Glad to see this report being referenced. A friend and I volunteered to gather this data at the beginning of 2017 along with hundreds of other volunteers. It's an interesting process. You show up, they assign you specific streets to walk and you just count up homeless people, noting their sex, rough age, and dwelling type (improvised structure, vehicle, etc.).

I encourage anyone who is interested to volunteer for the next SF homelessness count, likely in January 2019 (They do one every 2 years).

Thank you for taking the time to do this. I have found the referenced document quite valuable towards driving more rational debate around the subject.

This is a very in depth report but unfortunately it is on data that is from Jan 2017, before when we started seeing the huge homeless encampments forming all over the place (I have lived in Oakland for 25 years, so only really know about changes there). It shows that the number of homeless people in SF has been about the same since 2013, so I'm not sure it is worth reading the 80 pages to try understand what has changed to make homelessness a much bigger problem recently.

2013=7,350 2015=7,539 2017=7,449

Too bad they don't do it every year. Another survey is due in Jan 2019, and maybe it can help us understand this new level of homelessness going on.

If other locales aren't shipping SF vagrants, where is the increase coming from? Is SF especially good at producing new vagrants?

The survey includes a "primary cause of homelessness" section, of which loss of job forms a very weak plurality.

The increase since 2013 is reported to be only ~2%, (which I find slightly surprising¹) so it may be a bit loaded to ask where the "increase" is coming from. Since the last survey, the population even appears to have declined, slightly.

¹It feels like it has gotten worse, but that's only my impression, and I only frequent a subset of SF, so I may not be seeing areas that have gotten better. The survey is much more comprehensive than my anecdotes, of course.