What Happened To SF Homelessness?

Last year, I wrote that it would be very hard to decrease the number of mentally ill homeless people in San Francisco. Commenters argued that no, it would be easy, just build more jails and mental hospitals.

A year later, San Francisco feels safer. Visible homelessness is way down. But there wasn’t enough time to build many more jails or mental hospitals. So what happened? Were we all wrong?

Probably not. I only did a cursory investigation, and this is all low-confidence, but it looks like:

1. There was a big decrease in tent encampments, because a series of court cases made it easier for cities to clear them. Most of the former campers are still homeless. They just don’t have tents.

2. There might have been a small decrease in overall homelessness, probably because of falling rents.

3. Mayor Lurie claims to have a Plan To End Homelessness, but it’s probably not responsible for the difference.

4. Every city accuses every other city of shipping homeless people across their borders, but this probably doesn’t explain most of what’s going on in San Francisco in particular.

A Big Decrease In Tent Encampments

This is the most noticeable effect. Original graph from here, colored text is mine:

After a big spike during the worst part of COVID, tents plateaued until mid-2023, then steadily declined. This timeline doesn’t match the two factors most people credit with the decline - the Grant’s Pass v. Johnson case where the Supreme Court made it easier to clear encampments, and Daniel Lurie taking over as mayor.

What does it match? It might match a legal ruling the city got in September 2023. At the time, it was federally illegal to clear away homeless encampments without offering the homeless people an alternative, eg a shelter bed. San Francisco is chronically short on shelter beds, but cleverly kept a small number of beds in reserve on the exact day of cleanup operations to offer the affected individuals (many of whom would decline anyway). In 2022, a homeless advocacy group sued, saying this was a loophole that made a mockery of the requirement, and the city needed to generally have shelter beds available before it could clear encampments; the judge issued an injunction preventing the city from clearing encampments while the case was going on. In September 2023, another judge disagreed, and restored the city’s right to use this strategy.