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.
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/