A preliminary release of the biennial point-in-time homelessness count on Thursday showed that there has been a 13 percent decrease in the number of people living on the streets or in tents in San Francisco since 2022 — meaning the city has the lowest number of unsheltered homeless people on its streets in 10 years.
However, the measure of overall homelessness, which also includes people living in shelters, cars, RVs and tents, has risen to 8,323, a 7 percent rise over the last two years.
Moreover, preliminary point-in-time figures show that 437 homeless families were identified in 2024 — a spike of 94 percent from 2022. The report noted that 90 percent of the homeless families resided in vehicles. As of March, 380 families were still on the waitlist for emergency shelter.
The biennial point-in-time count tracks homeless people across the city in a one-night count, and is released by the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing.
Of the total, 4,355 people — about 52.3 percent — are experiencing unsheltered homelessness living in places not meant for human habitation, like cars and campgrounds. And among them, 2,913 people were living on the streets or in tents. The department noted that the overall unsheltered population didn’t change much since 2022 — only a one percent dip — meaning more people are living in places like their vehicles.
Jennifer Friedenbach, the executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness, said it was “not surprising that the street count is down,” pointing to a voter initiative, Proposition C, passed in 2018.
That ballot measure raised taxes on San Francisco businesses earning more than $50 million, and directed the tax money to homelessness services, such as mental health services and hygiene programs. It also goes to housing aid, such as short-term rental subsidies, permanent supportive housing, and the preservation of single-room occupancy buildings.
The measure passed with more than 61 percent of the vote, and had its funds of some $492 million released in 2020.
But the true need may be much larger than what is captured in the count, which is not an accurate gauge of homelessness. The count relies on an army of volunteers who fan out across the city on the same night every year, hand-counting the numbers of tents and vehicles they believe are housing homeless people. Added to that figure are those staying in city shelters or jails.
The count only tallies visible homelessness, and undercounts those who are marginally housed or homeless for parts of the year.
Friedenbach said this especially applied to the counts of homeless families.
“That’s an area that the city has really failed,” said Friedenbach. Families tend to be invisible, she said, either surfing on couches, sleeping in their cars, or hiding in parks. So they are often undercounted.
Still, said Friedenbach, they are useful as a measure of trends over time. “The counts are really good for comparing apples to apples, because they, generally speaking, follow the same methodology year to year,” she said. “But point-in-time counts are never considered accurate. They’re considered undercounts.”
Paul Boden, executive director of Western Regional Advocacy Project, who was himself homeless as a juvenile, said he believes that the city’s policy to improve homelessness has taken a turn for the worse since the city started to do point-in-time counts in 2005.
He thinks that the count rests on basic headcounts of those on the street, but ignores many, many others.
“It just drives me crazy that we do everything but do a yearly analysis of the systemic issues behind why this issue exists,” Boden said.
The count is federally mandated, a requirement for cities like San Francisco that receive federal funding for homelessness services.
Boden called the process “disingenuous,” saying that the pressure of funding makes it “an asinine system for doing an actual needs assessment.”
On Tuesday, Mayor London Breed, joined by Supervisors Hillary Ronen and Myrna Melgar, announced Safer Families — a plan to invest $50.4 million in addressing family homelessness.
Safer Families will add 155 emergency shelter hotel rooms for families and give out vouchers to serve 600 families with emergency shelter over the next year and a half. The plan will also add 165 slots of rapid rehousing — a time-limited subsidy that gradually decreases as the tenant stabilizes and finds housing outside of the homelessness response system. Also to be added: Shallow rent subsidies, a program to lower rent burdens for families, and 50 slots of rapid rehousing for families whose head of the household is age 18 to 24.
That funding would also come from Proposition C, and will not affect the general fund, where the city’s deficit lies, according to the mayor’s statement.
Friedenbach, for her part, said that shelter alone will not solve the problem, and that permanent housing was needed. “You never want to think about shelter alone,” Friedenbach said. “You always want it sandwiched between prevention and housing.”
Let’s remember Prop C does have an impact on the general fund: Stripe and other businesses left over it. While these moves generated transfer tax money in the short term, mid to long term (i.e. today), this means an erosion of the general fund’s tax base.
We should have a healthy skepticism of why business owners say they’re moving out. Maybe for Stripe it was the tax, but maybe it was cheaper real estate in South City, as well as the availability of enough adjacent office space to immediately build a campus for its rapidly expanding workforce.
Businesses also regularly blame street conditions resulting from homelessness for decisions to close or move. That, too, is sometimes a dubious rationalization, but to the extent it’s true, it shows the dilemma we face: underfunding critical social services also has consequences.
The tension is real and it’s why the economist Thomas Piketty suggests that progressive taxes are best passed at the national level so you don’t get capital flight from one city/state to another. That would be the real solution for getting the funds necessary to make sure everyone has housing as a human right. But we all see how hard it would be to pass anything progressive in Washington with the Senate filibuster firmly in place, and now a right-wing Supreme Court as well. That’s probably not happening any time soon, so we in San Francisco have to muddle through as best we can. For me, the benefits of 2018 Prop C clearly outweigh the costs. Many companies still want to locate here; remote work has been a bigger issue.
Prop C passed before the pandemic. There’s no way to quantify the impact, if any, on companies moving out.
It doesn’t matter (except to taxpayers) how much money politicians throw at the homeless “crisis.” We’ve spent billions, and the problem worsens. It’s not just San Francisco – LA was just found to have 1200 or more newly purchased apartments sitting vacant. We’re losing businesses by the day; conventions and tourists go elsewhere. The city has lost some 12% of its population over the last five years.
Breed and her team twist the statistics trying to gaslight voters into believing that she is on top of the problem. The fact is that it’s not about money. It’s about a failure of will and the fact that Breed’s cronies benefit by running the industry designed to keep people homeless and the cronies in lucrative jobs.
We could start by getting rid of HSH, under which the problem has worsened, and the 14-plus teams that allow campers to refuse services. And the nonprofits, whose execs profit handsomely by doing a terrible job with no accountability, need to open their books or be fired.
Enforcing laws against street camping, drug use/sales, running illegal businesses, using the streets as toilets, and assaulting citizens would be a good start. There is a large subclass of street people in need of acute and ongoing medical care, especially psychiatry and substance use. It is despicable and cruel to leave them to languish when they clearly cannot care for themselves.
Then there are the chronic drifters who just don’t want services and “prefer” to live on the street where they don’t have to obey any rules or laws. Other cities do not allow this, and SF should not either. The city shows its contempt for its residents by forcing us to live with and finance this horror show.
We need a new generation of chronic care homes that get people away from the squalor and teach them life skills. There is plenty of money available once the nonprofits are cut out. No more bonds – demand accountability.
Get rid of thr RVs along Lake Merced Blvd. Tow them to the county they were last registered.
Businesses are closing like crazy and vagrants are inevitably increasing, the “progressive”realignment of San Francisco is right on schedule. Soon there will be no evil capitalists left in the city (well except for fentanyl and meth dealers) and the glorious rein of compassion on steroids can triumph!
Study the system that depends on poverty. Stop studying poor people. Help them instead. Study the billionaires who could eradicate poverty if they played by the rules the rest of us are held to. Study how the 85+ billionaires in SF could solve the problems they created on the backs of poor people.