Dealing with the chronic emergency on city streets

Shooting up in public: photo, Liz Hafalia

From Heather Knight's story in today's Chronicle:

His[Mayor Farrell's] new budget will include doubling the money spent on Homeward Bound, the program that pays for free bus tickets for homeless people if there’s a receptive friend or family member on the other end.

Knight is the only one in the local mainstream media regularly doing serious work on the chronic emergency on city streets. The Chronicle has a praiseworthy history of covering homelessness---by Kevin Fagan, C.W. Nevius, and now Heather Knight.

As I've been saying for years, Homeward Bound is the best, most cost-effective program the city has to deal with homelessness.

But if the city has "housed 11,362 homeless single adults and sent an additional 8,086 home to receptive friends or family members through the Homeward Bound program"---as Knight recently told us---why hasn't the city's homeless problem been solved by now?

She provides the answer in today's story:

Jeff Kositsky, director of the Department of Homelessness, said his team gets an average of 50 people off the streets every week. But every week, 150 people take their place. Let that sink in. For every one person who gets help, three more join the homeless ranks.

Kositsky said that while 7,500 people were found to be living on the streets during last year’s one-night count, there are 20,000 people who are homeless in San Francisco over the course of a year. About 6,500 of them arrived here homeless from somewhere else, he said. He said these figures show why it’s impossible to build our way out of the problem...(emphasis added)

Yes, Calvin Welch years ago pointed out the fallacy behind the notion that we can build our way out of our housing problem. See also his The myth of long-term housing "underproduction."

But Welch and his "progressive" allies on the left have long fostered the illusion that the city's homeless are just city residents down on their luck who can't afford housing in our pricey market. That doesn't even qualify as a half-truth, since the homeless, the marginal and soon-to-be homeless are arriving in the city every day: See Are the homeless really San Franciscans?

That reality only highlights the national dimensions of the problem, which means the state and the federal governments must step up to help cities deal with the crisis. 

We really need a national response to this ongoing crisis, which we're unlikely to get from our present Moron in Chief.

See also Homelessness in SF: The silence of the progs.