If we wanted to actually solve the homeless problem, we'd build cheap housing. Pretty much everything else follows. This isn't politically feasible, since every

If we wanted to actually solve the homeless problem, we'd build cheap housing. Pretty much everything else follows. This isn't politically feasible, since everyone wants to make it difficult to do near them in hopes of foisting the problem of "undesirables" off to anywhere else. So assuming some long-term political will to overcome the NIMBYs, here's a plan that'd actually work to solve SF's homeless problem: 1. Design a standard-plan Single-Room Occupancy building, along the style of the Russian Khrushchyovka [1]. Prefab / economy of scale, three to five stories, no elevator, shared bathrooms and kitchens. Optimize it to be the cheapest habitable room that you can give someone a key to. 2. Pass a state law allowing a department to buy land and build one of these regardless of local zoning and input. You want to stop us from fixing the housing problem? Too bad, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. 3. Add in a feedback mechanism to force construction of more housing where/when rents get too high. Something like set up a waitlist system and automatically build another one of these when the waitlist gets long enough inside a geographic area. Qualify people for free or subsidized rents based on current market rates - rental rates go up, and you can make more money and still qualify, which causes more people to enter the waitlist, which causes more units to get built, which drives rents down.