It's very hard to work around human nature and the whole "why am I paying rent like a sucker when the drug addicts on the street are getting free apartments?"
I also think that people who point out that a huge percentage of the people on the street are on drugs, so the drugs are the problem are not entirely correct either. The drug use is a symptom that also exacerbates the problem. One of the big contributing factors to California's homelessness problem is that wages have not kept up with rents, and it is not even close. If you're working two full time minimum wage jobs in SF you won't be able to afford an apartment, and that's a fundamental problem. Either bring rents down or wages up, neither of which are popular with the people who have political power.
This idea that the "homeless problem in SF" is primarily a problem of "people being unable to afford homes in SF" is just laughable.
All you need to do is walk down almost any street in San Francisco and take a secondary glance at the homeless people you see, and its obvious that "can't afford a home" is just one of their many problems. Most of these people couldn't hold a job because they're addicted to really hardcore drugs (you might even get an opportunity to watch them smoke or inject some during this secondary glance), and often severely mentally ill. "Homeless" is to a great extent besides the point, this is a mental illness / drug addiction problem.
Even if you could find a solid place for $800/mo in SF, these people wouldn't be in it because the vast majority of them are unfit for employment. If that was really the issue then we could solve all this by just sending them to Omaha.
You're right that people who have several physical or mental health issues would be hard to help, in any system.
But the number one cause of homelessness isn't addiction; it's poverty.
And for that matter, the overwhelming majority of people who are substance-addicted don't become homeless. Lots of the people you work with are addicted to something.
There are so many steps before people literally have to sleep on the streets. They stay out of sight. You surely have noticed all the camper vans on some streets in SF. I'd bet that for every person actually on the street there are 10 who are effectively homeless but managing it in a way you can't see. Living at their place of work or study, living in a vehicle, couch-surfing, illegal sublets, and things I'm happy to never have to imagine.
The article the OP posted details many stories of people who are competent to hold down a job, even multiple jobs, but cannot find anywhere to live.
Those are the homeless that attack the elderly. Those are the homeless that shit on the street. Those are the homeless that lie naked sprawled across the sidewalk or at the end of a BART escalator.
Whatever the cause, these homeless do have mental health and substance abuse issues, often are voluntarily homeless (and will resist help.) They're not all of the homeless problem, but they are a major part of it.
Getting rid of hard drug dealers would solve a large part of the issue. Making it illegal to be on hard drugs (and enforcing it) would be as well.
But I'm just going to say: I've lived in San Francisco. I currently live in Vancouver, not far from the epicentre of unhoused and addicted people.
Vancouver has many of the same problems and for the same reasons.
I have never, not once, feared for my safety around poor or addicted homeless people in Vancouver. Nor did I even feel like they hated me, specifically. I remember walking out of a doorway in Gastown where there was a woman smoking a crack pipe, and she was very apologetic and moved her stuff. It seemed oddly Canadian to me, even at the time.
In San Francisco I often felt sheer rage from unhoused people, or even just poor people. Acting out aggressively at the slightest provocation. Screaming for apparently no reason.
If you've lived your whole life in America it may be hard to imagine that these things aren't universal. But they aren't. If you think about it there really isn't any reason why being poor has to be the same as being dangerous.
I have no evidence as to exactly what the difference is. I think maybe Canadian policies are a little more generous and a little more available. Canadians were just as racist, but maybe American chattel slavery really went over the top in causing such social rifts. I don't really know.
The difference is that Europeans an Canadians are willing to bribe their homeless people to stay in line. It is called coasian bargaining and welfare payments are the only widespread application of it that has had any semblance of success.
Friend, every person gets benefits from the state. Be thankful that all the help you got was education, policing, infrastructure, community wealth, tax policies that favor asset owners, indirect subsidies, or privatized profits from public research. Or policies that would be obvious redistribution if Russia had done them in 1950 but because America does it it’s capitalism. If you look at where America’s defense spending goes it is rather obviously an employment and welfare program with a side hustle of war profiteering and global power projection. Closer to home, there would be no Stanford or Silicon Valley without massive, sustained defense spending in the Cold War.
Bribed? You seem to think that the homeless actively use their immiseration as some kind of protection racket. Maybe there are social services and non-profits that we can legitimately criticize for that (see OP’s article) but the people themselves? Really?
Alternately, we could say the Americans have decided to make the lives of poor and addicted people as bad as can be achieved without actually killing up them. Perhaps they serve a vital function as an example to others about what can happen.
And this is the dividing line on this issue of homeless, how people identify the problem and the motivation for the fix.
Some people want to fix homeless because of empathy while others want to fix it because of selfishness. Your comment reveals that you are in the latter group. You don't actually want to get homeless people into homes because you empathize with how horrible their lives must be without one. You just want to the minority of homeless people who are a nuisance to stop bothering you and people you actually do empathize with. All those other homeless people who aren't attacking the elderly or shitting on the street can keep on living the same invisible life of suffering because their suffering is not actually a problem in your eyes.
Who says we can't help both groups? Why is my position (that we should help the "noisy" homeless) incompatible with the position that we should not help the "silent" homeless? Where did I even imply one was a higher priority than the other?
And what the hell, how is caring about elderly people being attacked "selfish"?
Fixing part of the problem is a good thing. Different strategies might solve different parts of the problem. Objecting to progress isn't helpful and isn't compassionate, it's the way we got our current harm-maximization policies.
My counter to the dismissal of the problem of "nuisance homelessness" was to insist that they're a problem. But argument aside, it sounds like we're agreed policy-wise: let's aggressively fix the problem of violent law-breaking lifestyle-choice homelessness with all the obvious tools we've been neglecting to use, and with the money and peace of mind freed up by their absence (carried out in tandem, no doubt you'll want to accuse me of favouritism for law-abiding seniors again...) turn our efforts to the more difficult issue of the invisible law-abiding down-on-their-luck homeless.
The invisible homeless seem like the people that most likely can be helped, and the ones I feel more empathy and respect for. The visible ones that trash public places and make them unsafe, I want them dealt with so that the problem is fixed for everyone else. If that means involuntary commitment because they refuse drug treatment or being relocated to some sort of housing facility, so be it. I don't think people should be allowed to trash parks, camp on sidewalks or use walking paths for bathrooms and doing drugs, all of which should be illegal.
But when people say "homeless" that's who they mean. Not saying that you are wrong about there being 10x as many people living in camper vans or whatever, but that's just not who anybody means when they talk about homeless people.
Also not saying that it isn't a problem which should be solved, because it absolutely is. But if you did solve it, and you told people that homelessness was down by 90%, they would look at you like you were crazy, because it's only the other 10% they were complaining about in the first place.
You overestimate how much talent it takes to live indoors. Living in a house and being a drunk or junky is actually much more common than being a homeless drunk or junky. Drugs and alcohol do not magically deprive one of the ability to live indoors. Have you ever heard of a crack house? Totally possible to be a housed druggie.
Similarly most mentally ill people are able to muster the ability to sleep indoors.
Let’s agree that nothing about drug addiction or mental illness precludes living indoors.
The increase in homelessness seems as though it corresponds almost exactly to California’s housing crisis and unaffordable rents. Heroin has been around for a long time. It cannot be the explanation for a sudden increase in homelessness. Mental illness is a constant more or less, so it cannot be the explanation either.
What changed over the past decade, and especially changed in the past few years? Housing prices and rents.
I’d love to hear other explanations for the rapid increase of homelessness in California this past decade or two. It cannot be attributed solely to drugs or mental illness.
You are, presumably unintentionally, using a blanket descriptor "mentally ill" and "drug addicted" to describe an extremely wide spectrum of expressions.
"Serious Mental Illness" definitionally requires substantial interference with or limiting of one or more major life activities (including maintaining a safe house, and maintaining employment).
You are conflating people's common use of the term "mental illness" - yes, we can agree that most people with say, seasonal depression, can hold down a job and maintain a house. This is not what San Francisco's visible homeless "mental illness" is referring to. They are suffering from Serious Mental Illness.
No, we cannot agree that most folks with Serious Mental Illness are able to muster the ability to sleep indoors, definitionally.
Again, "drug addiction." There is an appreciable difference between the character of the drug, and the addiction - aka "Chronic Substance Abuse."
That is, once again, I do not agree that someone with open meth sores on their face is going to hold down any sort of a job and/or be able to muster a safe home environment.
Next, you ask what has changed in the past few years? Then conclude only two things have changed in 10 years - "housing prices and rents."
While there may be a correlation, possibly even a causation, this is still an oversimplification of the problem. There are other cities, even in the US that have seen an increase in housing prices and not the corresponding inhumane treatment of both the housed, and unhoused in SF particularly.
I wonder if anything else has changed in SF in 10 years that makes it uniquely inhumane to the homeless, and also disproportionately affecting the entire character of the city? Could it be policies? Complete lawlessness and availability/encouragement/facilitation of new drugs and drug addiction?
There are at least two obvious problems that are unique to the West Coast, perhaps namely SF, 1) an overall increase in homelessness caused by certainly a multitude of factors that include much more than "rent," such as the bifurcation of particularly the SF labor market and the educational/cognitive barriers to "information technology work" versus the alternatives. That is to say, the problem isn't necessarily inherently that rents went up, the corollary is true that pay didn't go up for those experiencing homeless who were happily housed and paying rent before. Ought they move? Ought we relocate them? Ought we pay, say, fast food workers similar to MAMAA developers? It seems you suggest affordable government project housing? And 2) policy that makes it such that those who do suffer from Serious Mental Illness/Chronic Substance Abuse (by some counts, the majority of those experiencing homelessness) that does everything it possibly can to ensure they maximally suffer, while having the greatest possible negative impact to the bystanders, often other people experiencing homelessness, but also the housed, and business owners. That is to say, SF policies it as absolutely easy as possible to stay addicted, and as difficult as possible to overcome the addiction, while simultaneously pretending severe mental illness is not a thing (i.e. you [paraphrasing for emphasis] "most mentally ill people can maintain a house and a job".)
It seems our conceptualization "homelessness" is corrupted by inadequate, and inconsistent use of nomenclature.
Both things can be true at the same time. Drugs are a significant issue in the homeless community, but providing housing and hope can do wonders for many of the homeless out there. When they feel like garbage, because society doesn’t care about them and treats them like they are, it’s impossible to consider a life with hope. If you’ve never been in that place, it’s very hard to understand.
But this “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality most people have is ludicrous; it simply isn’t that easy, when you have either mental health problems, or, quite simply, no hope.
> It's very hard to work around human nature and the whole "why am I paying rent like a sucker when the drug addicts on the street are getting free apartments?"
Easy fix: Give them a free apartment, too. Let them see what it's like. If they do better there than paying rent or mortgage, great. But I bet they won't last more than a day or two before turning that key back in. They think a free apartment is some great thing to have, as if their neighbors won't be all the people they didn't want to be around in the first place.
Have you seen the living conditions that people in SF are willing to put up with for cheap rent? Living out of their car, renting a closet, an attic, a couch in a living room. And that's not just baristas, it's well paid tech employees as well.
An endless amount of people would live in a 400sqft apartment with ex-homeless neighbours if it meant saving 2k on rent every month.
I like the idea, but I don't know if a place like SF has the capacity to test that experiment with, even if they did some lottery system for it.
I'm sure established families wouldn't actually go through with that plan, but they are also older and more likely to vote against those programs. the youth would take the most advantage of it and may even put up with it due to alternatives for housing being 2K/month into their college loans and the idea that it's a temporary discomfort. And we all know that the 18-29 demographic doesn't turnover nearly as much as that 50+ bracket.
While I agree with housing first and you, I think at the same time your quote is mischaracterizing the opposite point of view, which I've seen from close. The more appropriate quote would be:
"Why am I paying rent for myself and rent for the drug addict on the corner (through taxes) while I cannot afford to pay for my son's college/medicine/whatever?"
Living in a country with virtually no drug use (besides heavily abuse of alcohol ofc) it feels that while drugs are not the main problem for many, they are for some, and definitely make other problems worse.
0.2% is not "among the lowest in the world", or at least among OECD countries. Many countries have the rates way below 0.1% And not just rich countries, Brazil for example has 0.05%
That table you linked only measures rates of 34 countries. You realize there are ~200 countries on the planet right?
It’s just objectively true that the US enjoys much higher living standards than the rest of the world…even if Brazil’s homelessness rate in 2015 is 0.1% smaller than the US 2020 figure…
Well, if you want to compare US to countries like Ethiopia or Sudan then you are lowering the bar significantly. OECD is an organization of relatively rich, developed countries, which seems like a proper crowd the US should compare itself to :)
My point was that the US really shouldn't be bragging about their homelessness rate.
> US enjoys much higher living standards than the rest of the world
Tell that to 20 millions Americans living in trailer parks.
> Brazil’s homelessness rate in 2015 is 0.1% smaller than the US 2020 figure
Not sure how you count that. For me it's 0.18% vs 0.05%, so US rate is over three times or 260% higher (or conversly Brazil's homelessness rate is 73% lower). I can't do anything about 2015 vs 2020, that's the latest data available for this report, I guess.
I'm not sure if you're American or not, but in my country we're being torn apart by a mob of people who feast on outrage. I come from a family of Vietnamese immigrants, who's lives were ravaged by war and political persecution. I know what the world is like and it's fucking terrible.
I'm not trying to "brag" about the US homelessness rate. I'm trying to point out that things are honestly pretty good here. You can get educated, find work, and build a beautiful life for your family. The median household income here is like 6-7x the global median. Despite the recent political polarization, our government is the oldest and most stable in the world.
To me, 0.18% is a reasonable rate and the long term trend is undeniably downwards. I hope you levy these same criticisms against the likes of Germany, France, Sweden, etc... because they all have higher rates according to your chart.
If we don't stop this silly conflict fueled by internal anti-American sentiment, our country may implode.
See my response to this upthread[0]. Moving requires time and money, which many people in this situation don't have to spare. In a way they are locked into their current location, because even though it's already financially precarious, the simple act of trying to find a new location and a new job could easily tip them into deep financial trouble.
What I haven't understood is: why don't people move away if they're doing min wage jobs in a place where they are clearly incapable of delivering any quality of life?
Bring labor supply down and suddenly the market has to pay more. This seems to be simple oversupply in a saturated market.
Moving itself is expensive. If you're living paycheck to paycheck, you don't have the time or money to even travel to another location to look for better housing and a better job, let alone the time or money required to actually effect a move.
Consider that for many people in this situation, missing a few days of work to look for a new place to live might mean getting fired. Even if they don't get fired, the lost wages for missing those days of work could put them behind on their bills or make it difficult to buy food.
And even if they are able to spend time to find a new place to live without putting their finances in jeopardy, remember that they also have to find a new job in the new location, and doing that without further financial hardship could be difficult.
There are also other considerations: someone barely able to afford living in SF or NYC might not have a car, and walk or take transit to work and to do errands. Living in a lower-cost area might mean needing a car to do things like buy groceries or get to work. If you already can't save money, how are you going to afford a car before you move to the new area?
Many of us here can afford to take weeks or months off to take a break between jobs. Sometimes it's hard to understand that many people can barely take sick days without risking financial ruin.
Not to mention that it might also involve moving away from what little support system that you do have, the cousin that provides child care while you work your second shift janitor job, for instance.
This is huge. No matter how desperate you are, it’s highly likely you’ve established some relationships. You know which of the homeless around you you can trust to watch your things. You know what business owners are more tolerant of a nap.
Let me reply to this - your ancestors can and did come to a new life. Moving from SF to Nebraska is not a new start. You still carry your credit score, loans, run-ins with the law and all the baggage with you. 18th century lifestyle was much more focused on physical work and as long as you were able to, you can find a job. Now, it is much more complex. Without a car, you are screwed in Nebraska. If you have a kid (or more), then you have to build up a brand new support system. The world has changed.
I think the real argument here is that it wasn't just some Joe Schmoe making the move. But the people we're talking about here are below Joe.
Moving may be easier in that it doesn't have a high risk of death, but much harder in actually surviving at your destination. You don't just grab a plot of land and start building your own house these days. America did that hundreds of years ago and charges for it now. How are you paying a security deposit in another state on minimum wage, let alone the travel and job seeking?
Typically charity. That's my one of my other comments suggested that the person moving should reach out to churches in their preferred destination. It may help them meet new people and start a network, including landing a low skill job they can utilize to make rent while they search for a better one.
How many jobs can you walk into in Nebraska and start working with no id. The nature of work has changed. Travel options are much more plentiful but those low skilled jobs aside from farming have been outsourced
I get all those points, truly, but at the same time find it hard to belive that a dedicated person couldn't scrape together enough money for at least a plane ticket or bus ride out of town. They could prematurely contact a church in a destination city to see if the church had any charitable funds to spare them for temporary housing as they look to find work.
I think these days we forget that the gov was never meant to provide a social net. The mechanism for that is charity. It's much harder nowadays with disconnected communities, but reaching out for help often works.
I myself spent years with belongings only as burdensome as I could carry (at worst case) or pack into my sedan. It made moving from one place to another easy, and I could always rent a cheap hotel to live in since I wasn't burdened by possessions.
> I think these days we forget that the gov was never meant to provide a social net.
It absolutely was. Government has grown into this leviathan we have today, and the world's drastically more complicated since the days of living in huts in villages but the underlying principal is we take care of our own.
The purpose of the (US) government was and is to provide for the general welfare of its citizens; that's one of the two justifications given in the constitution for its ability to levy taxes.
Welfare is right there in the founding document, and a safety net is part of that.
Categorically, definitionally, and historically wrong.
What you are you are referring to is the following: “ Article I, Section 8, Clause 1: The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States…”
First, “welfare” here means “the state of well being.”
Second, it is tied to the “United States” as a whole - not any given individual, especially because the Supreme Court has ruled the government has no duty to protect its citizens from harm (Deshaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services, 1989; and The Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales, 2005).
Thus, if the Supreme Court has established that the government has no obligation to protect citizens from harm, it has no obligations to economically provide for citizens either. That’s called “charity” and it’s what churches have typically done by collecting revenue (tithing) from its congregants.
20th century governmental usurpation of charity by rebranding it as “welfare” is a distinctly modern concept, that also happens to be constitutional, insofar that the government collecting taxes to distribute benefits on a needs basis does not violate the Constitution, which is entirely different than being enumerated in the document itself, which you erroneously conflated.
If such a constitution was written as you suggest, then it would have been outdated and torn up long ago. It would have been too rigid to stand the test of time. Also HN supports at least one emoji (囧).
There are several theories in designing constitutions. Many countries just give up and rely on common law instead. The more rigid constitutions tend to be ignored or the countries fall off into chaos, so America is somewhat successful in its implementation of constitutional law.
Chinese jiong should be the only emoji allowed on HN, since it is a valid Chinese character, but then so is a swastika (in both directions, non-nazi Buddhist meanings of course).
About 2.5 million people living close to the official poverty line left California for other states from 2005 through 2015, while 1.7 million people at that income level moved in from other states – for a net loss of 800,000.
My personal example or experience: I would love to live in SF or in Alameda county. My employer statewide pays same salary to everybody with same title, with SF county (not Alameda) getting extra $260 per month, whereas rental differece is like $1000 for studio in non-Alameda & $2500 in SF.
Many of my colleagues can still afford to live in SF because they have their parent's homes or something in that area, and thus pay no rent, or have way lower expenses in housing.
Because if you’ve ever been working poor you know that your support network is hugely important. Grandma can watch the kids, Pablo knows how to keep that old car of yours running cheap, Henry has some house repair know-how, and so forth. Leaving your entire family and friends to settle elsewhere; it’s hard. It’s scary. And if you’re poor, it’s almost certainly one-way for at least some years.
> It's very hard to work around human nature and the whole "why am I paying rent like a sucker when the drug addicts on the street are getting free apartments?"
A lot of people seems to accept tax cuts for billionaires much higher than anything spend on the poor. It is all about framing and repetition.
Humans like to help other humans. The problem is that there is a push towards selfishness from the people that has the most and profits more out of it.
It's less about "why won't you help these people" and more about "what have you done with the $100k I paid you last year, when will you be satisfied?"
The only defense is electing people that stop the bleed and force the government to prioritize what they spend on. Talk amongst yourselves and decide if building a new park or helping homeless people is more important.
There are many unselfish people who don’t like to throw good money after bad, who think that the current solutions are so ineffective that even if the entire wealth of every billionaire went towards homelessness the needle would barely move.
The US federal government spends a trillion dollars a year on social programs (likely more when you include the states) - and some work exceptionally well, and others not so much.
And much of it is effectively subsidizing Walmart and friends anyway.
Are there any good studies into the most prevalent causes of homelessness? I'd be especially interested that are trying to tease apart cause and effect, without the study author trying to prove out their own preconceptions.
Years ago, I took a class on Homelessness and Public Policy. I've spent time homeless and read a lot, etc.
There is a lack of affordable housing in all US states.
It's extremely hard to live without a car in the US and cars are a huge expense, plus our car-centric culture means lack of a car is a barrier to employment, both practically and because people are reluctant to hire you.
Medical expenses can be a factor in the US. Universal health coverage could help.
There's no one cause and the oft cited "addiction and mental health" is largely prejudice. In a nutshell, you wind up homeless when you have too many problems and not enough resources to handle them and the US doesn't provide a robust social safety net.
> There is a lack of affordable housing in all US states.
Is it a lack of affordable housing or is it a lack of wage growth compared to cost of living?
Personally, I've started to think it's the latter, because it explains why upper middle class non-millionaires are also getting pinched. They too often rely on income rather than capital gains.
Does one not solve the other though? If it does, that seems to make them mutually exclusive.
My personal conspiracy theory, and I admit it's a conspiracy theory, is that corporate land owners are the ones centering popular conversation and data around affordable housing rather than wage growth. It opens doors for rental assistance, a multitude of rental-based density expansions, and other programs that put more money in their pockets rather than expanding the money income-based people make and keep via ownership.
I'm not a land owner. I'm someone with an incomplete BS with a concentration in Housing who also spent years homeless.
In the 1950s, the average new home was 1200 sq.ft. Post 2000, it was over 2400 sq.ft. and held on average one less household member. We've also torn down a million single room occupancy units in recent decades.
Apologies, I wasn't implicating you. Landowner could've been better expressed as corporate landowners. They're the ones that own the most residential real estate in large cities, which are generally the only places having this problem.
My house was built in the 1950s at around 1200sq ft. It's since expanded to over 2000, mainly from finishing a basement and expanding the top level. I'd be curious to see the data you base that on, because the people I bought it from passed this down generation to generation and had their entire family living in it. The house I grew up in has a similar story.
Another anecdote is that about half of the 1950s homes on my block were bulldozed and replaced with single units that have largely gone vacant. My cities issue is that we have plenty of housing, but even the bottom line single units are too expensive compared to wages because permitting and building costs are through the metaphorical roof.
I'm pretty sure the stats on 1950s housing vs. post 2000 housing were federal stats, but I don't have a citation handy. I've been talking about housing issues a lot of years.
You're probably right. When I was in the Bay I met a lot of people who would've lived in single unit housing who split mansions and single family homes with other people.
In Texas I don't remember seeing much if any SROs. I've only seen them in abundance since I've lived in Portland.
Wage growth is exploding in some areas (ours primarily) and not others, which contributes massively to the Baumol effect.
Land owners aren't really incentivized that much to talk about affordable housing. Housing developers would like to fix the problem by building market-rate housing - as supply goes up, demand begins to be satiated and prices can come down over time. All the while, developers make more money.
But building dense and inexpensive housing is often blocked by leftist-type politicians for being unsuitable for living, and NIMBYs of all sorts of political spectrum block it on wholly different grounds.
More housing = affordable housing. Not subsidized housing, not regulated housing. Just more of it will help America.
Apologies to you too, I should've said corporate landowners. I think that mostly puts us in agreement, though I don't think developers are the problem. It's property managers seeking to maximize profit that are more the problem there.
> More housing = affordable housing. Not subsidized housing, not regulated housing. Just more of it will help America.
Last caveat that I'd add to this is also more diverse housing street by street. Having space for single family homes alongside dense housing isn't just a good vibe, I think it also incentivizes a normalization of value. Combine that with shopping/retail and I think you can build some pretty equitable places with shorter commutes.
Very difficult to tease out the definition of various terms in studies and they are mostly trying to play to their anticipated audience.
This is evident, for example, if you look closely into the studies saying stuff like "most homeless people in the Bay became homeless in the Bay area", etc.
Nah. I'm more pissed off that my tens of thousands of dollars per year in property taxes don't help a damn bit. I'm more than happy to have people have "free" housing when they need it. Unfortunately SF does not spend or govern responsibly or in the interest of its citizens.
I also think that people who point out that a huge percentage of the people on the street are on drugs, so the drugs are the problem are not entirely correct either. The drug use is a symptom that also exacerbates the problem. One of the big contributing factors to California's homelessness problem is that wages have not kept up with rents, and it is not even close. If you're working two full time minimum wage jobs in SF you won't be able to afford an apartment, and that's a fundamental problem. Either bring rents down or wages up, neither of which are popular with the people who have political power.