I’m not sure if getting rid of the addiction would automatically make SF houses affordable. Certainly doesn’t help. But it’s also not SF’s job to house the entire nation’s homeless population.
Homeless services can’t discriminate based on previous residency, they aren’t even allowed to ask. HUD has some residency requirements, but they are only loosely enforced. A lifelong resident of SF are often competing for the same resources with ex-cons who just got off the bus after being released from prison in Texas given only an open bus ticket.
That being said, a resident of SF has many more other ways of avoiding the streets (and still be considered unhoused) vs that ex-con, so the numbers are going to be lopsided if we are just counting the visible homeless problem.
That's weird. I learned just last week that Palo Alto requires proof that you ever lived in Palo Alto with a piece of mail before they'll let you into their shelter. Also their shelter has bunk cots. not bunk beds, bunk cots, so the bottom person is inches away from the top person.
According to https://www.asaints.org/outreach/hotel-de-zink/, that is Palo Alto’s only homeless shelter and it doesn’t mention a residency requirement. It also doesn’t have the bunks you are referring to.
East Palo Alto is not the same as Palo Alto at all. I can definitely believe that is at least feasible then, although they do not list a residency requirement on their website. The only requirement is:
Must have a referral from a San Mateo County, or Santa Clara County Partner Organization to receive shelter.
They may be legally distinct, but we can agree that they're physically adjacent, and thus for someone who's unhoused in the Bay Area, they're both options on where to live. I don't think an invisible line that anybody can cross without any sort of border control really that important a distinction here.
I would never call them the same. East Palo Alto is much much poorer than Palo Alto; I think I would be laughed at when I was living in San Mateo if I ever tried to pass off a location in East Palo Alto as being in Palo Alto. One is full of Stanford kids and rich people, the other is full of poor people. Highway 101 isn’t a very invisible line.
I wouldn't call them the same either, but the context here is being unhoused in the Bay Area. I'm not, thankfully, but when I was living in PA I definitely met a few people who dropped East when referring to where they live. Anyway, it's too late to edit my original comment.
It's very unlikely that former residents (in the sense of paying for housing for extended periods of time with their own wage income) comprise a significant portion of San Francisco's street homeless.
It's possible that many frequent flyers to emergency rooms have been dumped from other communities. But most homeless people are just that, people who have lost their homes in their community. And anyway, how could it really be any different?
> with their own wage income
Of course poverty is the number one reason they are becoming homeless. Why are you talking about wage income. They have too little income. Who the hell wants to live on the street!
First of all, you cite data about Oakland when I was talking about San Francisco. The cities are different enough that it's worth noting. I will also state that I am well-informed about the matter and have few "misconceptions" in the obvious sense.
> Nearly 8 out of every 10 unhoused people in Oakland were living in Alameda County when they lost their housing.
That's not what the Point in Time count asks or tries to measure. The statistic reported is the location of last known shelter. So, as an example, someone who moves to San Leandro from Fresno to crash on a friend's couch for two weeks and then is asked to find a different place to stay would count as "living in Alameda County" for the purposes of the statistic. Another example: a longtime homeless person who has cycled in and out of shelters in the region for decades counts as "living in Alameda County" even if they first lost their home in Kern County or out of state.
> Primary Cause of Homelessness (Top five responses, Fig. 19)
This is silly data to cite. Drug use is correlated with money issues, interpersonal relationship problems, eviction, foreclosure, inability to keep a job, and more. Maybe if the survey had a multiple response design, the distribution would be relevant.
> And anyway, how could it really be any different?
Greyhound bus stations. If you’ve ever taken a bus across country before, they pick up a lot of people at prisons and they stay on until some west coast city (LA, SF, Portland, or Seattle). That accumulates, and once they stick around for at least a year, they are considered resident (for some definition of housing lost, that means even if they were housed in a hotel once, or couch surfed at the start). Surveys that rely on self reporting are incredibly inaccurate. One was done in Seattle, and found out that 80% of King county’s homeless population was previously housed in pioneer square, an absurdity that put the entire survey in doubt.
It really is in the self interest of homeless oriented agencies and NGOs to present the problem as local as possible. If it isn’t local, then giving out housing will only make the local problem worse (people will start arriving for their free housing from other areas of the country), you can judge your success by how much worse the problem gets, which isn’t popular with local voters.
Without good information, at any rate, it isn’t weird that we are seeing the problem get worse for every billion we throw at it. Eventually the popular cities will just give up trying very hard because they never had the power to fix it in the first place.
Is this some kind of joke? Do you really think people who get evicted for not paying bills automatically get sent to a different city? How do you propose your magic mechanism to send people from SF away the moment they become homeless? Someone who ends up homeless is going to stay in a place that is familiar to them.
> Do you really think people who get evicted for not paying bills automatically get sent to a different city?
When did I say that?
> How do you propose your magic mechanism to send people from SF away the moment they become homeless?
What does this have to do with anything? The vast majority of tenants evicted in San Francisco receive both legal representation and relocation fees starting at ~$7k per person and more if you claim disability, which most do.
There are ~80 nonpayment evictions in the city annually, and there were ~0 from 2020-2023.
> Someone who ends up homeless is going to stay in a place that is familiar to them.
Probably true of the average homeless person, but there are many more homeless people outside San Francisco than in it, so you only need to believe a small percentage of, say, California's homeless population ends up in the city for local homelessness to be dominated by folks who lost their last stable shelter outside the city.
