SAN FRANCISCO – Sidewalks once teeming with tents, tarps and people passed out next to heaps of trash have largely disappeared from great swaths of San Francisco, a city widely known for its visible homeless population.
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.
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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.
“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.
“But also, as a business owner, I need clean, inviting streets to encourage people to come and shop and visit our city," she said.
Advocates for homeless people say encampment sweeps that force people off the streets are an easy way to hide homelessness from public view.
“Shelter should always be transitional,” said Lukas Illa, an organizer with San Francisco's Coalition on Homelessness. “We shouldn’t have folks be in there as the long-lasting solution.”
Other California cities have also reported a drop in visible homelessness, thanks to improved outreach and more temporary housing. The beach city of Santa Cruz reported a 49% decline in people sleeping unsheltered this year, while Los Angeles recorded a 10% drop.
San Francisco has increased the number of shelter beds and permanent supportive housing units by more than 50% over the past six years. At the same time, city officials are on track to eclipse the nearly 500 sweeps conducted last year, with Breed prioritizing bus tickets out of the city for homeless people and authorizing police to do more to stamp out tents.
San Francisco police have issued at least 150 citations for illegal lodging since Aug. 1, surpassing the 60 citations over the entire previous three years. City crews also have removed more than 1,200 tents and structures.
Tracking homeless people is extremely difficult and where all the people once living on San Francisco’s streets have gone is impossible to know.
There are still people sleeping on sidewalks, some with just a blanket, and tents continue to crop up under freeway overpasses and more isolated corners of the city. But tents that once sprouted outside libraries and subway stations, and went on endlessly for blocks in the Mission, downtown and South of Market districts, are gone. Even the troubled Tenderloin district has seen progress.
Steven Burcell, who became homeless a year ago after a shoulder injury cost him his job, moved into one of 60 new, tiny cabins in May after the car he was living in caught fire.
Mission Cabins is a new type of emergency shelter that offers privacy and allows pets. But like all shelters, it has rules. No drugs, weapons or outside guests are allowed. Residents must consent to their rooms being searched.
“At the beginning, it was rough, you know, going in and just getting adjusted to being searched and having them look through your bags,” acknowledged Burcell, 51.
His tidy 65-square-foot (6-square-meter) room contains a twin bed, pairs of shoes lined by a door that locks and opens onto a sunny courtyard that, on a recent morning, was filled with the voices of children playing at the elementary school next door.
“To have your own space inside here and close the door, not sharing anything with anybody," he said, “it’s huge.”
But Burcell opposes encampment sweeps. He said two friends rejected beds because they thought — inaccurately, he said — the shelter would be infested with rodents. That did not stop crews from taking their tent and everything inside it.
“Now they have nothing. They don’t have any shelter at all,” he said. “They just kind of wander around and take buses, like a lot of people do.”
Since 2018, San Francisco has added 1,800 emergency shelter beds and nearly 5,000 permanent supportive housing units, where people pay 30% of their income toward rent and the rest is subsidized, bringing the total to more than 4,200 beds and 14,000 units.
Breed, who first won office in June 2018, can claim credit for the expansion, although some plans were in place before she became mayor and her administration had huge financial help.
The money came from the federal government battling the pandemic and a California governor — and onetime San Francisco mayor — who made fighting homelessness and tent encampments his priority. Gov. Gavin Newsom has pumped at least $24 billion into the effort since taking office in 2019, including a program to turn hotels into housing.
San Francisco also benefited from a controversial 2018 wealth tax on the city’s tech titans that Breed opposed, saying companies would leave. There was no exodus and the pandemic overshadowed any fallout.
The funds have helped get people off the streets and tripled the annual budget of the San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing from nearly $300 million in 2018 to $850 million this year.
But the department's budget is expected to dip below $700 million next year, and that worries experts who say more is needed in a city where the median price of a home is $1.4 million.
“We still have a housing market that is way too expensive for way too many people. And as long as that continues to be the case, we’re going to see folks falling into homelessness,” said Alex Visotzky, a policy fellow with the National Alliance to End Homelessness.
Advocates for the homeless say that's why city officials need to invest in more affordable housing.
One such place is 835 Turk Street, a former hotel the city purchased and reopened two years ago as supportive housing. It's home to David Labogin, who lost his housing after his mother died.
“Of course, things could be a whole lot better,” he said, sitting on a single bed, “but from where I came from, I got no complaints.”
But housing takes longer to build, and converting old properties is not cheap. The city purchased 835 Turk for $25 million and spent $18 million — twice the estimated amount — rehabilitating it.
Until then, shelters are adapting, accommodating couples and people with pets.
It takes new residents about two weeks to adjust to the rules at Mission Cabins, said Steve Good, CEO of operator Five Keys. “A few rules to keep them safe is better than living on the street, where there aren’t any rules,” he said.
“Amen,” said Patrick Richardson, 54, who stopped by to watch as Good was interviewed. He was on his way to a two-year college in Oakland where he is studying to be an X-ray technician.
Richardson had been sleeping on couches and pavement when an outreach worker offered him a cabin.
His new home, he said, “rescued me.”