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The nation’s homeless population is skyrocketing. What can other cities learn from S.F.’s approach?
San Francisco is spending $846 million this year to address its homelessness crisis, more than some cities’ entire annual budgets.
771,480 people experienced homelessness nationwide in 2024, the highest number ever recorded, and an 18% increase from 2023.
HUD didn’t skimp on the many reasons why the numbers have skyrocketed, citing a shortage of affordable housing, systemic racism, natural disasters, inflation, public health crises, and the end of COVID-19-era eviction protections. It’s hard to imagine the resolution of any of those issues in 2025, when our incoming president has pledged to cut funding to public spending.
The city deployed caseworkers and public health employees to meet with each person, one-on-one, for five months straight. They listened to the people on the street, drove them to doctor’s appointments, helped them fill out paperwork for benefits, and slowly, day after day, earned their trust.
This differed from the standard citywide approach, where overloaded case managers frequently lose track of clients on the streets. Sending the same group of staff to the same neighborhood to meet with people they were building relationships with eventually had an impact. Some of the 34 selected for this pilot had refused services for more than a decade. At the end of the pilot, nine moved into permanent housing, seven went to temporary shelter, and 19 agreed to drug treatment and mental health counseling.
Without targeted investment, family homelessness will continue to rise. San Francisco’s count last year found 437 homeless families, a 94% increase in two years. It was a predictable scenario: a city plan to resolve family homelessness by December 2021 fizzled out, and the numbers spiked accordingly.
