In a bid to address the city's drug crisis — and the crime and homelessness that come with it — San Francisco voters shifted right in Tuesday's primary, approving ballot measures that aim to boost enforcement powers.
Debatable. San Francisco spends a billion dollars a year on homelessness. That’s unsustainable even for SF. Only 800,000 people live in SF.
The costs for locking up homeless people is greater than the cost of providing housing. The following quote is from a slapdash search; I haven’t read the document because my original source is a book, The End of Policing, and that book had multiple citations that I’m not listing here.
As identified in the chart above, the total cost of incarceration is estimated to be 25% higher than the total cost of providing equivalent supportive services to prevent recidivism.
There’s a question of induced demand. We don’t have really good data, but anecdotally there’s a common belief that a lot of SFs homeless either migrated here from other parts of the country or were bussed here, because of SFs lenience.
During most surveys, most homeless people report being born here. Which is a useless fact, because if they report being from somewhere else, they’ll likely get sent back there.
In any case, San Francisco does not incarcerate the homeless. It allows them to live on the streets.
The costs for locking up homeless people is greater than the cost of providing housing. The following quote is from a slapdash search; I haven’t read the document because my original source is a book, The End of Policing, and that book had multiple citations that I’m not listing here.
https://santabarbara.legistar.com/gateway.aspx?M=F&ID=05bf1da9-a734-43e0-93fd-54ca33867e77.pdf&From=Granicus
There’s a question of induced demand. We don’t have really good data, but anecdotally there’s a common belief that a lot of SFs homeless either migrated here from other parts of the country or were bussed here, because of SFs lenience.
During most surveys, most homeless people report being born here. Which is a useless fact, because if they report being from somewhere else, they’ll likely get sent back there.
In any case, San Francisco does not incarcerate the homeless. It allows them to live on the streets.