Homelessness in the San Francisco Bay Area

Homeless person on Church Street in San Francisco

The San Francisco Bay Area comprises nine northern California counties and contains five of the ten most expensive[1] counties in the United States. Strong economic growth has created hundreds of thousands of new jobs, but coupled with severe restrictions on building new housing units, it has resulted in a statewide housing shortage which has driven rents to extremely high levels. The Sacramento Bee notes that large cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles both attribute their recent increases in homeless people to the housing shortage, with the result that homelessness in California overall has increased by 15% from 2015 to 2017.[2][3] In September 2019, the Council of Economic Advisers released a report in which they stated that deregulation of the housing markets would reduce homelessness in some of the most constrained markets by estimates of 54% in San Francisco, 40 percent in Los Angeles,[4]: 1  and 38 percent in San Diego, because rents would fall by 55 percent, 41 percent, and 39 percent respectively.[4]: 14,16  In San Francisco, a minimum wage worker would have to work approximately 4.7 full-time jobs to be able to spend less than 30% of their income on renting a two-bedroom apartment.[5]

San Francisco has several thousand homeless people, despite extensive efforts by the city government to address the issue. San Francisco's dense, compact development pattern, its comparative lack of vacant land (i.e., beneath freeways, alongside creeks), and its high volumes of pedestrians tend to limit homeless encampments to the city's sidewalks and are thus more readily visible to the general public. This dramatically larger prevalence of visible homelessness in the city, relative to other large US cities, is widely noted by visitors and residents. As of 2018, this had begun to impact the city's largest industry, tourism (a $9 billion industry), as one large doctors' group has decided to move their annual convention elsewhere after members' concerns about threatening behavior, mental illness, and assault on one of their board members.[6][7]

The number of people in poverty in the San Francisco Bay Area grew from 573,333 (8.6%) in 2000 to 668,876 (9.7%) in 2006–2010.[8] While poverty rates vary greatly across the SF Bay area, in 2015, the Silicon Valley Institute for Regional Studies published that the poverty rate was 11.3%, having a slight downward trend from 12%; however, it was still above the historical average rate of 9%.[9]

  1. ^ "Which US county has the highest home prices? Graphics and maps explain". USA Today. March 13, 2024. Retrieved March 28, 2024.
  2. ^ Hart, Angela (August 21, 2017). "How California's housing crisis happened". The Sacramento Bee. Archived from the original on October 1, 2017. Retrieved January 28, 2018. Cities that have seen dramatic rent increases, such as San Francisco and Los Angeles, attribute their spikes in homelessness directly to a state housing shortage that has led to an unprecedented affordability crisis.
  3. ^ Fagan, Kevin; Graham, Alison (September 8, 2017). "California's homelessness crisis expands to country". San Francisco Chronicle. Archived from the original on September 11, 2017. Retrieved December 12, 2017.
  4. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference CEA_1 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  5. ^ Arnold, Althea; Crowley, Sheila; Bravve, Elina; Brundage, Sarah; Biddlecombe, Christine (March 24, 2014). "Out of Reach 2014: National Low Income Housing Coalition". National Low Income Housing Coalition. Retrieved February 22, 2018.
  6. ^ Edwards, Nick; Ellwood, Mark (January 1, 2009). The Rough Guide to San Francisco & the Bay Area. Penguin. p. 112. ISBN 9781848360600.
  7. ^ Matier, Phil; Ross, Andy (July 2, 2018). "SF's appalling street life repels residents — now it's driven away a convention". San Francisco Chronicle. Archived from the original on July 4, 2018. Retrieved July 5, 2018.

    The doctors group told the San Francisco delegation that while they loved the city, postconvention surveys showed their members were afraid to walk amid the open drug use, threatening behavior and mental illness that are common on the streets.
  8. ^ "Bay Area Census -- San Francisco City and County". www.bayareacensus.ca.gov. Retrieved February 22, 2018.
  9. ^ "POVERTY IN THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA" (PDF). Joint Venture Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley Institute for Regional Studies. Retrieved March 18, 2018.