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.
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.
In a podcast docu-series, a woman qualified for free housing and was afraid to take it. She had mobility issues and someone in her unhoused community fetched her prescriptions. She was afraid of not being able to get medication. Now imagine how that feels losing your support system and still sleeping outside.
There’s a popular idea that homeless people don’t want homes.
I’m sure that’s true in isolated cases, but I don’t know if it’s generally true.
Yeah I think that normally boils down to a choice of having condescending assholes run your life and force you to jump through endless difficult hoops while massively restricting your life where they take away everything that helps (including pets, relationships, etc) then when people don’t want to put up with that the system washes its hands and says ‘see, they want to he homeless!’
It’s like someone telling you that if you don’t eat the chips they’ve pissed on you don’t ever want to eat again.
Sure there are people and groups that do want to live in a van or moving between worksites, friends and camps but generally they’re not often counted as homeless because they have a postal address (family, friends, or work) through which they’re registered - my brother would technically fall into this as he lives undocumented and illegally in a caravan behind his workplace but is legally registered at our parents, if he didn’t have somewhere to register his bank account, etc then he’d be classed as homeless though that’s verry different to being a ‘rough sleeper’
But yeah if the question asked was ‘do you want a safe and comfortable place to sleep where you’re allowed to live your own life’ then you’ll get a different response to ‘would you like to go to a kind of prison but it’s less safe, more annoying, and we’re taking your dog away, your gf or friends can’t come over, etc etc etc…’