10mo ago

Homeless encampments have largely vanished from San Francisco. Is the city at a turning point?

The number of people sleeping outdoors dropped to under 3,000 in January, the lowest the city has recorded in a decade, according to a federal count.

And that figure has likely dropped even lower since Mayor London Breed — a Democrat in a difficult reelection fight this November — started ramping up enforcement of anti-camping laws in August following a U.S. Supreme Court decision.

Homelessness in no way has gone away, and in fact grew 7%, to 8,300 in January, according to the same federal count.

But the problem is now notably out of the public eye, raising the question of where people have gone and whether the change marks a turning point in a crisis long associated with San Francisco.

74 comments

Homelessness in no way has gone away, and in fact grew 7%, to 8,300 in January, according to the same federal count.
Oh, good, who needs to address a problem when you can ignore it?
- This message has been approved by Donald Trump®️™️ 👍
  
  This isn't a partizan issue, just like immigration, Democrats are fucking horrible on homelessness too.
  
  I never realized how Orange the thumbs up was....
- Ah yes, the Covid strategy employed by many.
- San Francisco has increased the number of shelter beds and permanent supportive housing units by more than 50% over the past six years.
  Read the article before commenting next time.
  
  Shelters are not permanent living accommodations. They don't let you stay in them long-term. On top of that, everything from just basic theft to sexual assault happens in shelters.
  Also, if you have a dog, you can't bring the dog with you. If you're a woman alone on the streets, having a dog around to protect you is a pretty good idea.
  So increasing the number of shelter beds doesn't do shit. Permanent housing units, fine. But touting shelters is just bullshit.
  
  You skipped the "and permanent housing units" part of my comment. Shelters are a step to getting off the street. They give homeless access to information and resources to improve their position. It is in no way "ignoring the problem" like you claim. Short of singlehandedly solving poverty, what do you expect a mayor to do?
- I mean,
  How do you read the article, see that the number of people sleeping outside is as low as it's been in a decade, dropped from a number that was increasing, and then say nothing is being done about it?
  Your gymnastics are of the type brought to the Olympics by the Russian team.
  
  Homelessness in no way has gone away, and in fact grew 7%, to 8,300 in January, according to the same federal count.
  Then YOUR gymnastics are at the Russian elite spy level in a Bond movie.
This is so sick. Instead of doing something about the rising homelessness problem, they just shoo them away so rich people don't have to see them anymore. Making life even harder for those who already have it rough.
Way to kick the one laying on the ground.
- In a podcast docu-series, a woman qualified for free housing and was afraid to take it. She had mobility issues and someone in her unhoused community fetched her prescriptions. She was afraid of not being able to get medication. Now imagine how that feels losing your support system and still sleeping outside.
  
  There's a popular idea that homeless people don't want homes.
  I'm sure that's true in isolated cases, but I don't know if it's generally true.
- SF has been trying to solve the problem your way for 20 years and it's only gotten worse.
  
  Incredibly incorrect. SF has done less than nothing to solve the problem for 20 years, and is shocked when doing nothing did nothing.
- Eh. Using public well used spaces as your own personal living space is selfish and disrespectful of everyone else. You got a tent, go out and live in the woods.
  There is no reason to be in the city if you're homeless other than access to drugs.
  
  Or doctors. Or jobs. Or grocery stores.
  You'd be surprised how many homeless or car bound are employed.
  
  There is no reason to be in the city if you’re homeless other than access to drugs.
  Unless you are homeless and unemployed. Which is a thing. Especially in cities with ridiculously high rent like SF.
  You can't really think that all the homeless people in cities are drug addicts.
  
  There is no reason to be in the city if you're homeless other than access to drugs.
  And access to literally everything else, which is why most people live in cities. Drugs are also very common in rural areas because young people have nothing better to do and there's lots of open space to manufacture them.
  I'm certainly not a fan of people pitching tents on sidewalks, but let's at least stick to legitimate arguments.
  
  Using public well used spaces as your own personal living space is selfish and disrespectful of everyone else.
  Tell that to every person parking their car in public. It's an insane waste of space and massive subsidy to the already privileged. We give free/cheap rent to cars EVERYWHERE but far far less for actual humans.
  If we ban cars, we would probably double the amount of land available housing. Not to mention the benefits in terms of imperialism, pollution, violence, equity, wastefulness, etc.
  
  I pity you. People like you don’t deserve pity but I pity you regardless.
  
  I hope you never become homeless.
  Or maybe I hope you do, just enough so that you can understand what those people are going through.
  
  Aren't you a peach. I hope your username stands for Dick-karma and I hope that karma of being a dick comes back to you tenfold.
  
  Eh. Using public well used spaces as your own personal living space is selfish and disrespectful of everyone else.
  Hopefully you support a ban on private vehicles then? Special big trucks and SUVs.
  
  "The only thing in a city is drugs"
Tracking homeless people is extremely difficult and where all the people once living on San Francisco’s streets have gone is impossible to know.
We all know where they went. Oakland and Richmond.
- Don't forget Sacramento. I hate the sweeping under the rug without fixing the problems.
  
  Honestly makes sense. As messed up as it sounds, it 100% must be cheaper for the city to offer a bus ticket out of town than to actually address why people are homeless. Capitalism is an asshole.
  
  Sacramento?
  That sounds like the best possible solution, send them to the state capital so the state actually has to deal with them.
“We’re seeing much cleaner sidewalks,” said Terry Asten Bennett, owner of Cliff’s Variety store in the city’s historically gay Castro neighborhood, adding that she hates to see homeless people shuffled around.
Caring more about how it 'looks' than how unhoused people are surviving is peak 21st century bs.
- I get your point, but the owner is just making an observation and even says they hate seeing people shuffled around in your quote.
Gotta clear the encampment location for the incoming waves of foreclosure homeless people!
From my time with a county government: homeless tend to cycle between being within municipal city limits, unincorporated county, and state/federal lands like Dept of Transportation lots with highway overpasses and such.
Shuffling between jurisdictions keeps legal proceedings ever going anywhere.
- That's it exactly, move them around like whackamole.
They probably are doing what a lot of places in the country do and just bus the homeless people out of their city and send them to another.
- That's how they all ended up in SF in the first place.
I just went to Dreamforce last week and was told they push the tents further away from the conference while it's happening.
I don't know what it looked like before but there are still PLENTY of homeless in San Francisco and it's very sad to see.
- Saw the same thing in Hollywood last year, Walk of Fame was clear, but man, one block after it ended, tents everywhere.
- Dreamforce has always paid San Francisco a ton of money to block off entire streets around Moscone Center. There was no way the city would allow a speck of dirt or homeless people within walking distance of the area. You drift out of the zone, though, and reality comes crashing down.
They're all turning up where I live across the bay
Similar thing going on in Seattle.
- Yeah, I've been wondering about that.. any theories?
  
  Sweeps by police mostly. Lots in jail, others pushed to suburbs (especially since they combined the Seattle homelessness initiatives with king county resources), and a few put in temporary housing.
Living on the Southern Atlantic seaboard here, a lot of our homeless are from New Jersey and Maryland... usually get a big wave of them come winter; local governments in the northeast shipping them down so they don't die from exposure in the colder months.
They could put them all in Sausalito and Bay Farm. That would precipitate a solution quickly, I’m sure.
... a major london breed is running the city? :|

74 comments