- By Marcus White | Examiner staff writer
- Jul 27, 2023 (SFExaminer.com)
San Francisco had only 52 shelter beds for every 100 unhoused people in The City last year, and just two-thirds as many beds as their peer cities, according to a new controller’s office report.
The report published on Wednesday compared The City to 15 other jurisdictions across the country, finding that its peer cities and counties offered, on average, 78 temporary shelter and overflow beds for every 100 people who were homeless. Only three of the examined jurisdictions — Denver, Baltimore and the District of Columbia — had at least 100 shelter beds for every 100 unhoused people.
Last year, San Francisco had a per-capita homelessness rate of 887 people per 100,000 residents. In 2022, The City’s rate was about 35% higher than the average and an unsheltered homelessness rate (503 per 100,000) that was almost 42% higher than the peer average.
Yet The City, whose problems with visible homelessness and drug use remain primary concerns among residents and have become shorthand for its apparent decline to critics on all sides of the political spectrum, had a lower per-capita homelessness rate than Oakland (1,147 people per 100,000 residents) and Los Angeles (1,077 per 100,000).
San Francisco also had a lower unsheltered homelessness rate than Oakland (757 per 100,000), LA (730 per 100,000) and Berkeley (646 per 100,000).
San Jose, whose mayor “emphatically” said “will not become San Francisco,” averaged just six fewer unsheltered, unhoused residents per capita than The City. San Francisco also had a lower share of unsheltered residents (57%) than any other peer jurisdiction in California, including San Jose (75%), Los Angeles (68%) and Oakland (66%).
Unsheltered homelessness remains a problem throughout California. Ninety percent of respondents to a statewide UCSF study published last month said they had spent at least one night without shelter during the previous six months.
The San Francisco Controller’s Office published its findings the same month The City rolled out a new reservation system for unhoused people to secure placement in an emergency shelter, and the same day Mayor London Breed signed a two-year budget that would add some 600 new shelter beds in San Francisco. Supervisors had hoped to add 2,000.
On Tuesday, unhoused advocates filed a legal brief alleging that The City continues to openly violate a federal court order barring San Francisco law enforcement from conducting sweeps of encampments.
