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Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

("in San Francisco") From 2005 to 2020 the estimated number of unsheltered homeless people nearly doubled, even as homelessness declined nationwide.

One possible explanation: California has become the dumping ground for the nation's homeless population.

We have a nationwide shortage of housing. Both in person and online, I continue to hear homeless people plan to move someplace relatively warm and dry while stuck on the streets.

California is on a short list of states with dry weather and the weather there is more temperate than, say, Nevada or Arizona. You can die in the extreme heat of summer in some of the dry states.

I don't think the mess in San Francisco is entirely due to local policies. I think the nation as a whole needs substantially more affordable housing.

View on HN

The author argues that housing prices are not a significant factor:

"Throughout it, they emphasized that the homeless were just like you and me, just poorer. Today, many of California’s leading homelessness advocates insist that the current crisis is due mostly to the housing shortage. Homelessness experts and advocates disagree.

'I’ve rarely seen a normal able-bodied able-minded non-drug-using homeless person who’s just down on their luck,” L.A. street doctor Susan Partovi told me. “Of the thousands of people I’ve worked with over 16 years, it’s like one or two people a year. And they’re the easiest to deal with.'” [1]

[1] https://www.studentnewsdaily.com/editorials-for-students/why...

> I’ve rarely seen a normal able-bodied able-minded non-drug-using homeless person who’s just down on their luck

This right here. Nearly all homeless I've worked with were non-neuronormative and/or drug abusers. They're almost never just normal folks who have fallen on hard times. The reason they aren't rooming with a family member or friend is because their behavioral outbursts and/or stealing things to buy drugs has exhausted all the goodwill of those who would help them.

Author and journalist Sam Quinones hypotesizes in his book, The Least of Us, that a significant part of the increase in homelessness is due to a change in methamphetamine quality.

Prior to about 2010, meth was manufactured in Mexico using high quality precursors. The government cracked down on imports, and cartels started using a much more dirty P2P manufacturing methods, which is anecdotally associated with vastly higher levels of disruptive psychosis.

He talked about it in an episode of Econ Talk.

https://www.econtalk.org/sam-quinones-on-meth-fentanyl-and-t...

It’s an interesting theory but P2P meth was the standard meth prior to ephedrine being used in the 90’s.

Did we see the same level of homelessness back then?

In this telling, there's also a huge increase in supply since then- 1980s biker meth was relatively artisinal, but the current situation involves large and professional factories in Mexico.

True, but at least in the 60’s and 70’s most stimulants were legitimate medications. Amphetamine, dextroamphetamine and methamphetamine were widely prescribed and diverted into illegal channels.

There was a “scourge” of truckers taking uppers and driving all night. Stimulant use was really rampant across all social classes. Use decreased when prescriptions were cut off, then meth resurged in the 90’s.

And the other data point is methamphetamine use is the drug of choice in much of Asia. But you don’t see anywhere near the social problems you do in the US.

This is completely anecdotal, but contemporary accounts of the Haight Ashbury following the Summer of Love tell the story of a movement that started out on acid, moved on to speed, and became far more violent and filled with squalor because of it. Much like what is happening today.

“[1] Even among drug-using Haight-Ashbury subcultures, the high-dose methamphetamine abuser was marginalized, but became increasingly visible and unavoidable because of violence associated with dealing methamphetamine and because of the users' hyperactivity and paranoia.”

1.https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02791072.2011.58...

Good question and frankly idk.

Could be that that biker meth was also as bad. Could be differences in recipes/precursors/equipment as p2p can be made from hundreds of different ingredients.

I wonder if there are data sets tracking drug impurities that could test the hypothesis.

Worked with in what capacity?

Became friends with a number of homeless, bought them meals, gave them money, gave them clothing, heard their life stories in their own words, etc. There used to be a lot near where I used to live.

How did you meet? On the street? At a shelter? Most homeless people are homeless under a year in the US. Many have jobs. Many sleep on couches not streets. Or in cars not shelters. And they try to avoid the stigma of homelessness.

> Most homeless people are homeless under a year in the US

Source?

> Many have jobs

Source?

> How did you meet? On the street?

Yes, and a few did indeed have cars and sleep in cars.

Agencies and researchers talk about 2 or 3 kinds of homelessness. Longer than 1 year is chronic.[1] 120,323 of 580,466 homeless people counted were chronically homeless in January 2020.[2]

I don't think the number with jobs is tracked nationally. 10% of unsheltered people in San Diego said they were currently employed or attending school.[3] Another 11% were unemployed under 6 months. In New York City 16% of single adults in shelters had jobs.[4] 28% of families had at least 1 working adult. And people with jobs spend less time in shelters or on the street of course. Maybe none if they can afford a cheap hotel room.

You meet who you meet on the street because people with somewhere else to be are somewhere else.

[1] https://guildservices.org/the-different-types-of-homelessnes...

[2] https://files.hudexchange.info/reports/published/CoC_PopSub_...

[3] https://www.rtfhsd.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2018-WPoin...

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/18/nyregion/in-new-york-havi...

> They're almost never just normal folks who have fallen on hard times

Why do those have to be two distinct types of people? It seems to me that normal people who fall on hard times might have a tendency to become "non-neuronormative and/or drug abusers"? I wonder how strong that conversion is.

Able bodied able minded homeless people prefer clinic doctors in my experience.

What if part of the reason they got hooked on drugs was they were down on their luck 8-15 years ago, and she's only seeing the end result of chronic drug abuse? There's a high correlation between low SES and ice use. I know of three ice users in my broader circle and they're all very very poor but don't otherwise have mental health issues. Her impressions as a field doctor are useful but I am sceptical and this needs more rigorous study.

Exactly. While I think there is an argument to be made that many of SF's/California's policies are counterproductive (e.g. treating all theft < $900 as a misdemeanor), blaming SF without looking at the nationwide policies is cheap, lazy journalism.

The same thing is happening in Austin. As a liberal city in Texas with relatively homeless-friendly policies, it was been well-documented that many rural areas in Texas are giving their homeless one-way bus tickets to Austin.

So we're left with the dilemma that relatively liberal cities have their homeless problems blamed on their policies, when a fairer criticism is just that these liberal policies attract homeless to their locales.

Without a national or at least comprehensive state-wide solution for homelessness, this will be a difficult problem to solve.

The $900 felony rule keeps being brought up on HN, but the felony amount for Texas is $2500.

Clearly something other than the misdemeanor/felony classification is at play.

Stealing in Texas is a significantly riskier proposition than stealing from someone in California.

Especially burglary. The scariest stories of post-Chesa SF for my money are the home invasion ones when the owners/tenants are present in the home. Burglaries in Texas don’t happen unless the thief is 100% certain nobody is home.

Got any links on such incidents?

Here are some links:

https://abc7news.com/san-francisco-crime-armed-robbery-sf-da...

https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/woman-robbed-at-gunpoint...

https://www.ktvu.com/video/643073

https://sfist.com/2021/07/11/66-year-old-san-francisco-resid...

https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/tag/home-invasion-robbery/ for the general category of home invasion. I think that's the technical difference, for anyone googling - robbery when you aren't home, invasion when residents are present.

Burglaries in Texas definitely have people present and I personally recall multiple rapes and murders happening this way when I lived there. Home invasions even a tag on this Dallas news site.

https://dfw.cbslocal.com/tag/home-invasion/

To be clear “home invasion” is Burglary with people present https://www.merriam-webster.com/legal/home%20invasion)

The difference is that Chesa Boudin, SF's DA, won't prosecute those misdemeanors (and often won't even prosecute felonies).

> “We will not prosecute cases involving quality-of-life crimes,” the DA, Chesa Boudin, said in an interview while he was campaigning for office. “Crimes such as public camping, offering or soliciting sex, public urination, blocking a sidewalk, etc., should not and will not be prosecuted.” Despite that — or maybe because of it — he was elected. [1]

> The initiative set a threshold of $950 for shoplifting to be considered a misdemeanor, which doesn't prompt law enforcement to make an arrest, rather than a felony, which could incur harsh penalties like jail time. "Some people calculate, 'Hey, you know, I don't want to go over the $950, so let me steal $949 worth of property,'" Scott said. "If it's a felony, our officers can take action," he added. "But if it's a misdemeanor, that arrest has to be a private person's arrest. And that makes a difference because they have to be willing to do that." [2]

[1] https://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/559465-the-litt...

[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/after-san-francisco-sho...

Please indicate on the crime rate graph the point at which Chesa Boudin was elected.

https://ibb.co/64jbBZ2

Again, if you're not even arresting people for minor things like breaking windows, you're not going to see it on a "crime rate graph".

Why would you call the police to report a crime that they have a policy of taking no action on?

San Jose, and the peninsula don’t have nearly as much petty theft or shoplifting crime. And yet the laws are nearly identical. Only difference I can think of is the local community supporting the police.

The laws aren't the only factor. They also have to be enforced, which they often aren't in SF.

Could be. In WA, people like to say that Bellevue, Redmond, and the like will arrest their homeless people so they end up in King County jail..in Seattle. "Problem solved."

What's different is the enforcement of punishments.

quote from https://saputo.law/criminal-law/texas/theft-crimes/theft/:

    * Theft under $100 is a Class C Misdemeanor (punishable by a fine up to $500).

    * Theft between $100 and $750 is a Class B Misdemeanor (punishable by up to 180 days in jail and a $2000 fine). 
    If the value of the stolen property is under $100, it is still a Class B Misdemeanor theft if you have been previously convicted of theft of if the property stolen was an identification card like a driver’s license.

    * Theft between $750 and $2,500 is a Class A Misdemeanor, punishable by up to one year in jail and a $4000 fine.

In California, you are not likely to see any jail time (and often you will not see any prosecution at all) for the same crime that will be prosecuted in Texas. It's not about felonies per se, but the general attitude towards punishing crime.

Their policies are demonstrably at fault though, there are large European cities which face this same dynamic and yet they do not have anywhere near the level of problems that we have in this country.

This seems to be, in large part, due to their policies. Housing is not their primary goal, addiction and psychiatric treatment are. You get housing when you comply, it's the carrot that is used to motivate people to engage with the program.

The author recently did a Joe Rogan podcast and did a very good job of explaining this and it's practical effects and differences in detail.

> You get housing when you comply, it's the carrot that is used to motivate people to engage with the program.

Note that Finland famously has a "Housing First" policy that has practically eliminated homelessness there, so that seems to be a direct counterexample to your comment.

And while the overall rate in Finland has been trending downwards, the rate of people living outside as well as long-term homelessness has _increased_ in the past two years in Finland.

Reference: https://www.ara.fi/download/noname/%7B0D67A61D-7980-467C-834...

> Without a national or at least comprehensive state-wide solution for homelessness, this will be a difficult problem to solve.

I wish more people realized this. Every city seems to be having people complain about homelessness. The three cities ive lived in in the last 6 years has. Idk why it is on a city of 60,000 people to try to fix homelessness. Especially when a ton are homeless veterans. The national goverment is dumping their problem on places to small and unorganized to deal with it.

Ok but it's also been documented that SF gives bus tickets, too. Everywhere is giving bus tickets. So if you're using this argument you'll need to show that SF is giving less bus tickets per homeless population.

>One possible explanation: California has become the dumping ground for the nation's homeless population.

>I think the nation as a whole needs substantially more affordable housing.

And San Francisco will never be a place with affordable housing.

Modesto, ok. Manteca, ok. Not SF. No one ever thinks, I'm homeless, lemme go to SF and see if I can find something there.

It's political. Otherwise you'd see more homeless in San Diego than SF.

Sounds like you've never spent much time in San Diego.

Isn't San Francisco also much more expensive? It stands to reason that the number of people no longer able to afford their rents would contribute to the problem.

This article was really focusing on the chronic visible homeless; living on the street, public feces, injection drug use etc.

Many people do become homeless because of higher rents but they are able to take advantage of social safety nets so you don't see them on the streets of SF.

San Diego does have quite a lot of homeless, but it isn't as concentrated geographically.

I'd argue that part of the issue with San Francisco is the concentration of the homeless into a small area. You don't see homeless in Atherton, for example. The wealthy enclaves in the Bay Area have zero problem with pushing the homeless out of their areas into somewhere else. In the Bay Area, there aren't that many "somewhere else" left so the ones that remain get overloaded.

San Diego county has roughly half the homeless pop of SF city/county while having triple the population.

I live in SF and while I don't spent a lot of time in Atherton, but homeless is most definitely visible even in the wealthy enclaves. Even before covid there was a small but visible homeless population in downtown Palo Alto (univ ave) and more recently there are tents on the sidewalk in Cupertino just down the street from Apple's spaceship campus. I think it must have become less acceptable to "move them along" during COVID.

Correct. Atherton isn't a great example. There's literally no downtown, so any homeless people would have to set up camp right outside some (very rich) person's (giant) single family home on a street with no sidewalk. Even in less affluent parts of the Bay Area unhoused people typically cluster in business or industrial districts rather than residential neighborhoods filled with single family homes.

You see unhoused people in downtown Menlo Park, Palo Alto, and Los Altos which are almost as wealthy as Atherton, and there was temporary outrage last year when it was reported that Menlo Park PD had paid for a one-way cab ride for one of the regular unhoused residents up to Pacifica (they claimed that she asked them to get her there so she could get her hair cut by a friend).

South Bay homelessness has adapted to car culture. A lot of South Bay homeless live in cars or campers permanently parked on city streets adjacent to parks, school fields, and/or business parks. I think most South Bay cities have a "you have to move a vehicle that's parked on the street every 3 days" law intended to discourage this, but it doesn't seem to be enforced.

Perhaps this speaks to your point, but the situation is just as bad in the outlying Central Valley cities. There are currently people camping on the embankment of Highway 120 through Manteca. Stockton's situation only kept getting worse after the 2008 recession, and there are tent camps in drastically unsafe areas along the freeway shoulder there as well. This has been going on for years.

It's definitely a regional problem, not just something isolated to a single city. I often wonder if people move around from town to town as their connections in the community shift, or they get a bad rep with local law enforcement... a friend who was formerly an EMT had an anecdote of a woman he picked up in Antioch for a meth-induced mental health incident who he saw, years later, stumbling around outside the hospital in Oakland in much the same state.

I think it's entirely possible that people come to SF or LA as an intentional destination and then, over time, get flushed towards the outlying cities, if they don't get ground into the dirt first. The current Atlantic article about the changing meth trade features a transgender person on skid row in LA who came there from the Midwest, believing that they could eventually gain access to gender reassignment surgery: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new...

Who came up with the hypothesis that California is the dumping ground for the nation's homeless? I'd like to know if it stands up to scrutiny.

California itself has a population which is the size of a medium sized European country. It is large enough to have a sizable homeless population. If you are homeless are your chances of getting food and services better in the central valley or in SF? Also, are there significantly less homeless people on the East coast by comparison?

I too would like to see some real numbers behind this. But I will say that I took greyhounds and amtrak in / out of CA a lot growing up in the bay area and I had numerous experiences talking to homeless folks who had been put on the train or bus by law enforcement in counties outside CA for destinations including SF and San Diego. I never experienced the inverse of homeless folks getting shipped out of CA. Always stuck with me for whatever a personal anecdote is worth.

This article is fascinating, and surprising:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...

So that appears to imply that in largely more wealthy cities are sending homeless people to less expensive cities and SF has an active program which is doing this too.

This was surprising to me, in that SF is such a large participant.

Excellent article, thank you for sharing it!

CA has 1/2 the population of homeless in the US but only 1/8 of total population. The eastern seaboard has close to half the US population but obviously cannot have nearly the same rate of homeless.

Something is at play, though it need not be anything too complicated. Good weather and significant resources dedicated to making the homeless comfortable make California the obvious destination.

There are possibly network effects within homeless communities that are hard for outsiders to understand as well.

Thank you, is there a link where I could cite that information?

I need to write that I was slightly mistaken, CA houses half of the “unsheltered” in the United States and only a quarter of the “homeless.” The unsheltered are highly visible and make up 70% of the total homeless in CA, the highest rate in the nation.

Here is a detailed link from CA: https://shou.senate.ca.gov/sites/shou.senate.ca.gov/files/Ho...

The economy of California is pretty good vs other states.

People from all over the USA travel to places like California for better economic opportunities.

Misfortunes happen and people become homeless.

Thus you end up with people from "out of state" that are homeless.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/08/21/nevada...

There's multi-billion dollar lawsuits going on because it's been documented as a policy of nevada hospitals.

That is interesting and very concerning but that is 10 people when the homeless population in CA is 151,278 https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/homeless-po...

The thinking is that it's not an isolated incident and lots of PD's & hospitals did this. It's hard to prove because no one will admit to it, and the people being sent aren't always the most reliable witnesses.

Anyone who wonders how SF keeps sliding further into dystopia, this is why. Because every negative consequence of their politics gets blamed on some other.

Only someone with zero experience with San Francisco in the 70's, 80's and into the 1990's could say that with a straight face.

Disclaimer: I have read the Economist article but not the book it appears to synopsizing/marketing.

It doesn't seem like trying to simplify challenges in large cities to a single dimension like housing is a path to success. Basic needs and social services beyond housing go a long way in supporting people, which (sadly) can't be provided by just addressing a housing shortage/affordability gap.

It's worth taking a look at the SF Point in Time and Housing Inventory Counts data [1] to provide context on this conversation.

[1] https://hsh.sfgov.org/about/research-and-reports/pit-hic/

"as a whole needs substantially more affordable housing.'

I'm fairly sure this is an issue with at least all the western democracies. Not to mention other countries. That issue includes housing that is used as an investment, eg kept empty / kept high priced. Then there's the unsuitability of a lot of housing, eg not enough rooms, too many rooms, poor locations.

If your employee, nanny, maid, servant or dogsbody has a one hour drive to get to work each morning, don't expect them to stick around if they can change to a better opportunity.

The great resignation sums this up nicely. Why work there when I can work here?

A large number of homeless in San Francisco were previous SF residents.

When folks live paycheck to paycheck almost anything can lead to them becoming homeless.

That said, there are more then enough homes for everyone, in the form of vacant homes. https://sf.curbed.com/2019/12/3/20993251/san-francisco-bay-a...

> One possible explanation: California has become the dumping ground for the nation's homeless population.

Even more than Skid Row? To be honest that wikipedia page blows my mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skid_Row,_Los_Angeles

> We have a nationwide shortage of housing.

First, you must understand that the population of San Francisco is growing, but slowly. Over the last decade San Francisco grew by just under 10%, which sounds like a lot, but it really isn't when looking at a larger data set compared to many other metropolitan areas. San Francisco is now the 17th largest city in the US, which I believe is unchanged from a decade ago. Looking at the data a huge number of cities are growing dramatically faster than San Francisco.

The fastest growing big city in the US is Seattle, which grew over 27% the last decade. That is a lot of growth, but Austin, Fort Worth, and Denver grew at nearly the same rates (26%, 26%, and 24% respectively) and the first two were 50% larger, which is a phenomenal amount of growth in raw numbers. This year Austin bumped San Jose to become the 10th largest city in the US and last year Fort Worth became the 12th largest city. 10 years ago Fort Worth was the 18th largest city in the US. In the next 10 years Fort Worth will also likely surpass San Jose and become the 11th largest city in the US, though its only the 5th largest city in Texas.

Why is it then that housing supply is a major issue in San Francisco, but not in these other cities that are growing so much faster? It cannot be due to geographic constraint, because Seattle and Dallas are geographically restricted as well, Seattle due to ocean and mountains and Dallas due to encapsulation by suburbs.

Secondly, when this conversation comes up people in the bay area tend to be unable to differentiate housing from houses. More specifically from any place to live versus owned single family real estate. This is likely due to restrictions on size and affordability not present in many other locations. There is a substantial difference with regards to equity, taxation, value, availability, and inflation.

Third, the actual data suggests absolutely no relationship between housing inventory and growth. Most people want to quibble about some high school economics class they once took with regard to supply/demand without looking at the data. The supply/demand relationship typical of retail does not apply to fixed assets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_asset

In high growth markets the speed of population growth is a direct correlation to the availability of inventory. This means that the more housing that exists for purchase the more the population grows to accommodate. When housing inventory shrinks, often because they can only build so many houses at a given speed, higher density housing units are introduced in place of single family homes, thus further accelerating the rate of growth. This is not observed in San Francisco because San Francisco is not growing that fast and has constraints on home ownership not present in many other locations.

Even more unexpected is that house prices, as in actual houses that people own, is only loosely associated with demand. In my area houses have increased in value about 34% over the past year and continues to climb, though very slowly now. That price growth was due to unassociated economic material constraints that have since recovered and now the supply of new single family homes are again exploding and new apartment complexes are popping almost as fast. Access to existing inventory was not interrupted and growth of new units did not dramatically slow during this price volatility, yet prices sky rocketed and demand remained constant.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities

> Why is it then that housing supply is a major issue in San Francisco, but not in these other cities that are growing so much faster?

There's the actual rate of growth vs demand- and the demand for h I using in SF was quite high in the 2010s compared to other metros.

[citation needed]

https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/FINAL-PIT-R... is full of a lot of good data.

The data does not support GP's assertion:

70% from San Francisco

22% from rest of California

8% from out of state

Also, the data disagrees with the general sentiment of "Mental Health" issues amongst Homeless people. Only 5% were homeless because of mental health problems. Most of them, almost a quarter are homeless because they lost their job.

Basically, many things in this report goes against the general opinion of people of the Bay Area. Misinformed public leads to misinformed decision making and policies.

Responding to GP:

> I don't think the mess in San Francisco is entirely due to local policies. I think the nation as a whole needs substantially more affordable housing.

This is wrong. It is precisely due to the policies of SF city. The sooner people realize and accept the faults of San Francisco city's governance, the better it will be for the city. Same lessons can be applied to Portland (used to be ranked 3rd in the nation according to Oregonian, now it is ranked a whopping 66th out of 80), Seattle, and Los Angeles.

To OP - thank you for the link, it's illuminating.

That's absolutely correct. San Francisco should be a city lined with gold given the wealth and income base. Given its fortunate context it should be more like Singapore and a lot less like a slightly nicer Los Angeles.

And makes GP assertion even less likely when counted at per-family-with-children.

47% is from within SF the rest is from elsewhere

> Also, the data disagrees with the general sentiment of "Mental Health" issues amongst Homeless people. Only 5% were homeless because of mental health problems. Most of them, almost a quarter are homeless because they lost their job.

The same study also quotes (p. 28): "Seventy-four percent (74%) of respondents reported living with one or more health conditions, compared to 68% in 2017. These conditions included chronic physical illnesses, physical disabilities, chronic substance use, and severe mental health conditions. Sixty-nine percent (69%) of respondents reported their condition limited their ability to hold a job, live in stable housing, or take care of themselves, compared to 53% in 2017."

This points to the fact that regular, long-term medical care is the singular issue in the homeless. I had no idea that things were that bad. 15% have a traumatic brain injury? Holy hell.

Losing one's job is not mutually exclusive with drug addiction and mental illness.

good link; good read

Catch-22:

Top cited primary cause of homelessness: "Lost Job" (26%)

Top cited obstacle to obtaining employment: "No Permanent Address" (28%)

No permanent address is self reported. In general those who aren't employable are unreliable for self-assessments as to why (although I don't doubt the lack of address is a hinderance -- for sure it would be).

Similarly, lost job tells us little about the bigger picture. What led to them being a lost job away from being homeless? Was it living beyond their means? No family? No friends willing to take them in? Being raised poor with no social net and working jobs making no money?

You have to really do a deep analysis to get in deeper to understand how people ended up in the situation they did, what roads they could have taken but didn't, what are societal ills that brought them there, and thus what to ultimately do about any of it.

Given the amount of money ($1B+) SF spends on homeless yearly, personally I wish we could find a way to use that to actually do something WPA style and employ them to do various jobs to actually improve things (and hopefully their life as well) versus just continue to maintain status quo.

> the amount of money ($1B+) SF spends on homeless yearly

> TOTAL NUMBER OF PERSONS EXPERIENCING HOMELESSNESS, 2013-2019 > 7,008 (2013) 6,775 (2015) 6,858 (2017) 8,011 (2019)

Are both of these figures correct?

Wikipedia[1] says it was $241M in 2016 but notes

"However, much of this spending is focused on housing the formerly homeless, or those at risk, and not the currently homeless"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_San_Franci...

You're right, depending on how you itemize things. However, there's $1B+ spent on human welfare and neighborhood development [1], much of which crosses over in one way or another either supporting the homeless or trying to not make people homeless with programs like food banks. If you look at where that's going [2], you'll see the areas with the highest unemployment are getting most of these funds.

[1] https://sfgov.org/scorecards/finance/expenditures-and-revenu...

[2] https://www.sfdph.org/dph/files/mtgsGrps/FoodSecTaskFrc/docs...

The article itself says that 30% of the homeless people say that they were already homeless before they arrived.

I've given up on affordable housing in California.

I feel we need to open up vacant federal, state, and local land to free camping.

(Neusome is doing some good work. Near Candlestick Park boat launch, there is a lot set aside for RV's, and car, to those that are homeless. Could you imagine parking overnight without getting a ticket? I've know two people who were living out of their cars. They both told me it as a nightmare of cops ticketing them, and whatnot.

Sausalito has a dedicated spot for homeless, but it's no model of success. The town decided they didn't want low income, or homeless individuals mored off shore. Anchorouts have been in Richardson Bay for over a 100 years. The town let a private harbormaster decide who stays, and who's boat is going to be crushed. People had knowhere to go, so they set up tents at Dunphy Park. The Liberal citizens didn't like looking at the homeless, so the town moved them.

So basically Sausalito crested their own homeless problem?

The new spot of dirt the homeless were given came with a bunch of rules. (Homeless have a lot of problems. A huge list of rules is not the answer. I happened to read a Section 8 lease awhile ago. It was 47 pages of rules.

Cops are handing out tickets for minor infractions. The one that got me were two $500 tickets. The cops said, they won't pay them, so the fine doesn't really matter.

As usual the cop missed a lot of legal training when going to the academy. You don't pay a ticket, and it eventually turns into a bench warrant. The homeless are housed eventually in jail. Brilliant!

Local rant over.)

As I said previously we need places they can camp.

We need outhouses, and hand washing stations, and maybe a place they can cook.

Their are some people who will never get off the streets.

I'm done waiting for housing.

Oh yea, don't like stepping in crap; provide porta potties.

I have a hard time finding free restrooms in SF, and I'm not homeless.

Watch the increase in Homelessness in CA in the next few months. It's going to be ugly.

I don't feel like debating anyone. The way homeless are treated has bothered me for years.

Homeless people want to move somewhere warm and dry year-round. For homed people, that is less of an issue. And maybe I'm wrong, but I really doubt housing prices are the reason. You can have adequate shelter for very cheap with roommates, if you don't want to live downtown. That certainly beats the pants off sharing under a bridge with 10 strangers and their tents.

To be real with you, a housing situation where you’re 5+ people in a 4 bedroom house isn’t a solution.

“Very cheap” is relative.

So fitting 5 people in a 4 bedroom is not a solution, but sleeping under a bridge is, which currently happens.

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