I'm always trying to quantify things because when I walk around SF, the homeless problem seems insanely bad but my pro-SF friends say things like "homeless has

I'm always trying to quantify things because when I walk around SF, the homeless problem seems insanely bad but my pro-SF friends say things like "homeless has actually been stable or slightly improving for years and you are being unfair to SF's complex situation". But on the other had, I was walking around the Embarcadero last week at a very fancy conference hotel and the situation on the street was deplorable. I'm not disagreeing with your comment, just adding on to it. You are 100% right that homelessness is a complex issue with lots of causes. But I think it's also fair to say at the end of the day that SF is completely failing at fixing the problem - both for the safety of the homeless people and for the safety of other citizens. It's a public health crisis in my opinion when you look at the basic numbers. Here's some numbers: San Francisco population: 884,363 (2017/Wikipedia) San Francisco unsheltered population (conservative): 6,600 (7,499 SF self-reported homeless count * 88.2% HUD estimated unsheltered rate) Unsheltered population rate (conservative): ~0.75% of residents (my calculation) - nearly 1 in 100! Compare that with London, another city also experiencing a homelessness epidemic due to explosively rising housing costs: London population: 8,825,000 (2017/Wikipedia) London unsheltered population: 1,137 (homeless.org.uk) Unsheltered rate: ~0.01% of residents (my calculation) So obviously homelessness rates in SF are absurdly high. In fact, there are more unsheltered homeless people in SF than the entire country of England: San Francisco unsheltered population: 6,600 (2017) England unsheltered population: 4,751 (2017) I'm not saying they are equivalent situations, but somehow a country with a population greater than the state of California manages to have fewer homeless people than one relatively tiny city in California. And people say things like NYC has a much higher homeless population of 76,501, but according to HUD, only 5.1% of NYC homeless are unsheltered. In SF, the unsheltered rate according to HUD is almost 90% - nearly the worst in the country. That means NYC actually has fewer unshelted people than SF on the streets despite a much larger population. I'm not saying these numbers are perfect, but it gives us an idea of the scale of the problem. Politicians may or may not be smart, but at the end of the day they are doing a terrible job of fixing this issue in a meaningful way. Someone needs to step up and treat this like the public health crisis that it is, even if that means bringing in more federal resources or changing the strategy significantly.