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iAUDIT! - Near the beginning of August, San Francisco’s Mayor London Breed announced a new approach to homelessness. Following Governor Newsom’s lead on directing encampment clean-ups on state land, Breed initiated a “service first” policy, where unhoused people are first offered services before being required to move. Besides the usual services such as shelter or counseling, the new policy re-emphasizes “family reunification”, or paying for a homeless person’s transportation to another location where he or she can be reunited with, and hopefully housed by, family members. I used the term re-emphasized because family reunification has always been part of many cities’ homelessness policies. The practice fell out of favor after some surveys found most homeless people claimed they’d lived within their local communities for several years before becoming homeless, and the stigma some advocates attach to relocation as “shipping your homeless to other cities”.
According to an article in the San Francisco Standard, the city’s new policy has three main components:
- Mandates all city and contracted staff who directly engage with individuals experiencing homelessness to offer access to one of the city’s relocation assistance programs before offering any other services, including housing and shelter.
- Requires first responders, including police officers, firefighters, and paramedics, to provide information handouts on the city’s relocation services and a contact number.
- Establishes a tracking system that will publish data measuring the effectiveness of each program.
This policy stands in stark contrast to the City of L.A., which has vociferously rejected the Supreme Court’s Grants Pass decision and Newsom’s new directive. Despite a lack of demonstrable results, LA will continue to follow Housing First policies, which can best be summarized by City Homelessness Chief Lourdes Castro Ramírez’s description of providing “relentless outreach”, which seems to benefit no one besides nonprofits paid by the contact hour.
The reaction to Breed’s new policy was immediate and overwhelmingly negative, at least as far as the media’s coverage. A few of the headlines include:
“Mayor makes inhumane, ineffective sweeps a major part of her re-election campaign.”
--48hills.com 8/2/24
“Tents Return Right Away In Mission District, Tenderloin Areas Targeted By Encampment Sweeps”
--SFist 8/5/24
“As San Francisco cracks down on homeless encampments, a question arises: Where will people go”?
--L.A. Times 8/3/24
Breed’s opponents in the mayoral election accused her of shilling for moderate votes on the backs of the unhoused, or of outright criminalizing homelessness.
We won’t know the effect of San Francisco’s new policy for at least several months. A crisis created over decades can’t be solved in weeks. But we can get some perspective on the realities of the city’s homeless population and what that may mean for Los Angeles.
The San Francisco Standard noted 40 percent of the respondents in the latest PIT count said they were not from San Francisco, a 12 percent increase in five years. “37 percent who were previously housed say they lived in San Francisco for less than a year when they became homeless, up from 15 percent in 2019. The number of people who lived in SF for more than 10 years before becoming homeless dropped to 14 percent from 43 percent in 2019”. These statistics paint a much different picture than advocates’ claims that the vast majority of the unhoused are long-term members of their local communities. We don’t know what the percentage of non-local people are in LA’s homeless population but given the region’s weather and lax enforcement of camping ordinances, one would be safe assuming it is significant. It doesn’t help that nonprofits like the Weingart Center use local funds to bus people from Florida to L.A.
San Francisco’s increase in the non-local homeless population also brings into question a central tenant of current homelessness policies; that the cost of housing is driving homelessness. If an increasing number of homeless people are new to the area, it is highly unlikely they have been driven out of housing due to high costs. Its is equally unlikely they had regular employment before becoming homeless. In that circumstance, Breed’s approach of leading with relocation makes perfect sense. It is neither cost-effective nor sound policy to create housing for people who choose to move to a city without the resources to house themselves.
Advocates were also quick to accuse Breed of criminalizing homelessness and predicted massive arrests of people with nowhere to go. According to the Standard’s article, to date, only nine arrests have been made, and eight of those were for outstanding warrants. The single person arrested for refusing to move was cited and released on-site. Both the Mayor’s Office and the Chief of Police have made it clear they have no intention of arresting their way out of the homeless crisis.
Another of advocates cherished myths is that the vast majority of unhoused people are not “service resistant”; a sizable population of people who resist shelter would make outreach, regardless of how relentless, pointless. According to the LA Times, San Francisco officials said only about 10% of people offered shelter have accepted it. Ninety percent of the people offered shelter refused it; this is one of the reasons Breed cited for leading with relocation offers; even though the city does not have shelter capacity for every unhoused person, it doesn’t need it because most people won’t accept it anyway.
A Voice of San Francisco article quoted an unhoused person’s attitude toward housing:
“When asked what the best part of being homeless in San Francisco was, Oxsen waxed poetic: “I’ve never been so free to wake up whenever, do whatever I want that day. Let the day just come and go. Who’s to say I’m wasting my time if what I’m doing makes me happy, right? Why does society get to decide what at my age I should be doing right now? … I choose to have my retirement or my vacation, or whatever you want to call it, my hiatus, partying. I’m high all the time, I’m never not high. But that’s my retirement, that’s what I’m doing. I get to wake up on beachfront property and put my f****n’ feet into the sand and watch killer whales … I pay nothing and put my feet in the sand as soon as I wake up. I have beach front property, I have it if I want it.”
The problem, besides the obvious sense of entitlement, is that Mr. Oxsen is enjoying his beach life at taxpayer expense. Someone has to pick up his trash, take care of his hygiene needs, and provide medical help when he inevitably overdoses. The response to Mr. Oxen’s question about why society gets to tell him how to act is “Members of a civilized society have a responsibility to one another. As someone who is paying for your lifestyle, I have the absolute right to tell you that you don’t get to live free where and how you want on my dime”.
The LA Times article is also an example of how advocates often get tripped up by their own stories. The article states, "Breed’s hard-line approach has drawn sharp criticism from homeless advocates, who argue that clearing tents does not address the poverty and addiction that cause homelessness". For years, advocacy groups have insisted addiction is a consequence of homelessness. Now, when it suits them, they say addiction is a cause of homelessness, and therefore must be met with treatment.
Breed’s policies are consistent with the findings of social scientist Micheal Shellenberger, who conducted an extensive study of San Francisco’s homeless population, including in-depth interviews with the unhoused themselves (something LAHSA does not do in LA). He found many unhoused people do not want shelter when offered or will only accept it if they can continue the behaviors that contributed to their homelessness to begin with. Ironically, many of his interviewees said the so-called compassionate services provided by the city, such as food and free needle programs, make it easier to live on the streets. The mission of a homelessness program should be to reduce homelessness, not practice policies that sustain it.
The final reality we need to consider is the effect of homelessness on a city as a whole. Cities aren’t one monolithic entity; they are made up of people, each with their own reasons for living where they do. No one has the exclusive right to define what a city is. Cities are living organisms, where various groups like business owners, homeowners, renters, wealthy and poor, should live in some kind of balance. When one group’s purported rights are elevated above others, the balance is lost. Consider this San Francisco Standard story about business owners in the Castro, that most liberal of liberal San Francisco’s districts. Business owners spend as much as $20,000 to get restraining orders against people whose untreated mental illness poses a danger to employees and customers. California’s byzantine mental health laws leave thousands of people on the street, where many, lacking treatment, become dangers in their communities. California’s mental health laws have tilted so far in favor of protecting people from unnecessary commitments, they have created a more dangerous environment for those with problems and the communities they live in. There is absolutely no reason a resident or business owner should have to follow a draconian and expensive process to get the protection due everyone who lives in a civilized society.
It remains to be seen if Mayor Breed’s new programs will be effective in reducing San Francisco’s homeless population. But we know the city’s current Housing First policies have been ineffective, as they have in Los Angeles. In LA, the result of spending billions has been an infinitesimal, unsubstantiated, and unsustainable decrease of two percent in the City’s homeless population. Perhaps it is time for Los Angeles’ leaders to recognize the reality of the homelessness crisis, as apparently Mayor Breed has.
(Tim Campbell is a resident of Westchester who spent a career in the public service and managed a municipal performance audit program. He focuses on outcomes instead of process.)
