Perhaps this speaks to your point, but the situation is just as bad in the outlying Central Valley cities. There are currently people camping on the embankment of Highway 120 through Manteca. Stockton's situation only kept getting worse after the 2008 recession, and there are tent camps in drastically unsafe areas along the freeway shoulder there as well. This has been going on for years.

It's definitely a regional problem, not just something isolated to a single city. I often wonder if people move around from town to town as their connections in the community shift, or they get a bad rep with local law enforcement... a friend who was formerly an EMT had an anecdote of a woman he picked up in Antioch for a meth-induced mental health incident who he saw, years later, stumbling around outside the hospital in Oakland in much the same state.

I think it's entirely possible that people come to SF or LA as an intentional destination and then, over time, get flushed towards the outlying cities, if they don't get ground into the dirt first. The current Atlantic article about the changing meth trade features a transgender person on skid row in LA who came there from the Midwest, believing that they could eventually gain access to gender reassignment surgery: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new...

San Diego does have quite a lot of homeless, but it isn't as concentrated geographically.

I'd argue that part of the issue with San Francisco is the concentration of the homeless into a small area. You don't see homeless in Atherton, for example. The wealthy enclaves in the Bay Area have zero problem with pushing the homeless out of their areas into somewhere else. In the Bay Area, there aren't that many "somewhere else" left so the ones that remain get overloaded.

I live in SF and while I don't spent a lot of time in Atherton, but homeless is most definitely visible even in the wealthy enclaves. Even before covid there was a small but visible homeless population in downtown Palo Alto (univ ave) and more recently there are tents on the sidewalk in Cupertino just down the street from Apple's spaceship campus. I think it must have become less acceptable to "move them along" during COVID.

Correct. Atherton isn't a great example. There's literally no downtown, so any homeless people would have to set up camp right outside some (very rich) person's (giant) single family home on a street with no sidewalk. Even in less affluent parts of the Bay Area unhoused people typically cluster in business or industrial districts rather than residential neighborhoods filled with single family homes.

You see unhoused people in downtown Menlo Park, Palo Alto, and Los Altos which are almost as wealthy as Atherton, and there was temporary outrage last year when it was reported that Menlo Park PD had paid for a one-way cab ride for one of the regular unhoused residents up to Pacifica (they claimed that she asked them to get her there so she could get her hair cut by a friend).

South Bay homelessness has adapted to car culture. A lot of South Bay homeless live in cars or campers permanently parked on city streets adjacent to parks, school fields, and/or business parks. I think most South Bay cities have a "you have to move a vehicle that's parked on the street every 3 days" law intended to discourage this, but it doesn't seem to be enforced.

San Diego county has roughly half the homeless pop of SF city/county while having triple the population.

Isn't San Francisco also much more expensive? It stands to reason that the number of people no longer able to afford their rents would contribute to the problem.

This article was really focusing on the chronic visible homeless; living on the street, public feces, injection drug use etc.

Many people do become homeless because of higher rents but they are able to take advantage of social safety nets so you don't see them on the streets of SF.

Sounds like you've never spent much time in San Diego.