Homeless numbers will rise to 20,000 in San Francisco, stunning report reveals

The report suggests that for every one person housed under a city programme, four more will experience homelessness

A new report suggests that the housing crisis in one of the US’s great cities remains dire.

According to an estimate in San Francisco’s Point-in-Time Count, as many as 20,000 residents will experience homelessness at some point in 2022 — an astonishing number in a city with just more than 800,000 residents. If that estimate is correct, nearly 2.5 percent of San Franciscans will be homeless at some point this year.

Still, per reporting from the San Francisco Chronicle, the analysis represents the most significant headway the city has made in fighting homelessness in nearly two decades.

San Francisco conducted its Point-in-Time Count, mandated by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development to receive federal funding, in February. City officials who conducted the count on that night found 7,754 people — a reduction from the 8,035 people the city found when doing the count three years ago prior to the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Over the course of the entire year, the city believes that many people not counted on that particular February night will experience homelessness as well. For many people, homelessness is not chronic but rather experienced only intermittently or in transitional periods.

A closer look at the numbers and the city’s estimate for the year starkly reveal who is bearing the brunt of the city’s housing crisis. Black people, who only comprise around six per cent of the population in San Francisco, make up 38 per cent of the homeless population.

Latino people are 30 per cent of the homeless population despite comprising just 16 per cent of the total population, which the number of Latino people experiencing homelessness up by 55 per cent in the last three years. In total, more than half of the people experiencing homelessness in the city are Black or Latino.

“Our analysis is that the Latinx community has always been undercounted, and we finally have data reflecting the seriousness in the community,” Laura Valdez, director of Dolores Street Community Services, told the Chronicle. “Black and Latinx people are going to be overrepresented in the numbers of homelessness because of poverty, systemic racism, the historic marginalization of our communities, redlining, lack of affordable housing, gentrification.”

The data also suggests the number of houseless people experiencing addition, either to drugs or alcohol, has increased from 42 to 52 per cent since 2019.

The numbers are not all bad, however. Thanks in large part to programmes put in place during the pandemic to get people shelter, the number of people living on the streets and out of their cars dropped by 15 and 24 per cent respectively between 2019 and 2022. It remains to be seen how many of those programmes will continue moving forward, and whether the city can truly resolve the crisis without tackling the underlying issues of economic inequality and its housing shortage.

The city’s housing crisis, long one of its top political issues, has been especially potent over the last several years as the Covid pandemic increased precarity and rates of certain crimes. A percieved link between homelessness and criminality was a central feature in the campaign to recall the city’s progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin, which succeeded earlier this year.

After Mr Boudin was ousted, the Mayor London Breed appointed the significantly more conservative Brooke Jenkins as his replacement.