San Francisco’s recent homelessness crisis appears to be easing according to new numbers released by the city’s mayor, London Breed, who predicts the numbers will hit their lowest level in five years.
The city calculates its homeless numbers every three months and at the end of the last count in April there was a 41 percent reduction compared to July 2023.
360 tents and structures were counted in April, down from 610 last summer and 385 during the February count.
It is the lowest figure the city has recorded since it began tracking the data in 2018.
Breed says the reduction is due to a number of factors, including police enforcement of anti-camping laws when homeless people have reasonable access to shelter accommodations.
San Francisco has cleared several well-known homeless encampments
Where tents once stood, the sidewalks are clear and spotless. Places where homeless people once congregated are now cleared
The city calculates the city’s homeless numbers every three months and at the end of the last count in April there was a 41 percent reduction compared to July 2023.
San Francisco’s recent homelessness crisis appears to be easing according to new numbers released by the city’s mayor, London Breed.
London also touted the increased availability of new shelter beds and a renewed effort to fill empty housing units as factors behind the reduction in numbers.
“Our camp crews and outreach workers are working tirelessly to go out and help get people into shelter and clean up the encampments,” said Mayor Breed. ‘We continue to use all the resources we have and work to add more, but there is much more to do.
‘We will be relentless in our efforts to help people access safer and more supportive facilities, and make our neighborhoods cleaner and healthier for everyone. I want to thank our outreach workers across all of our agencies for their commitment to helping people.
‘It’s not an easy job, but it’s making a difference. “We continue to use all the resources we have and work to add more, but there is much more to do,” Breed said in a statement.
Early in the morning, a homeless man and woman quickly gather their belongings as Urban Alchemy crews begin their daily street cleanup in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood.
City workers are seen cleaning the streets and removing tents and items belonging to homeless people.
The area outside the United States Federal Building in San Francisco was considered the largest of all the city’s open-air drug markets.
The hangouts along Mission and Market Streets are also no more, along with a brazen open drug market that for more than a year had been outside the Nancy Pelosi Federal Building.
Federal rules have now freed up the city’s ability to forcibly move homeless encampments, with rules allowing police to forcibly take down tents if people have “reasonable” access to shelter.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit clarified in September 2023 that those who refuse shelter are not “involuntarily homeless,” so they are not protected by the court order. In January, a three-judge panel largely upheld the court order.
Since the beginning of the year, the city has cleared 242 encampments during which outreach workers contacted 1,530 homeless people.
Following a change in rules, the city saw a decrease in the number of people visibly living on city streets.
However, the figures do not convince everyone, since a reduction in the number of tents “does not necessarily mean a reduction in the number of homeless people.”
“There is still a huge unmet need with long waiting lists for shelter and housing,” he said in The standard.
“Touting a reduction in the number of tents as a result of the raids is mere political theater.”
City data reveals how accommodation offers were accepted 30 percent of the time and rejected 60 percent of the time.
As of Monday night, 155 people were still on the wait list for individual shelter beds and another 372 families still on a separate wait list for family shelter beds.
Police are permitted to enforce anti-camping laws when homeless people have reasonable access to shelter accommodations.
A San Francisco Police Department officer asks two people sitting on the sidewalk to move
Officers are now taking a more active role in moving homeless people to shelters.
A San Francisco Police Department vehicle drives through a homeless encampment being cleared in San Francisco.
Scenes of homeless drug addicts stumbling on sidewalks and fears of violence and petty crime have become a national political issue, and Donald Trump has made it part of his campaign platform.
in a video in homeless people freed by his campaignTrump said “hard-working, law-abiding citizens” were being marginalized and forced to “suffer at the whims of a deeply sick few.”
He promised to “ban urban encampments” and create “tent cities” on “cheap land” for homeless people that will be staffed by doctors and social workers to help people address systemic problems.
Still, homeless people and their advocates say the raids and relocation policies are cruel and a waste of taxpayer money.
The answer, they say, is more affordable housing, not crackdowns on tent cities.
San Francisco is reeling from rising crime, the emptying of the city center and the movement of residents to safer, cheaper areas.
Breed is facing a re-election bid and is currently in trouble according to a recent poll. He has overseen a continued slowdown in San Francisco’s economy and the prevalence of homelessness and overdoses on its streets.
‘As someone who grew up in San Francisco, Macy’s has always meant a lot to the people of this city. It’s where families came to shop during the holidays,” Breed said earlier this year.
Crime-ridden downtown San Francisco has seen many stores and restaurants close since its drastic decline, even though Breed attempted to exaggerate the statistics by claiming that crime decreased in 2023.
In October 2023, it was reported that seven Starbucks stores were planning to close as the city continues to deal with crime, drug use, and homelessness.
In late August 2023, a video was released showing the recently closed Nordstrom flagship store in San Francisco being nearly empty after nearly three decades in business.
