"They Just Want Them Out of Sight": A Short-Term Fix for Homelessness
Thanks for reading my newsletter! I have a book coming out in August called Lessons in Magic and Disaster. Jamie’s mother Serena has been hiding away in an old one-room schoolhouse ever since her life went up in smoke. Now Jamie is determined to help Serena return to the world by teaching her how to do magic. It’s the sweetest gut-punch. You can pre-order it anywhere, but if you want your copy signed and personalized with a doodle, please order from Green Apple Books and include details in the comments field.
Shelters are vital, but they won’t fix homelessness
Back in early October, I attended a hearing of the San Francisco transportation board about then-mayor London Breed's proposal to crack down on unhoused people sleeping in RVs and other "oversized vehicles." Basically, these were essential workers and their families, sleeping in vans parked on city streets, and the city wanted to tow their vehicles and impound their property. (This cruel scheme was eventually nixed by the city Board of Supervisors, at least for now.)
All photos below by Steve Rhodes/Flickr.
So I showed up to testify against this RV ban, but never got the chance because the SFMTA board kept delaying public comment. (I stayed all afternoon and finally had to leave around 6 PM.) Still, I got to listen to the mayor's representatives defending the policy at great length — and their main argument was that nobody would have their RV impounded without first being offered a bed in a shelter.
In other words, they would take away people's mobile homes and all their property, but it's okay because these folks would have access to a bed in a big communal shelter for up to 90 days.
Shelter beds are the main justification for a lot of policies lately that are designed to punish people who don't have a permanent, non-vehicular place to live. To a lot of people, it probably sounds good: we're offering a place to stay, so what's the problem? Except that shelter beds aren't necessarily a permanent solution to homelessness, for a lot of people. To find out more about this issue, I talked to Jennifer Friedenbach, the executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness, San Francisco (the organization that had alerted me to this hearing in the first place.) Here’s what I found out.
Some people are good candidates for shelter
Friedenbach emphasizes that shelter beds are a good option in some cases. She's heard from elderly women who prefer to live in a congregate setting "because they're scared of falling down and nobody finding them." They find community and feel less lonely.
I volunteered for shelters for years, including places where the winters were brutal and people could not safely sleep outdoors. I definitely saw situations where a temporary shelter with food provided was a godsend for people, especially where it was the only alternative. Shelters can be a lifeline for people in precarity.
"You want to prioritize [shelter beds] for folks who are in the worst situations," says Friedenbach.
But not so much people who are living in RVs.
For anyone living in an RV, says Friedenbach, "a shelter would be a serious step down." Also, when the mayor was insisting that families would be offered shelter space before their RVs were towed, there were already 500 families and 300 individuals on the shelter wait list.
So if the city were to prioritize giving shelter beds to people who'd lost their RVs, it would take shelter beds away from desperate people with no other options. "You would be given a bed to someone in an RV that basically already has shelter that's private," says Friedenbach, "and displacing someone who's someone who's sleeping rough, that is desperate for shelter."
Shelter doesn't solve the problem long-term
"Not having housing is very traumatizing, because of the instability," says Friedenbach. "Shelter does not offer stability."
There are no tenant rights in shelter housing, there are limits to how long you can stay there (which were just tightened), and people can get kicked out "on a whim." Someone living in a shelter is "not going to be able to build up community support," in part because guests aren't allowed.
One of the biggest complaints Friedenbach hears about shelters involves food restrictions. Residents cannot bring in their own food, and must eat the food that is served in the shelter. People who have special dietary needs, or simply don't like the shelter food, are out of luck. "A lot of people have experienced very severe food insecurity, and that's really hard for them," she says. These folks want to have food with them at all times, just in case. "There's a whole trauma around experiencing hunger that that really messes with" people.
"There's just nothing normal about shelter. It's an institutional setting that's highly restrictive."
I'd heard that when people enter city-funded shelters, they have to surrender their belongings. Friedenbach says the rules vary from shelter to shelter, but people who are caught up in a sweep of a homeless encampment are limited to two bags of possessions and must give up their tents. In most shelters, "typically, people are going to have to give up some property."
Giving people permanent supportive housing is "the quickest way to stability," and also improves their health outcomes a lot. People sleeping outdoors tend to have terrible health outcomes, which only improve marginally when you put them in a shelter, according to Friedenbach. But health outcomes "dramatically improve" when people have a permanent home, including mental health outcomes.
Not to mention, it's hard to find a job if you don't have a fixed address. "Stability in housing is a prerequisite for that flourishing to really happen," says Friedenbach. Shelters will also have curfews that might not work with someone's job schedule.
Crowded shelters also may not be right for people with severe mental illness who will be "calling out at night" and keeping everyone else awake. They're also not a good option for people with institutional trauma, such as survivors of sexual assault in facilities. People who have medical conditions and need medication may have a hard time holding onto that medicine in a shelter — especially if the medicine needs to be refrigerated.
Shelter beds are incredibly expensive
"We're going to put all of our investments in shelter, which is kind of the trend of a lot of policymakers," says Friedenbach.
On Oct. 29, a few days before she lost her bid for re-election, Mayor Breed announced that San Francisco was receiving $44 million from the state of California to build more shelters. Since taking office, her replacement, Daniel Lurie, has promised to add 1,500 new shelter beds to the city's supply. In her announcement, Breed's office emphasized that more shelter beds would help people "transition to housing."
But Friedenbach says it doesn't make sense to "have a system where you're requiring people to go through shelter first before they go to [permanent] housing, because that's not a good use of resources. Shelter is very expensive."
Back in 2023, the city passed a plan to build enough shelters to get everyone off the streets, only to be told that it would cost $70,000 per person to house everyone in shelters, for a grand total of $1.43 billion. Shelters require permanent staff, who tend to be expensive. As this San Francisco Examiner article explains, permanent supportive housing is much cheaper. (The up-front costs of building housing are higher, but they pay for themselves over time.)
The Supreme Court made it worse
One reason cities like San Francisco put so much money into shelter beds instead of other interventions is because they were required to offer people shelter before criminalizing them for sleeping outdoors. In other words, investing in shelter beds was largely a rationale to justify extremely harsh treatment of people who had been driven out of their homes.
And then the Supreme Court intervened. In last June's ruling in Grants Pass v. Johnson, SCOTUS overturned the Ninth Circuit and ruled that cities do not need to offer shelter beds to people before displacing or punishing them.
Friedenbach says "it's been pretty bad" since that Supreme Court ruling came down, and the sweeps of homeless people have gotten a lot more aggressive. "Everybody took their gloves off." Not only does the city no longer offer shelter to people, but you're more likely to see the police show up "without any support services at all." People are arrested and their property is confiscated. This was happening before last June, but it's escalated a lot.
The city has also turned a giant parking lot in SOMA into a “one stop shop” for the police to place drug users and unhoused people. A police spokesperson dismissed worries about potential overcrowding.
Money for prevention is drying up
The federal government has made the situation worse in another way. During the worst of the pandemic, the feds passed the Emergency Rental Assistance Program, which helped people avoid losing their homes. That federal funding has now dried up and cities have to find other sources. Friedenbach says San Francisco still has a little pandemic funding left over, plus money from the state. But the city changed its rules last month, so now this money will only go towards past-due rent, not future rent.
According to the San Francisco Anti-Displacement Coalition, local funding for rental assistance dropped 50 percent in 2024. A third of all applicants and receipients for this funding were Black, and also a third were disabled. It's much cheaper to keep people in their homes than to rehouse them, as advocates told Axios. It would cost $22 million a year to keep this program fully funded, much less than the cost of new shelter beds. (There's also a strict limit on how much money a single individual can get from this program in one year.)
Friedenbach offers an example. A family has housing, but the father works as a day laborer and then breaks his arm, so he can't work for a couple of months. If you give the family two months' rent money, they can stay in their home until the dad can work again — otherwise, they're in real danger of ending up homeless.
"A lot of people are going to be entering homelessness," says Friedenbach. "Even if they add all these shelter beds, there's not going to be enough shelter beds for everybody."
Why does San Francisco emphasize shelter beds?
Friedenbach says the city originally pushed shelter beds as a way to get around the constitutional protections for unhoused people — but the Supreme Court just eliminated those.
Back in 2022, now-Board of Supervisors president Rafael Mandelman pushed legislation that would require the city to offer shelter to anyone who needs it, which is already the law in Boston and New York. (This "shelter" would include tiny homes, but also city-run camping sites that Friedenbach worried might have resembled internment camps, with "everybody behind a barbed wire fence.") Mandelman was explicit that this would allow the city to enforce laws against camping or sleeping on streets more stringently.
The biggest problem, though, is that a narrative has taken hold that it's too expensive and difficult to build permanent housing. At an event back in 2023 sponsored by the billionaire-funded organization Together SF, leaders claimed that asking for permanent housing for unhoused people would mean that "the waiting line for permanent supportive housing is tents on city sidewalks." The solution, they said, was to build shelters instead, and to stop worrying so much about personal liberties.
"Their tagline is that it's not progressive values to keep people on the streets," says Friedenbach. "Of course, no one's fighting to have people stay on the streets." City leaders, she adds, "just want them out of sight. They don't really care where they stuff them."
Music I Love Right Now
Sly and the Family Stone were a vital group in the history of funk, and of music generally. And there’s a new documentary on Hulu called Sly Lives! aka the Burden of Black Genius, which illuminates the story of Sly, including a lot of details I had never known before. It’s a brilliant piece of work, exploring the pressures faced by Black creators through tons of interviews and archival footage.
(Music documentaries are a big topic right now — a Led Zeppelin doc is a hit in theaters, and meanwhile Netflix just announced it won’t release a Prince documentary by Oscar-winning filmmaker Ezra Edelman. I’m personally very worried we also may never get to see Paris Barclay’s recent documentary about Billy Preston, That’s The Way God Planned It, after some interview subjects sued over the fact that it focused on Preston’s homosexuality.)
Anyway, along with the release of the Sly Lives! documentary, there’s a new soundtrack CD, featuring a lot of alternate versions and remixes of Sly’s most famous songs. I’ve been obsessively listening to it, and even though I’ve memorized Sly’s entire back catalogue, it’s still a total revelation. I can hear stuff I’ve never heard before — like the remix of “Everyday People” emphasizes Gregg Errico’s foot-heavy drumming, which was previously buried in the mix. (The documentary really makes a strong case that Errico is an underrated drummer.) The alternate versions of “Sing a Simple Song” and “Thank You For Talking to Me Africa” have me thinking about those songs a whole different way.
If you want a real crash course in Sly and the Family Stone, I’d recommend getting the Higher! four-CD box set, which is currently going for around $25 in various places. But the Sly Lives! soundtrack is a great complement to the documentary, and a must-have for fans of Sly & the Family Stone.