San Francisco Mayor London Breed is having city workers and police who are conducting sweeps to get the homeless out of their tent encampments offer bus tickets out of town instead of a shelter bed.
It's just the latest signal from Breed that times have changed in San Francisco and a real attempt is being made to address the crisis of homelessness.
“We’re reverting to enforcement,” said Wayman Young, a police officer overseeing the sweep in San Francisco. “Now we don’t have to offer shelter, even though we still do.”
It's estimated there are only 3,600 shelter beds for about 8,300 homeless people. It hardly matters, however. Only about 10% of the homeless have taken up the city's offer to stay in shelters during sweeps this week.
“Unfortunately, San Francisco does not have enough shelter or housing for every person experiencing homelessness, but we do have some beds available each day to support the work of the outreach teams, and we continue to grow our system,” Emily Cohen, the department’s spokesperson, wrote in an email.
In the last few years, there's been a spike in the number of homeless residents who come in from out of town. Bloomberg reports that "The percentage of unhoused people in San Francisco who are from other California counties or different states has increased to 40%, up from 28% in 2019, according to data provided by the mayor’s office."
Breed was trapped by court cases that made it impossible to force people to get off the streets. Those federal orders prevented San Francisco and Los Angeles from clearing encampments and removing the homeless because there weren't enough shelter beds.
With the city possessing less than half the number of shelter beds that were needed, there was little that city officials were able to do until the Supreme Court decision, Grants Pass v. Johnson made laws preventing outdoor camping much easier to enforce.
Instead, Breed — in the thick of a difficult reelection bid — is turning to strategies other than more shelter beds. She said the city may issue criminal penalties for people who repeatedly refuse shelter. But the prospect of local jails processing hundreds more homeless people also raises capacity issues.
On Thursday, Breed put weight behind another approach. She issued an executive directive requiring outreach workers to offer homeless people who aren’t from San Francisco free transportation out of town — to cities where they have family, friends or other connections. Cretan said the city would cover the cost of bus, plane or train fares.
The city has had a similar program in effect for years, but it lost traction during the pandemic. Under the new directive, workers are to press the relocation option before offering any other city services, including housing and shelter.
“This directive will ensure that relocation services will be the first response to our homelessness and substance-use crises, allowing individuals the choice to reunite with support networks before accessing other city services or facing the consequences of refusing care,” Breed wrote in the directive.
California Governor Gavin Newsom issued a statewide directive to clear homeless encampments. But Los Angeles County, which is dealing with 75,000 homeless people, has decided to defy the governor's directive and continue to same failed policies. They call it "care first."
Too bad they don't care a whit about the Los Angeles County residents who are exposed to unnecessary risks from mentally ill, desperate drug addicts who make life a living hell in some parts of the county.
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