SF can barely build a public toilet without it turning into a taxpayer trough feeding frenzy, so expecting it to be the Mecca of the homeless, the addicted and the downtrodden is comedic at best, and tragic at worst. Even if someone were to get back on their feet from addiction, SF is the last place where they would want to try to live, given the astronomical cost of everything, unless they're going to suddenly become senior ML engineers who can afford a downpayment on a $1M 400sqft run down shoebox. Many non-tech people like school teachers can't even afford to live in the city, and they're not fighting against a crippling meth addiction.
There's plenty of room in Bakersfield, Stockton, Lancaster, Fresno.. there's plenty of space, housing is more affordable, the local governance more amenable, the cost of living night and day, but nobody in policy will ever be able to pull that off, so we'll be stuck with the current status quo that nobody is happy with.
But it points to an irony when you’re there, going to a meeting at the Transamerica pyramid or walking past the headquarters of Salesforce, or having a michelin starred meal, then walking down the street and a guy in an alley has a knife.
(Yeah, personal experience. I wasn’t very scared. Probably because I just had michelin starred wine pairings…)
They are not entitled nor are tax payers obligated to insure they have parity with people who can afford to live and work in SF.
And I buy the argument providing homes is humane and cost efficient compared to options. Any treatment medical or mental in the US is stupid expensive. But I think/hope DBT which is effective mental side is not the most expensive
All that has to happen is tax revenue has to fall and the spending will decrease and the homeless will go to some other place where they can live a better drugs and camping lifestyle. Having lived for some time a few years ago in the Tenderloin, the idea that the homeless in S.F are normal people who have fallen on hard times is a complete simulated reality that has almost nothing to do with the actual situation.
Also, why would someone run for a district they didn’t live in?
And nobody said he doesn’t live in the district. He moved to SF as a lawyer, then became Deputy City Attorney, then was elected to Board of Supervisors, then elected to state senate. His quote about not being able to afford to live in SF is most likely to point out that rent control in SF keeps qualifying rents affordable while market-rate rents are extremely unaffordable.
They should just drive in their cars to those cheaper places, true
We already have a (very successful, uncontroversial) program that provides free bus tickets to unhoused people who came from elsewhere and have a support system wherever they came from. That leaves the other 70%.
You can state all the facts you want and some people downvote because they simply didn't like it; others downvote because your replied topic was about a downvote (against policy) and those same problematic people who downvoted may also have multiple accounts.
Ultimately its a bridge too far and violates free speech by de-amplifying what you said (because it goes invisible once it goes under a certain vote) but that's mainly just my opinion that the vast majority of people (or bots) here don't hold.
Those people still deserve empathy, but they're a very different group than those who once were productive and housed in SF and then ended up on the streets because of a bout of bad luck.
No, that isn’t the context here. When I wrote this here, and when I put this figure on a Muni bus ad for Street Sheet’s ad campaign in 2015, I was responding to the often-repeated false assertion that SF is “a dumping ground” for unhoused people, that people “come here to be homeless”, that “other cities send their homeless here”, etc etc etc.
Claiming that “housed in San Francisco before becoming unhoused” should only include “productive” people who were paying their own rent with their name on the lease is moving the goal posts by an entire football field.
Cities are full of poor people. They ought to be — cities are great places to find opportunities to get out of poverty. And lots of people, self included, show up in cities with no money or plan, and crash on couches, in hotel rooms, in their cars, etc, until they land on their feet.
San Francisco has always been a place where people have done this. We didn’t have large-scale homelessness here until the second half of the 80s, after federal public housing was gutted and especially after the Loma Prieta quake wiped out a lot of affordable housing.
If cities don’t make room for poor people, those people will end up on the street. People try to make this more complicated than it is, but every serious study on this lands in the same place, every time — just provide housing.
Sure. But the approach to dealing with that subset of people should be different than the approach for the subset who were once employed and renting in San Francisco and then ended up homeless through a health emergency, job loss, or eviction. The latter group has shown the ability to sustain themselves in SF in the past, while the former hasn't. And, morally, the place of original residence is responsible for them, not the taxpayers of San Francisco.
If nothing else, people with longstanding ties to the community and economy should get preference for services compared those who didn't. And homelessness advocates get this: the entire point of conflating them is to increase sympathy for the people who just turn up.
How do you even begin to discriminate on that? The USA lacks a residency system like other countries.
I agree with your point, but it’s not possible to implement here, which is why the non profits continue the conflation.
That covers the large majority of homeless that SF should target for help and are all easily accessible to the city government. You can imagine corner cases (attended a private school, lived in SF but worked outside it) but it'd be an improvement over the status quo. Even many of the corner cases could be captured with additional documentation that would require a bit more effort on the applicant's side.
I believe you would find that this is illegal. Shapiro (Shapiro v. Thompson, 394 U.S. 618 (1969)) and its progeny address this issue on point.
(I feel obliged to mention I believe your number because of your expertise, simply because of the number of people in this thread who failed to say that).
This is how the system already works. The Homeward Bound program provides free bus tickets to people who have a support system elsewhere. That still leaves a substantial population of people who do not have any other support system, or whose support system is in San Francisco.
> If nothing else, people with longstanding ties to the community and economy should get preference for services compared those who didn't.
This is how the provision of services currently works. The problem is not prioritization, the problem is a lack of available housing for even your narrowly-defined “deserving” unhoused people. And arguing about a few percent being moved into a different category of eligibility does nothing to fix the underlying problem.
It's not San Francisco's responsibility to pick up the slack for places that don't take care of their homeless. Declaring that it is doesn't make it so, and both creates perverse incentives (for other places to shirk on their responsibilities) and makes it impossible for San Francisco to fulfill its own responsibilities.
Also, I don't think I used the word "deserving," despite your quotes. They deserve help, but San Francisco is not obligated to be the provider of services for the entire country. Once we do manage to build successful programs for the homeless who originate here, then we can talk about whether it makes sense to build aid systems and SF housing for people from other communities.
As it stands, we fail all the homeless in San Francisco. It's silly to think we can tackle homelessness nationwide before we even can get a handle on those who come from here.
There are a lot of false assertions made, often with no consequence for doing so, which is an ongoing problem; and worse a lot of these people actually believe what they say is true despite well researched facts showing to the contrary. Its disheartening that so many people are completely irrational when it comes to discourse on these things.
As for the lack of housing, to me its clearly not a money problem. Also, in other areas they do hotel vouchers instead of actually creating affordable housing; and while programs may limit it to no more than 30 days, there are loopholes which allow a revolving door between multiple hotels accepting vouchers. I would guess this is where most of the money is going, and this doesn't do the same thing as providing permanent housing first.
Additionally, the vouchers themselves are often traded, for drugs and other things and the areas where these are accepted, quickly become crime-ridden because the dealers follow the vulnerable populations; its one of the reasons some areas refuse to add additional local transit resources. They simply don't want to deal with it; or they deal with it in a way that makes it someone elses problem (like what happened in Santa Ana).
Everyone seems to have an opinion on what needs to be done, but none that I've seen have actually followed through on what the rigorous studies have shown. There always seems to be some loophole, corruption, backroom deal, etc for business to capitalize on homeless services without actually improving the situation in any way while draining resources meant to help people get back on their feet.
ETA some additional numbers[0]:
Of that [71]%, the top six places they were housed before their most recent loss of housing:
With Friends/Relative (31%)
Home Owned or Rented by Self or Partner (21%)
Subsidized Housing or Permanent Supportive Housing (11%)
Hotel/motel (9%)
Jail or Prison (8%)
Hospital or Treatment Facility (4%)
So only 21% of that 71% actually rented their own place. Granted, the "with friends/relatives" can cover some situations where I'd agree they count as originating from SF, but also covers things like people moving here and crashing with a friend for a week before being kicked out.
Note also that any homeless who has become housed at any point of their homelessness (including jail, hospitalization, supportive housing) would then persist in the "has been housed in SF before" stat.
[0] https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/2022-PIT-Co... , see page 31
Rent control: A random windfall for whatever tenant snags these coveted apartments when someone dies in a 3 bedroom apartment they haven't needed in 30 years but "can't afford" to downsize from since they have been paying $650 since 1989. Also the illegal subletters who are numerous and shameless, from personal experience.
Low-income housing minimums: A random windfall for a few lucky lottery winners, while everyone else from indigent to middle-class has to struggle because the developers need to build only luxury housing to make up for eating the cost of the low income housing.
And then this housing first thing is more of the same.
> siphoned off into these non-profits
Indeed. The homeless-industrial complex of nonprofits in SF is huge, but popular since it is a jobs program for all the people with social science bachelors and masters degrees, and no marketable skills.
Solving it requires relocation. There's no getting around it because the total cost of living is incompatible with people with slimmer means.
This is a misrepresentation of SF rent control. Rent increases for pre-1979 apartments are only capped if the same tenant lives there continuously -- when the apartment lease turns over, the rent can be raised to market rates.
That being said, there are some people that abuse the system by keeping a lease for a place they haven't lived in for 20 years and subletting it, sometimes for a profit, but there aren't apartments where the rent is permanently capped at 80s levels like you're suggesting.
Smart landlords will fight adding a cotenant, but tenants can always claim discrimination which is an uphill battle for the landlord especially in SF where juries are notoriously anti-landlord.
There's no issues around discrimination for this, and it's not an uphill battle. Replacement tenants are not co-tenants, and do not have rent control protection if the original tenants move out. Landlords cannot reject replacement tenants in most cases, but they have no requirements on accepting replacements as co-tenants. Replacement tenants are added as sub-letters of the original tenant.
I was a real estate agent who worked in property management, and I've also lived in rent controlled apartments in SF. You're absolutely wrong here.
1 million dollars in San Francisco real estate is a one room (maybe two room if it's in extra bad shape) hovel.
And that's the real problem. San Francisco is not a place for the poor to try to raise their lives to middle class. It's a place for middle class to struggle to stay above water. The homeless in sf need to be given decent places to live in a place where land costs something normal. That place does not currently exist in or near San Francisco, but can be reached by an hour or two bus ride.
Also, the median value for an owner-occupied house in SF is 1.15MM. So half the people live in something less than that.
This contradicts your earlier statement. If the median owner-occupied house 1.15M, that means more than half of homeowners are living in houses worth $1M or more. Clearly that includes middle class people, since it's more than half of the people.
Also, note that it doesn't take much money to live in a $1M house if you bought it a while back.
Looks easy from the outside but rarely is
Please let SF die so I can buy some affordable real estate there. Thanks!
Seriously though. SF’s problem is that it is too crowded. If people left, then it would be less crowded, an equilibrium would be reached eventually (if you believe we aren’t at one already).
It includes _some_ middle class people. Fewer and fewer as property taxes raise and the value of their home rises. Sure, they'll have a bunch of cash once they sell it, but not everyone wants to move away from where they were born just because there's a bunch of overpaid tech bros now living next to you.
CA should have taken the 17B and invested it the lowest-cost-of-living regions in the US to build out communities + housing with full wrap-around services for different purposes (homelessness, mental-health, vets, etc) and focus on therapy/recovery.
It seems spending 17B in CA would just get you a hotdog and bicycle these days.
SF has a lot of issues and the money went to places that were ineffective with only a small portion going to housing first.
17B shows this isn't a homeless problem, this is a corruption and accountability problem.
If I saw a reasonable housing first program where it actually provides cost-efficient housing for all that need it, I'd be a strong proponent.
The current system is not that, it's incredibly unfair, a tax-payer funded lottery in which residents provide accolades to homeless advocacy groups in return for inclusion on lists that make them more likely to win a spot in the residences. Huge amounts of tax-payer money is siphoned off into these non-profits throughout the process.
https://sfstandard.com/politics/san-francisco-nonprofits-con...