I’ve been thinking about homelessness/crime/related social dysfunctions in SF a good bit lately, as I think about moving to Berkeley, and its good to have some hard data put together in one place with relevant context. I’ve noticed that all I have to go off of on the wider internet, unless of course I go and directly do the research myself, is adversarially selected anecdotes that play into the red and blue political tribe agendas, and I’m epistemically afraid of updating on information selectively filtered like that. This is also probably the single best concise stab at explaining causes of SF’s homelessness I’ve read, as explanations are likewise epistemically distorted by the existence of political tribe pressures—I’ve now updated towards SF zoning laws being the chief cause of SF homelessness.
Almost certainly what he means is: restrictive zoning leads to small amounts of new housing, which leads to high rents, which according to this essay we just read, leads to high homelessness.
Zoning laws restricting housing supply, permanently driving up housing prices in turn, is one of my hypotheses explaining disproportionate SF/large US city homelessness.
Moderate California weather plus some busing of homeless people by other state governments is another.
Based on the above post, I updated in favor of the former hypotheses against the latter.
Some potential notes about “busing of homeless people by other state governments”
San Francisco periodically does a “Point in Time” survey of the homeless population. The last one was in 2017, with an N=1089.
69% reported they were living in SF when they became homeless
21% said they were living in California (but not SF)
10% said they were living out of state
However, San Francisco itself has its own bussing program called “Homeward Bound”, which may make the 10% who said they were living out of state hard to interpret.
Thanks for writing this!
I’ve been thinking about homelessness/crime/related social dysfunctions in SF a good bit lately, as I think about moving to Berkeley, and its good to have some hard data put together in one place with relevant context. I’ve noticed that all I have to go off of on the wider internet, unless of course I go and directly do the research myself, is adversarially selected anecdotes that play into the red and blue political tribe agendas, and I’m epistemically afraid of updating on information selectively filtered like that. This is also probably the single best concise stab at explaining causes of SF’s homelessness I’ve read, as explanations are likewise epistemically distorted by the existence of political tribe pressures—I’ve now updated towards SF zoning laws being the chief cause of SF homelessness.
Can you explain how you got from this post to zoning laws? (Not complaining, but I don’t see the link and I’m curious)
Almost certainly what he means is: restrictive zoning leads to small amounts of new housing, which leads to high rents, which according to this essay we just read, leads to high homelessness.
Zoning laws restricting housing supply, permanently driving up housing prices in turn, is one of my hypotheses explaining disproportionate SF/large US city homelessness.
Moderate California weather plus some busing of homeless people by other state governments is another.
Based on the above post, I updated in favor of the former hypotheses against the latter.
Some potential notes about “busing of homeless people by other state governments”
San Francisco periodically does a “Point in Time” survey of the homeless population. The last one was in 2017, with an N=1089.
69% reported they were living in SF when they became homeless
21% said they were living in California (but not SF)
10% said they were living out of state
However, San Francisco itself has its own bussing program called “Homeward Bound”, which may make the 10% who said they were living out of state hard to interpret.
There was another Point in Time count in 2019, and more recently a preliminary report for the 2022 count was published: https://hsh.sfgov.org/get-involved/2022-pit-count/