Do you think the homeless situation in west coast cities will ever get better?

[Pedestrian]

Originally Posted by The North One

They don't gravitate, they come from your cities. Mostly because they can't afford the housing and nobody is helping.

How are you this willfully ignorant?

This is wrong on many fronts. According to a liberal source:

The 2019 report found 70 percent had lived in the city; 22 percent in another California county and 8 percent out-of-state. Of that 70 percent, more than half, or 55 percent, reported living in San Francisco for a decade or more before losing their home. Just 6 percent said they had lived in the city for less than a year.

Going back a dozen years, the city’s 2007 point-in-time count shows 62 percent reported being from San Francisco; about 16 percent were from outside the state and 15 percent were from another county in the state.

I think these numbers--55% and 62% can be taken as the high limit of reality but even accepting them, it means that 45% or 38% were from some place other than where they because "homeless".

That actually makes sense to me. In the 12 years I spent in a substance abuse clinic providing walk-in services, my experience was that many of these people had fairly marginal existences before they actually became homeless. They lived in borderline housing (in SF, that usually means "single room occupancy" hotel rooms which, for those who don't know, often means a shared bathroom and no cooking facilities). And typically they became homeless because they lost their low income job when they became mentally ill or seriously involved with substance abuse.

I also think you have to distinguish between the chronically homeless--the ones you find living on our sidewalks in tents, usually single males--and the acutely homeless which much more often means families and/or people who lost employment NOT due to mental and substance issues. In a city like San Francisco, with a vast variety of services for "the homeless", the families usually get some sort of housing fairly quickly and because they are still employable, often get back into the work force.

As for the "nobody is helping" complaint, the city and county of SF spends something like $600 million per year on its homeless problem including both prevention and direct aid and services. Given that the city has a population of about 800,000, that's a contribution of an average of $750/year from every man woman and child targeted to the problem. In that sense, we are ALL "helping".

Finally, there's THIS:

Editorial: The lesson of San Francisco's luxury-priced homeless camps
Chronicle Editorial Board
March 5, 2021

The rent for a small San Francisco apartment remains astonishing enough even after a year of battering by the pandemic economy. The monthly cost of a crude tent at one of the city’s sanctioned encampments — over $5,000, or 2½ times the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment — is more so.

But it shouldn’t surprise any observer of state and regional homelessness policy. California and its cities and counties have dedicated ever more money to homeless services and affordable housing . . . .

. . . spending public money alone is hopelessly inefficient and ultimately hopeless as a means of ending homelessness.

Known as safe sleeping sites, the city’s half dozen sanctioned camps are expensive partly because they were hurried into being as an emergency response to the pandemic. Group shelters, at high risk of outbreaks, had to be emptied. Nor are the camps just collections of tents: They come with staffing and services, including food, bathrooms, security and social workers. And their annual cost is about 5% of what the city spends on homelessness.

Still, at $16 million a year to shelter 314 people, the cost is untenable and unjustifiable at anything approaching San Francisco’s homeless population of over 8,000 according to the last official count. The emergency hotel and motel rooms marshaled for similar reasons house 10 times as many, mostly at the expense of the federal government. But they cost over 40% more per night on average and could be even less sustainable as funding disappears and the hotel industry revives.

San Francisco spends more than $300 million a year on homelessness, a figure expected to roughly double under a measure approved by voters in 2018 . . . .

https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/...s-16004693.php

It's just ridiculous to say that, if spending money constitutes "helping", "nobody is helping".

[The North One]

Huh??? You have a funny way of presenting and cherry picking information. Your source proves me correct, the vast majority of the homeless in 2019 are from San Francisco and had lived there prior to becoming homeless (70%) with more than half of that having been there for decades. Only 8% are actually from out of California. The rest are all likely from within the Bay Area that came into SF's tiny city limits.

[Pedestrian]

Originally Posted by The North One

Huh??? You have a funny way of presenting and cherry picking information. Your source proves me correct, the vast majority of the homeless in 2019 are from San Francisco and had lived there prior to becoming homeless (70%) with more than half of that having been there for decades. Only 8% are actually from out of California. The rest are all likely from within the Bay Area that came into SF's tiny city limits.

The majority have lived in SF a while. It's not a "vast" majority. This certainly shouldn't be a surprise. What should be is what I said--that between ⅓ and a half of the SF homeless are relatively recent arrivals at best.

Finally. the information source is the people themselves who are motivated to claim local residency (among other things, the state tries to induce them to leave if they are newly arrived and have roots elsewhere--they actually will buy them a bus ticket).

Actually, it isn't surprising a lot of them lived somewhere in CA before they moved to San Francisco. All counties in CA have a benefit called "general assistance" that goes to single males who don't qualify for other forms of income assistance. The amount varies by county and SF has among the highest, if not THE highest, in the state. There's a lot of fraud in the system also with numerous people being caught collecting benefits in more than one county. But it's well documented that people move to SF from elsewhere in the state to collect the higher GA benefit (and too many of them keep collecting it in the county they left as well).