I dunno. As someone who lives in NYC where we really just don't have the same problem at all it's pretty clear there are some policy reasons involved too.

Are you sure climate isn't the main factor? If I were homeless I'd go to SF over NYC due to the mild winters.

The overwhelming majority of homeless people in California lived in the same county they currently do before they became homeless. Climate is clearly not the main factor.

71% in SF homeless already lived in SF, 90% already lived in California: https://socketsite.com/archives/2016/02/san-franciscos-homel...

the cite link in that article is dead but refers to http://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/2015-San-Fra...

75% of LA homeless already lived in LA: https://www.lahsa.org/documents?id=2059-2018-greater-los-ang...

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....

In the LA survey 65% had lived in LA for at least 20 years, 80% had lived there for at least 5 years. Half the people in SF who had already been there had been for at least 10 years when they became homeless, 89% had been there at least a year.

I think it's fair to say that people move to NYC in the same way, which is the city being compared here.

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).

From the report: "Eleven percent (11%) had lived in San Francisco for less than one year."

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

It got moved to a new URL: http://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/2015-San-Fra...

Thanks. 51% reported living in SF for less than 10 years, so Newsom's point that more than half of the homeless were sent from other places could still hold.

11% were less than one year.

Well SF get's also cold af. I would go to LA or San Diego. So, while it might be a factor, it surely isn't the main factor.

(A) It's cold

(B) Our cops are super aggressive with the homeless. I mean, technically that can be described as "policy", but probably not the way you meant it

I used to volunteer for an annual winter round-up, where a bunch of volunteers would get vans and go looking for homeless and try to get them into shelters. We did this on one of the coldest nights of the year, trying to prevent people from dying in the chill. We had no problem finding shit-tons of homeless folk, with the caveat that unlike in other cities I've been, they put a little effort into hiding from the public eye.

This was in the outer boroughs.

(C) NYC has a right to shelter law.

Combine that with your B and you can start to see the outlines of an actual policy decision.

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.

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.

NYC gets cold in the winter, which helps to manage the problem somewhat as a forced migration occurs. The west coast doesn’t get very cold in the winter, meaning Seattle, Portland, Sam Francisco, LA, and San Diego are all nice places climate wise for homeless year round.

This seems like a stretch. I saw my fair share of empty subway cars which contained within them an unpleasant surprise when I was there last month. Not conclusive, but “at all” is a very strong standard.

I'm not saying there's no homeless people, there are.

But the SFO phenomenon of open drug use, screaming disruptive people, and street level encampments isn't something you see really anywhere in the five boroughs, excepting maybe a few errant overpasses or very industrial areas of Hunts Point or similar.

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.

Paris suburbs are hardcore, riot police running around with big guns and armor, it is a huge contrast to the inner districts.

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…

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.

What problem specifically? Because, minus the open-air drug use, I've seen the same thing in NYC.

How would that be clear? New York has developed over decades and have had plenty of problems to the point were the city becoming less seedy was seen as milestone. But even despite this New York continues to have plenty of problems. That a smaller city developing much quicker economically finds itself having social problems is entirely consistant with that.

When I last visited NYC (from SF) I remember walking by a guy who was older and clean but vaguely possibly homeless who as I recall was standing on the street corner minding his own business. And as I walked by, some police walked up to him and did the policey sort of "show id, what are you doing here" kind of thing.

I later marvelled to an NY-based coworker about how this could happen, since I've never seen it happen in SF (just random harassment of people who aren't even screaming/needling/etc.). His response: "oh, were you in Chelsea?" (Answer: yes.)

I guess that's one way to "solve" homelessness -- harass them until they move elsewhere.

I think the weather is a bigger factor than people expect.

If I was resigned to being homeless, I would definitely do whatever I could to be homeless in a city that hardly rains, never snows, and never gets freezing.

the real difference is winter, people who have nothing to lose and no ties in NYC hop on a freight train and head west

Listened to a Gavin Newsom interview a while back, where he had some pretty decent insight.

The interviewer challenged him on the homeless problem in SF. His answer was basically, "Yes, there are homeless people in SF now. The challenge is that during my tenure as mayor, we got people off the streets, but X x 2 homeless people came to SF from other places."

Newsom was far from blameless, but his point that homelessness in SF can't be solved on a SF level, or a bay-area level or possibly even a state-wide level, but needs a more global solution rings true to me.

The specific problems OP mentions are not due to high housing costs. What about rent being expensive means people have to shoot up or defecate in broad daylight on a public street?

You're on the streets, have no food, it's cold, raining, dark and you're wet. This is the 10th day. I offer you something to make it all go away for a couple of hours. Maybe you deny this time. But two weeks later you're more broken than ever, and you start shooting that Heroin or smoking that Crack. Just to make it go away for a short time.

When you have nothing else to live for you are more likely to turn to such escapes. The correlation is pretty strong, even though it isn't a strict cause-effect relation.

Yes of course people who own a house do drugs. Some of them destroy their mind to the point they can no longer keep their house.

The simplest hypothesis is that drug use and mental health lead to homelessness. And if that's the case, then the problem isn't housing costs (though high housing costs are a problem, just a separate one), it's that people have addiction and mental health issues.

The problem with your simple hypothesis is that the data doesn't back it up. Drugs & alcohol account for 15% of the reasons for homelessness in SF, and medical issues/illness account for 7%[1]. The data shows that housing costs and financial instability are the largest causes of homelessness in SF.

[1] http://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017SanFranc...

Sorry, I should have been more specific: I am referring to visible homelessness, people living on the street, etc. The colloquial meaning of the term 'homeless', in other words. I should have been more specific, especially given that this confusion regarding the use of this term is a pet peeve of mine.

No problem, thanks for the clarification. It's a pet peeve of mine, as well.

When you're homeless, you don't have your own private bathroom.

> ...homeless probem arises due to high housing cost...

I heard an interesting theory during a discussion of how off the rails weird some cities' denizens were X decades ago, and how you no longer really see that any longer. The hypothesis put forward was that back then rents were very cheap relative to minimum wage, and minimum wage jobs didn't take much more than a grade school education to hold down. A lot of borderline or minimally-mentally-ill people could fit in between these cracks and live out their lives relatively peacefully coexisting with the broader mainstream, though to be sure adding "color" to the surroundings.

I think this hypothesis has legs. I've read that there were successful experiments at simply outright giving homeless a place to live of their own reduced the incidence of homeless-related crimes to a statistically significant degree. If that is true, then it is worth questioning our economic incentives making housing ever-more expensive.

From my perspective as someone outside the real estate industry, I'm perfectly fine with reducing values by 10X or 100X in more HCOL areas through removal of all state support for the industry. As far as I'm concerned, that's simply stranded capital idling uselessly instead of working for everyone. I wish Bezos would apply his "your margin is my opportunity" aphorism to real estate and healthcare.

Can't remember where, but I remember reading stats that a huge percentage (like a third) homeless people are military veterans :(

The largest percentage of homeless people are families. The largest causes of homelessness are job loss, arguments with friends and family whom they lived with, eviction, and divorce/separation. Drugs & alcohol are responsible for 15%, and illness/medical problems account for 7%. [1]

[1] http://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017SanFranc...

There are also homeless regardless if they receive help, due to mental illnesses.

...and?!?

I heard rumors that a lot of towns just send their psychiatric homeless to SF with a one-way ticket.

That's been a rumor for as long as homelessness has existed. It's either SF, or San Diego, or Seattle, or some other large, urban, mild-weathered city.