SF - and probably much of the US homeless problem elsewhere - is largely cost of housing; rent and home prices are ridiculous enough that if you don't make big bucks, you are likely barely scraping by. Rents here are rising way faster than inflation, and it makes everything more expensive and means a lot more people are living that much closer to not being able to pay their rent. Way easier to end up homeless after losing your job when paying 3k/month in rent than 1k/month, as at the cheaper rent saving money is actually possible.
We've consistently built a tiny fraction of the new residential units needed for projected population growth for decades now. Supply has been barely growing while demand surged; what else should we expect?
Other parts of the country have not been as extreme, but this has played out in other cities too. We've had terrible housing policy, and increased homelessness is a direct consequence.
What you say is completely true, but part of the problem is that people have very different ideas of what they are talking about when they talk about homeless people.
People who tend to complain about the homeless are generally only complaining about the visibly homeless (i.e., the people living on the street). Meanwhile the people who advocate for helping the homeless are more likely to also care about the invisible homeless who tend to make up the majority of all homeless people. These are the folks who might have jobs, live in their car, have a gym membership to shower, etc. You could spend a lot of time with many of these people and have no idea they were homeless and as a result they aren't included in many people's perception of the problem of homelessness. Therefore, it's hard for people to believe that something as simple as lowering rent prices could actually solve homelessness for a majority of homeless people.
I think the burden of proof is on your position. When activists in my area pick a fight with local government, it's never over that invisible group. Indeed, as far as I can tell, they don't give a rip about the veterans living in the forest over by the VA hospital. I've never seen them over there. They're too busy picking fights defending the ones pooping at the downtown parks (and not in the public toilet) or trying to get city funding and approval for safe drug use, etc.
Now, you're right that there are people that do care and put tremendous effort into that more invisible group. Churches and church-backed organizations do a lot of that. Difference is, except for fund-raising from like-minded folks (and a lot of them hate even asking for money), they go about their work quietly, without seeking attention or reward.
There'd be the possibility of joining forces, but not with the DSA-types that jump in the limelight and scream the loudest and advocate for free needles. The people doing the bulk of the hard work don't want to make a statement on Palestine, they just want volunteers for the hard-to-staff weekday shower-cleaning shift. They need men willing to be mentors, etc. They care about the actual people they're serving, not trying to bring about glorious revolution. The two groups aren't compatible at the moment.
> they just want volunteers for the hard-to-staff weekday shower-cleaning shift
This may sound like a loaded question, but I assure you, that's not my intention. If you want to provide for those "invisible" homeless, who aren't drug addicts or mentally ill, shouldn't the primary volunteer pool consist of exactly those invisible homeless people? Or in other words, once you have organizers, why do you need external volunteers for cleaning the showers?
Point in case - my 75-yr-old retired parents staff one of those church showers in one of the most affluent towns south of SF. They have time, because they're retired.
The people using those showers can't volunteer, they have jobs they have to get to.
That's the point here, the invisible homeless are people who are _fully employed_ but they're still too poor to have homes to live in.
Thank you for being one of the few to draw a distinction there! The thing is, that second group are arguably already being helped by the many, many taxpayer-funded services we already have. They use the resources as intended to get back on their feet. I know it's not a fun time to be in that boat, but as long as it's a temporary boat and not a permanent predicament, it's not a societal emergency. To be clear, I'd support any reasonable policy specifically targeted and proven to help people who are in this situation.
One more thing:
> something as simple as lowering rent prices
Suppose you solve that (by market means, constructing an incredible amount of homes, or by communist means, by draconian rent-control cutting all rents by 70%). A 2-bedroom apartment in SF is now $1,200 and there are 50,000 of them vacant. Would these apartments not be immediately rented by 50,000 households from elsewhere who have always wanted to live there but haven't been able to afford it? Either the rents would shoot right back up if we're letting markets function, or the apartments would be insta-filled by a few very lucky people, with a years-long waiting list for any housing that ever opens up. There will always be one more person who will be happy to move to a great climate, top-tier city, unless the rents are obnoxiously high.
Rent control won't really solve the problem as it can only help people who already live in the city but makes rents even higher for new residents - there have been studies that essentially find that rent control essentially just transfers money from newer residents to ones who have lived here a long time. And worse, it a removes incentives for improving existing buildings and for current tenants to move, thereby reducing liquidity in the market - eg if you would like to upsize or downsize for whatever reason, being locked into a good rent controlled price is a strong disincentive.
The better solution is definitely "build an incredible amount of homes" though $1200 probably is not be obtainable even at extreme ends of possibility. We also should consider it a region wide problem and not just an SF problem - the whole bay area needs to build more, as rents in Oakland, Daly City, San Mateo, etc are related to SF prices as well. If the region is going to add jobs we better add housing at the same rate, and we've massively failed at that.
But anyway if the market actually starts functioning as new supply appears any tent decrease would incrementally attract some new tenants from elsewhere. Rents only shoot back up if the supply increase isn't sustained addition, or we somehow artificially lower rents for a short period. In a functioning market we should find an equilibrium price and when demand spikes faster than units can be built, be development would spring up that in a few years would push prices back towards normal (as jobs / the economy clearly moves faster than new housing can be constructed). But even in the booms when construction should be seeing the influx of people with high salaries and trying to develop new housing to keep up... Well, the volume of new housing just didn't keep up.
Are you talking about the homeless who are actually causing any problems (the chronic homeless)? Or the meaningless statistical group of "Everyone who doesn't have their own/rented home today"?
> Way easier to end up homeless after losing your job when paying 3k/month in rent than 1k/month
Any person without serious mental and/or substance problems can handle losing their job without sleeping in the streets. By virtue of not being mentally ill and addicted, everyone else has "friends" and "family" somewhere who would say "Oh, gee Fred, sorry you lost your job. Sleep on my couch for a few weeks while you're looking for work."
The only people who don't are those who have burned every bridge by repeatedly betraying the trust of those who love them (theft, bringing drugs into their home, sexual abuse, etc).
A lot of people also sleep in their cars and shower at the gym while putting their lives together. Now, those people DO count as homeless in the official counts, but they aren't the ones causing any problems, and they also consume only a tiny fraction of the public resources that "The Homeless" we see on the streets do.
So, while lower rents would help with the official numbers, you would see little improvement on the streets because that's not why they're there.
(All that said, I'm sure there's a small pipeline from the 'temp homeless' to the 'chronic homeless,' which is probably 99.9% made up of people who are in the "living in the car" or "couch surfing" phase who make the poor choices to take up an addiction to drown their sorrows.)
Separately, the other problem with the "just build more housing" plan is: These cities aren't surrounded by 50-foot walls. They're not closed systems. Say we build so much that the $3000 rent drops to $1000. Now, people from elsewhere, seeing that SF is now as cheap as Fresno, will decide to move there, as the weather is way better, and there are tons of cool things about living in a world-class city by the sea. The low prices pull people from elsewhere just as reliably as low air pressure causes wind to blow towards it. (This is also why these temperate coastal cities can't fix things with money: The more comfortable you make it to be homeless in your city, the more tweakers from the hinterland will gravitate to the city.)
> Any person without serious mental and/or substance problems can handle losing their job without sleeping in the streets.
This statement is very load-bearing in your whole argument though. Losing a job can completely derail a person's daily habits and cause their issues to worsen, either by the additional stress or by forgetting to keep their meds. It's downhill from there.
Becoming and then staying homeless for a significant time is often almost irreversible. The key is to prevent people from ever getting there, as much as you can - and that is the point the poster above was making. The fall from house + job > house > no house makes it very hard to ever get another job that actually pays enough to go back to having a house.
After the Civil War, when many plantation properties became economically unsustainable, occasionally the main house would be abandoned by the owners, and the remaining sharecroppers would take up residence; one house that used to be for one extravagantly wealthy family, now occupied by a handful.
In Newport, RI, after the income tax made maintaining grand Gilded Age domiciles untenable, many were subdivided into multiple units. Again, a house for one family (and there servants) turned out to be decent housing for multiple.
People keep saying that America has a building deficit, and to some extent, we do. But we also have a lot of physically massive houses that house one family, because those families can currently afford it. Historically, that has not been a permanent state.
From about 2010 onwards we have had the phenomenon of the High-Income White Collar Itinerate - the Silicon Valley worker living in a converted van, or the remote coder working from a LOC country with low barriers to entry regarding Visas and Taxation. These being the 'privileged' demographic.
The less fortunate simply deal with shrinkflation of the bottom tiers of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Only 12% of married Americans under 30 own a home in 2026. In 1960 it was 52%.
The pandemic-heightened desire for more spacious and independent living, as well as “excess” savings accumulated early in the lockdown stages of the pandemic, propelled headship rates of young adults by two percentage point to 43.1%, the highest level since 2010. This still didn't meet parity with the historic norms of 1990-2000s.
The problem is money, but at a different level. When you deal with the homeless it's too late. That money must be spent before someone becomes homeless, on welfare: unemployment benefits, accessible healthcare and housing. A minor cut taken care of immediately is nothing, but let it turn into gangrene and you won't be able to fix it at all.
AFAIK also SF was long known as "hobo capital", meaning many homeless or drifting people just ended up there. So it's much more complex than that, since many of the homeless are not even locals.
Yes, develop an economy that is not run for rent seekers. Provide a job guarantee so everyone can work at a wage floor. Build housing stock that is actually affordable and desirable for anyone on a normal wage. Make sure healthcare is affordable and available universally. Provide schools that are good regardless of where you live or what you can afford. Those things would be a start.
Spending money is necessary but not sufficient to fix this sort (or literally any sort?) of big problem.
I hope you don't think San Francisco having spent a lot of money on the problem (the $100k per person figure in isolation is deceptive, but let's not dwell on that) means we've expended more than a really minimal amount of effort as a nation on the problem. Consider how little the problem of homelessness was discussed during the last presidential cycle, or how often it's discussed in congress, and I think you'll see what I mean. (consider the words used when debating it and you'll really understand what I mean)
Something to keep in mind is that that figure includes homeless people who have been homed and are being supported, it's not just the ones currently on the streets.
I think around 1986 Reagan cut the federal funding to the facilities that would house the mentally ill. This created the homeless situation in the USA. I remember the term homeless as newly formed at that time and remember the population exploding as I went through college in center city Philadelphia.
The homeless situation as we know it had multiple causes in the 80s and prior. Part of it was Reagan-era policies wanting to save money, but the other half (which in my view would have probably still "achieved" the same end result) was activists who argued that involuntary institutionalization violated the rights of those who were committed. "The Left" and "The Right" were full partners in dismantling what we had. In my opinion, both were too stupid to realize the consequences of just deleting what existed without having a realistic plan for how to deal with those people. It's like if you realized your water heater was consuming $30 worth of electricity every month so you just turn the breaker off and say "We saved $30 and improved our climate footprint" but now everyone has to take cold showers forever and the dishes don't get properly cleaned.
There was always a population that preferred living on the margins of society. Hobo’s and tramps are different than the mentally ill and they were called hobos and tramps. My grandmother used to trade food for labor of these people as they passed through.
The homeless were people that could not care for themselves or be of use in some way. The grey area might be junkies.
The problem is you can’t get people off the street if they don’t want to get off the street unless you do it forcibly. You can end the homeless problem overnight but SF is too empathetic. I’m not even saying this is a fault, I’d rather they fail on the side of empathy than succeed violently.
The problem is one of the alternatives they consider worse than homelessness is a life without opioids.
I had cousin who was homeless in San Diego. Over the years she came into money a couple times, either from family members or through inheritance. Instead of getting a place to live she figured drugs were a better use for that money. We tried everything to get her off the street, and nothing worked. She wouldn't even stay at a shelter. Because she had no intention of giving up the drugs.
They don’t want to be homeless but they don’t want to put up with free housing drug free rules so they prefer to stay on the streets where they can keep using.
And still once I was ina small restaurant that let a homeless guy use the toilet and they forced the door open after hearing crashing sounds, and he had painted the walls with his poop and jumped up and down on the sink until it broke off.
Days later I saw a sign in their window saying the bathroom was for customers only.
SF is one of the highest cost of living cities in the US. I'm guessing housing and utilities is going to chew up the majority of that $100K, before you even consider medical and mental health visits and transportation to and from those visits, and there is likely tons of resistance from surrounding localities to allowing the City to relocate those they are helping to suburbs where they might find cheaper and/or more accessible housing, food costs, improved access to healthcare, etc.
Repeal all prohibition. It enriches cartels and incites corruption. Take all the money pissed up the wall fighting drug crime and spend it on treatment and rehab. Let corporations sell pharmaceutical grade drugs like heroin (junkies don't actually want fentanyl, it wears off too fast while heroin lasts for hours) and pay some fucking tax.
It is pretty much how China has handled it. It seems like it does actually work if your goal is to fully eliminate drug issues, but it's unacceptably harsh for most countries to palate.
A quick check suggests the penalty for possession is 3 years in prison, not life. No idea if that is a maximum sentence.
From what I can find, it looks like China does a lot of what the US does, including DARE style education, and that there is still (by Chinese accounts) quite a lot of illegal drug use.
I would think that since China is very nationalist and still fairly collectivist/anti-individualist, and has a grim history of drugs being used as a tool of foreign imperialism (the opium wars), drug use is much further out of the social "Overton window". I think that's a better explanation for apparently lower drug use than harsh punishments, because other states also have those (notably the US!)
Dealers can deal with that easily, this is often how they operate now, they don't carry big bags of stuff in their pockets usually they have nothing if police will do quick search. With that approach you will mostly catch users.
If I would be getting these naive suggestions of yours in this thread from my 6 year old son, I could respect them. But adults in 2026 should definitely know better and know a bit of history to reflect on.
The laws are enforced harshly and consistently, so people follow them. As a result, you have low crime and low total incarceration.
Take auto theft. In California, we have 1 auto theft arrest per 15 stolen cars. Incarceration rate is 1 in 5 of those arrested, so 1 per 75 stolen cars.
Japan has 1 arrest for every 2 stolen cars - A much higher rate of getting caught.
Japan has about 5,000 stolen vehicles nationally per year. California has about 200,000 per year.
As a result, there are very few in prison for it, despite the 10 year sentence.
Could it be because Japan is populated mostly (98%) by people who have lived there for multiple generations under strict rules? Also, it's probably a cultural thing where crime is shamed.
Be careful comparing such statistics between countries as the defintions of what counts at every step will be different and there are always contributing factors that skew the statistics.
Prison isn't the right idea. But getting them into some sort of treatment would make sense. And that could be court mandated for repeat offenders for some crimes.
That was what was supposed to happen in Oregon when they decriminalized drugs. However, building the treatment centers, shelters, etc took forever, in part due to communities pushing back against these facilities being built in their neighborhoods, and you still need a well-staffed justice system with sufficient judges and public defenders to actually process offenders in a timely fashion or at all. Lack of public defenders, judges and jail capacity is why Portland has so much catch and release, not due to unwillingness to enforce the law.
I kind of read the suggestion as a deterrent for dealers and people engaged in drug trafficking, which could lead to less addicts... Not as "jail the junkies!"
And? Doctors are not supposed to be a pharma dispensary. Depending on motivational factors a doctor may either tell someone to suck it up, quickly fill out a standard subscription to cover up the symptoms or spends some time to diagnose and fix the root cause and then prescribe medication by taking into account but the patients immediate needs and the long-term health impacts.
I assure you, if they stopped spending that money tomorrow, things would get dramatically worse, as all the people that money keeps off the streets would be on them.
But currently housed people becoming street homeless would.
Unless you mean to say that you don't care either way if they do.
(If your value system places zero value on that, then my value system places positive value on spending your money on things you very explicitly don't value.)
This argument is so dumb. SF spends so profligately that a well–run system could spend less money and be just as effective, if not more effective. Nobody would be turned out onto the street just because less money was being spent. Half of that money is probably going to fraudsters who are bilking the government. A lot of it is probably being spent in useless ways that ensure that more money will be spent on the problem in the future, to keep the cash spigot running to the NGOs that profit from the homeless.
The vast majority of the homeless you see on the streets in the US are there no because of money trouble, but because of mental health or drug issues (or both).
People with money issues can almost always lean on friends or family. It’s the people that no longer have any friends or family willing to put up with them that end up on the streets.
Then the question becomes why US has such a huge problem with mental health and drugs that most other countries don't have with this scale. Maybe it's easier to develop mental health and/or drug issues when there are no societal safety nets, like accessible healthcare, decent affordable housing, unemployment benefits, ...
I don't know why people seem to think the US has "no societal safety nets."
We have medicaid, unemployment benefits, how expensive our housing is completely depends on location just like other places (rural-ish areas are probably cheaper than almost all of Europe), etc.
We really should go with a harsh Chinese solution. If you do drugs in China, you hope your dad is Jackie Chan or you are going to have a really hard life. And being caught homeless in a big city gets you a free escorted bus ticket back to the poor rural area your hukou is in, where you couldnt make it either.
The more western solutions are compassionate containment like in Finland.
America cant make up its mind if it wants to be like China or Finland.
I live in Berlin and there's a ton of homeless people on the streets. As bad as most major US cities (SF is worse, or at least was - I haven't visited in a few years).
If they're spending money on, say, school lunches for poor kids and on substance abuse programs, they're not technically spending money on homeless people, but it's hard to see that the money that isn't being spent on the unhoused doesn't help people not become unhoused in the first place.
Closer familial ties + extremely harsh laws for drug sale and use. Asians realized how opium fucked China for a century and made sure none of that shit flies.
SF would beg to differ. They have a budget of $100k per homeless person. They can't solve the problem because the problem is not money