them out so that they can head out immediately.

There are caveats to be added to the above, but, I've never gotten the impression that our implementation of shelters has resulted in something people utilize in anything less than a crisis situation, for a population that doesn't consider "chronically homeless in the winter in a northern latitude" a crisis.

Yeah, same in Boston. We definitely have homeless people but they are usually polite-to-the-point-of-deferential to passers by — the complete opposite of SF.

There's a much more tolerant attitude towards drug use, we've got a milder climate, San Francisco specifically doesn't prosecute quality of life crimes, and it's significantly harder to commit someone against their will or mandate that they continue to use psychiatric medication.

Notice the comment on this thread about how in the poor areas it was unpleasant to get lunch? That attitude carries over. Starting with the fucking super bowl there was a very dramatic effort to shoo away the homeless people from where 'super bowl city' was. The net effect was a dispersal of homeless encampments the likes of which I've never seen. Combine that with stagnating wages at the low end and rising cost of living and you have a lot more people on the streets. Make no mistake, the homeless population in the whole of the Bay Area is growing dramatically.

Meanwhile in some "street photography" (but really mostly creep shots) group a couple people have been posting pictures of indigent folks from the 90s. The difference is pretty dramatic. From a friend who works for the city -- both meth and heroin have hit San Francisco very hard. The type of people that you see on the streets these days has changed.

San Francisco is also paralyzed by extremely aggressive NIMBYs. Shelters are at capacity, but the city's efforts to build more shelters (e.g. Embarcadero) are being battled by carpetbaggers. A while back the idea of "wet houses" was floated to get addicts off the streets (where folks will call 911 and tie up a large chunk of SFFD/paramedic resources). Of course that didn't go over well with the punishment first crowd.

New York is also facing record homelessness and is actually buying property to house homeless folks — San Francisco is…

It was the same for me. I was in Manhattan two years ago, and I was amazed with how much worse the problem is in SF.

This was a sharp contrast to the mid 1990s, when I lived in New York. I found aggressive panhandling to be more prevalent in NY than SF then, with panhandlers following me for blocks, approaching me at the counter of coffee shops (once crowding me as I attempted to get my change from the cashier, quickly picking up it up when I dropped it, and then asking me for it while holding it away from me).

I'm always a little skeptical about anecdotes, though, as the "homeless" population, ranging from non-addicted or mentally ill people who are temporarily without housing to severely addicted and mentally ill people engaging in criminal level harassment of people, often clusters in a few neighborhoods in a city, sometimes at the outskirts.

I met a man from Paris who refused to agree that San Francisco has a worse problem than Paris. He said that he believes that in Paris, the severe poverty is pushed out to the edges of the city. I don't know if this is true, or if he didn't want to criticize too much, but it is an interesting observation, at any rate.