by XUEER LU July 4, 2025 (MissionLocal.org)
The number of homeless tents on the streets of San Francisco has reached its lowest point since before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the latest data from the Department of Emergency Management.
In June, the city counted 165 tents and tent-like structures across the city. That tally fell by about a quarter since the last count in March 2025 — to 165 from 220. Over the last five years, the number has plummeted by about 85 percent, since it peaked at 1,108 in April 2020.
Apparel City — an area bordering Bernal Heights and Bayview — has the most tents, followed by South of Market and the Tenderloin.
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Bayview is the only neighborhood that had a site with more than six tents and structures. That’s a big dive from a peak of 66 large sites in April 2020, the city’s data shows. The city’s homeless tent count has been conducted quarterly since April 2019 by teams of city workers driving across the city, according to Denny Machuca-Grebe, spokesperson for the Department of Emergency Management. https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/K19nT/1/
Mayor Daniel Lurie credited the consistent decrease to the city’s “coordinated, multi-agency” street teams that he launched in March. Each of the five neighborhood-based street response teams works with seven city departments to help those experiencing homelessness and behavioral health crises.
“Our work is far from done,” Lurie said in a statement. “We will continue to be relentless in tackling the behavioral health and homelessness crisis from all angles, especially in the streets every day.”
Activists, however, do not think the number of tents is a good indicator of whether there are fewer homeless residents. Jennifer Friedenbach, the executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness, calls the data point “a terrible indicator of whether the city is effectively addressing homelessness” — for one, people might still be out on the street, but without tents as shelter.
Friedenbach said the homeless encampment sweeps the city started during the London Breed administration in August 2024, where workers, newly emboldened by a U.S. Supreme Court decision, confiscated tents and belongings might be leading to the decrease. But “that just leaves homeless people sleeping rough on the sidewalk with not even the modicum of shelter that a tent provides,” she said.
Some Mission residents, remarking upon street conditions at 16th and Mission streets, say the city’s confiscation of tents made an invisible problem more apparent. “They removed most of the tents,” said Rob Young of the 16th Street Alliance back in April. “What that left is a bunch of people without any shelter. The same addictions, the same problems. Except now it’s out in the open.”
While there are fewer tents, the number of people in the city’s shelters has been increasing since 2021 — to 6,859 in 2021 from 9,913 in 2024. “This increase in clients corresponds to both an increase in shelter capacity and an increase in the number of people experiencing homelessness between 2022 and 2024,” the city report tracking the increase reads.
The mayor has also made adding 1,500 new shelter beds a goal. And so far only 122 of those have been added. Where those not in a shelter are being housed is unclear. https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/XZ0N2/5/
Friedenbach, for her part, said other counts might more accurately gauge the true homeless population, like how many people entered temporary shelters or exited from shelters into permanent housing. About 13 percent of people staying in shelters were able to exit into housing, according to the March 2025 report from the City Controller’s Office.
With the city’s count, “you’re essentially counting a piece of fabric,” Friedenbach said. “It’s not very meaningful.”
But the last point-in-time count, another means of counting the city’s homeless last released in 2024, showed a 13-percent decrease in the number of people living on the streets or in tents in San Francisco since 2022. It also showed that the city had the lowest number of unsheltered homeless people on its streets in a decade.
For Lurie and his department, the decrease in tent count is a “clear sign that momentum is building.” Since taking office, Lurie has been making it a priority to build more shelters and make the streets safer and cleaner.
Lurie ran a four-month pilot “triage center” on Sixth Street to connect those struggling with homelessness and drug addiction to services. The police department also parked a “mobile-command unit” 24/7 at the 16th Street BART plaza as part of his operation to clean up the area. Lurie also proposed redirecting $88.5 million from building housing to adding more shelters.
“The declines aren’t just numbers,” Machuca-Grebe of the Department of Emergency Management wrote in a statement. “They are a positive indicator of safer, healthier streets and more San Franciscans accessing help.”
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XUEER LU
Xueer is a California Local News Fellow, working on data and covering housing. Xueer is a bilingual multimedia journalist fluent in Chinese and English and is passionate about data, graphics, and innovative ways of storytelling. Xueer graduated from UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism with a Master’s Degree in May 2023. She also loves cooking, photography, and scuba diving.More by Xueer Lu
