Last year, I wrote that it would be very hard to decrease the number of mentally ill homeless people in San Francisco. Commenters argued that no, it would be easy, just build more jails and mental hospitals.
A year later, San Francisco feels safer. Visible homelessness is way down. But there wasn't enough time to build many more jails or mental hospitals. So what happened? Were we all wrong?
Probably not. I only did a cursory investigation, and this is all low-confidence, but it looks like:
- There was a big decrease in tent encampments, because a series of court cases made it easier for cities to clear them. Most of the former campers are still homeless. They just don't have tents.
- There might have been a small decrease in overall homelessness, probably because of falling rents.
- Mayor Lurie claims to have a Plan To End Homelessness, but it's probably not responsible for the difference.
- Every city accuses every other city of shipping homeless people across their borders, but this probably doesn't explain most of what's going on in San Francisco in particular.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/what-happened-to-sf-homelessness
