San Francisco: 40 Years of Failure

Trying the same thing over and over, yet expecting a different result.

Homeless people in San Francisco’s Tenderloin protest lack of housing during Christmas of 1982.

Downtown San Francisco appeared different after the city removed most homeless residents and their possessions from the Asia-Pacific Economic Conference (APEC) area. Business leaders and political commentators proclaimed amazement that San Francisco’s homeless woes were seemingly vanquished for APEC. Many asked why downtown couldn’t look like this all the time. So, I have to wonder: do these people really think San Francisco city government hasn’t tried to sweep away the homeless before? San Francisco sweeps homeless people away from downtown whenever it hosts the Super Bowl, World Series or any major event downtown. This isn’t new and homeless people will return like clockwork afterwards.

I’ve discovered how few participants in San Francisco politics have a knowledge of San Francisco’s history beyond ten, maybe twenty years. This limited knowledge is common even among people who defend the homeless and mistakenly believe the tech boom created the housing crisis. If we want a downtown San Francisco where people aren’t dying on the streets, we need to accept this isn’t really about the current mayor, the board of supervisors or the technology sector. Any solution to homelessness must first understand that homelessness in San Francisco goes back over forty years and not much has changed since.

Today, there are an estimated 8,000 homeless people in San Francisco, while homeless advocates charge the real number is 2 or 3 times than the official night count. In 1982, the earliest official approximation of San Francisco’s homeless population was — drum roll, please — about 8,000. S.F. has around the same number of unhoused residents over forty years ago that it has now. Homeless activists in 1982 also believed this to be an under-estimate and argued the real population was upwards of 15,000.

By the 1980s, San Francisco’s residential construction had all but ended thanks to mass downzoning of neighborhoods to prevent apartments, public housing defunding, redevelopment destroying homes and economic issues. While rents increased and rent control was enacted to withstand it, office development downtown took off. The growing imbalance between employment and housing; deindustrialization and growth of white collar employment, transformed homelessness from a problem of runaway hippies to one of Vietnam veterans, minorities and immigrants unable to get housing.

To make matters worse, the decline of SROs in the United States during the 1970s put people who otherwise could find a room out on the streets. By 1990, the U.S. Census Bureau conducted a homeless count and found that there were 6,000 homeless at any given night in San Francisco. Census volunteers told the media this was an under count due to high numbers of uncooperative and missed individuals.

A study sponsored by the Association of Bay Area Governments used customer data from a homeless support organization to estimate 23,000 had been homeless in San Francisco at any given point in 1990. In comparison, the San Francisco Department on Homelessness estimates that 21,000 people experienced homelessness in 2019. Again, 30 years later and hardly a difference between them. By 2000, the city began its own homeless count system based on shelter usage and estimated 5,400 were homeless. It jumped to 8,600 and then fell back 6,500 in the aughts, mostly due to changes in the count methodology and some minor improvements in re-housing people. The homeless count remained steady until 2017 when the count jumped back to 8,000 and has remained since.

Just as San Francisco’s homelessness crisis repeats itself like the movie Groundhog Day, the city also endures the same cycle of reactionary politics. A cocktail of economic whiplashes and housing shortages make the city unable to accommodate normal mobility and migration, putting a new generation of residents and newcomers into tents and vehicles. A drug crisis springs up that disproportionately hits the unhoused. It was crack-cocaine then and it’s fentanyl now. A pandemic disproportionately kills homeless people; be it AIDS in the 1990s and COVID-19 today.

Media and business groups proclaim the streets populated with tents and drug addicts in the Tenderloin signal the death of San Francisco. Homelessness, high housing costs and displacement spills out of San Francisco and into nearby cities. Anti-homeless laws are passed in Bay Area suburbs, leading to envious political centrists in San Francisco desiring the same. Leftist activism flares up before police crack down on them with occupations of vacant property like Moms 4 Housing in 2019 Oakland, and the various Bay Area “Homeless Union” occupations of the 1980s and ‘90s.

The umpteenth San Francisco mayor, upon realizing homelessness increases at a rate faster than people are re-housed, evicts encampments after housed residents get angry. Every generation, well-spoken anti-homeless pundits insist homelessness is not a housing problem to a sympathetic center or liberal audience. Newspapers and political pundits call into question the large sum of money going to a problem that doesn’t seem to end.

Regarding the last point, there’s understandable frustration about the millions going to nonprofits yet street improvements not appearing evident. The cost to build homes for homeless people now exceeds $1 million per individual home in S.F. Administering services is getting costlier, in-part due to the cost of living issue for workers, thus reducing purchasing power of current subsidies. But the real issue is that these costs are getting higher, not the homeless nonprofits that administer them and do a fairly good job. Without these nonprofits the homeless wouldn’t be helped, and defunding them wouldn’t do anything to rebuild public sector capacity in administering these services. It was austerity of the 1970s and 1980s that gave birth to these nonprofits and killed public capacity to begin with.

The real criticism of progressives is that they are really good at responding to homelessness, unlike political moderates, but they’re not good at preventing it. They refuse to believe building more non-subsidized homes does anything other than make homelessness worse. Despite near unanimous research to the contrary. Even now they’re fighting the state from forcing the city to rezone and approve homes faster — something literally no other citywide progressive coalition in the Bay Area or even the state of California is doing.

The progressives in S.F. have this unique and unusual anti-housing development position because Moderate vs. Progressive politics in S.F. is an extension of the pro-development Downtown vs. pro-preservation Neighborhoods fight of San Francisco’s mid to late 20th century. This dynamic gets rebranded over the years to Progressive and Moderate, Pro- vs. Anti-Growth but the core opinions are generally the same.

The sad thing is that S.F. progressives undermine themselves by holding these evidence-free positions. They rightly identify “Housing First” and not sweeps as the evidence-based solution to homelessness. The progressives are correct and anti-homeless pundits like Michael Shellenberger are incorrect. Housing First has substantially reduced overall homelessness in Houston, Atlanta and Minneapolis by giving the homeless homes before beginning drug treatment and sobriety programs. Logical too, since many of these addiction issues stem from being unhoused. But S.F. progressives ignore that these cities also had high home construction. Thus, homeless housing construction and acquisition yielded absolute reductions in homelessness while stopping increased homelessness with a better housing market.

The byproduct is that San Francisco paradoxically has one of the nation’s best homeless re-housing services, but it can’t scale it against the insurmountable housing demand which produces more homelessness every day. Metropolitan Houston, while enduring a population boom, saw its homeless count decline from 8,400 to 3,200 since 2011, while San Francisco, which isn't seeing a population boom, has increased in homelessness from 6,400 to 7,200 over that same time frame.

So now we’re in the midst of the umpteenth right-ward, anti-tax lurch on homeless policy because nothing’s changed about San Francisco’s conditions to voters. This is the S.F. Groundhog Day cycle. What’s new is that the rise of fentanyl has collided with unsheltered homlessness like a nuclear reaction. People are in severe distress in the Tenderloin district. It’s not too dissimilar to the streets of declining cities like Philadelphia, but S.F. gets national focus because the poverty contrasts with the city's immense wealth and national media pundits reside there. Moreover, these street conditions weren’t as bad during the crack-cocaine epidemic because poor people in S.F. could still squeeze out homes to do drugs in. Nowadays, former crack houses cost $2 million in San Francisco.

The drug issue is also being selectively engaged with by moderates and progressives. Moderates ignore the evidence showing how conditioning welfare on drug rehabilitation fails. They also keep pushing this line that homeless people in distress are refusing treatment, but ignore that there’s no vacancy in treatment beds for the vast majority of people seeking medical services. Meanwhile, progressives uphold the decriminalization of drugs that Portugal did as a solution for S.F. However, they omit that Portugal’s decriminalization success heavily involved police and courts coercing people into treatment.

I have news for the next phase of city politics on homelessness. Mayors Feinstein, Agnos, Brown, Newsom and Lee all tried the same, failed strategy of sweeping them away, doing “care not cash”, voucher programs to curb panhandling, or doing re-housing without building enough homes overall. None of it reduced homelessness. Anti-homeless laws like Proposition Q in 2016 successfully evicted S.F.’s homeless to Oakland and birthed Oakland’s shanty towns, but new homeless people took their place in downtown San Francisco. Of course, there should be mitigation rules for encampments such as not allowing drug use near schools or working with encampment residents to prevent fires and get sanitation services. But homeless bans fail every time they’re tried.

The number one priority for San Francisco should be the creation of shelter beds by the thousands. Shelters that can both accommodate pet owners and non-pet owners, protections for various genders and sexual orientations, and with storage capacity for personal belongings. The city should be declaring a state of emergency and requesting both state and federal assistance in erecting homes and shelters.

The contrast between New York City, where you seldom see encampments, compared to the shanty towns of the Bay Area and the bodies all over the sidewalk of S.F. is astounding. It is solely because San Francisco and the Bay Area does not have enough shelter beds as an intermediary between becoming homeless and getting subsidized housing. The consequences of unshelered homelessness mean death and induced mental illness for thousands of people. California has the sad distinction of leading the nation in unsheltered homelessness, by far.

The second thing that needs to happen is San Francisco must be absolved of its land use authority. Since the 1960s, San Francisco has proven totally inept at building housing, from the city’s redevelopment agency destroying houses and inducing a housing shortage, to office heavy downtown developments attracting global capital but depending on suburbs to house them. The issue of housing in San Francisco concerns not only its residents but the cities around San Francisco, like Oakland, who suffer from high home prices, displacement and homelessness due to S.F.’s exported externalities.

San Francisco is used as an example by governments all over the world on how to completely bungle housing. If we want to turn this around and not let the 2020s be decade number 5 in San Francisco as a homeless capital of the United States, we need a lot more homes, now. Not just in housing units, but in shelter beds and in treatment beds for drug rehabilitation. Everything else, including sweeping the homeless, has and will fail.