JFC, it's not because of a lack of money that SF has a problem with homeless people, and it's not that more money would make the problem magically go away.
However, when people talk about homelessness being such a big problem in SF, I think a lot of what they are talking about is the subset of homeless people who are "violently mentally ill". That's something that I saw a lot more of in SF than in cities in the Mid West. By "violently mentally ill" I mean things like:
- Yelling at pedestrians that they are the incarnation of Satan and were going to use their demonic powers to strike them down.
- Using racial slurs for minorities that walked past.
- Purposely invading people's personal space.
I don't know why this would be a greater problem, or a more visible problem, with the homeless in SF compared to other places. Maybe in the Mid West it is difficult for people who are too mentally ill to survive the winter. Maybe other cities use anti-vagrancy laws to round them up.
Coordination at the federal level could even out geographical imbalances in services and also prevent all services from having to be delivered in the few places where it’s most expensive to do so. Doing all the free housing in the most expensive market is crazy.
Poverty and homelessness are near all-time lows in the US right now, comparable to Canada. You wouldn't know that by looking at the streets of San Francisco (or Los Angeles for that matter).
At a national level homelessness has declined dramatically since 2000. While San Francisco's problem has only kept getting worse. The US as a whole isn't seeing the homelessness problems that San Francisco is.
While San Francisco was doing nothing, the US implemented the Housing First program under the Bush Administration. That policy was continued and amplified by the Obama Administration, to extraordinary results: homelessness declined through the great recession, rather than skyrocketing as would have been predicted (especially coming out of a housing bust).
Unsheltered homelessness is down 20% since 2007. Total homelessness is down by 15% since 2007.
https://www.hud.gov/sites/dfiles/Main/images/hudno.18-147.jp...
2010 > Obama builds on Bush success to help the homeless
https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-view/2010/...
2013 > The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development reported that the number of the chronically homeless declined by 30% between 2005 and 2007. You might have expected the numbers to spike again when the financial crisis hit but no. Since 2007, the number of chronic homeless has dropped another 19%.
https://www.cnn.com/2013/04/29/opinion/frum-less-homelessnes...
2008 > On a cold January morning in 2001, Mel Martinez, who was then the new secretary of housing and urban development, was headed to his office in his limo when he saw some homeless people huddled on the vents of the steam tunnels that heat federal buildings. "Somebody ought to do something for them," Martinez said he told himself. "And it dawned on me at that moment that it was me." So began the Bush administration's radical, liberal — and successful — national campaign against chronic homelessness.
https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article...
2013 > The Astonishing Decline of Homelessness in America
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/08/the-ast...
Texas still just buys their homeless bus tickets to California. When I ask homeless people in LA where they are from, Texas is the #1 response. The LA Times just ran an article this week about people who to come LA seeking stardom and are homeless within a few weeks because they didn't bring enough money to pay rent because they thought they'd be a rich megastar within a few days.
It's truly fucked up for LA and SF to get blamed for having a homeless problem when most of the homeless in CA aren't even locals.
Along the i5 from Seattle to San Diego the encampments have been growing. There are a few places where it goes away but mostly because of individual city efforts to do something. Source - been driving the route very actively last 5 years.
