This is where I'm legitimately confused: the city is an expensive city, land prices are high and housing is expensive, rent is high and so forth. We're told t

This is where I'm legitimately confused: the city is an expensive city, land prices are high and housing is expensive, rent is high and so forth. We're told that that is the major problem, and the major reason for the homelessness issue of SF (mentioned many times below in this thread by numerous commenters). But other cities have lower land prices and cheaper housing. San Francisco has the highest land and rent prices of the entire country. The argument that "we need to lower the price of housing to address the homeless problem" sounds very appealing, until you consider: wait, why are they going there? The indications are that they're not from there. Is the problem that they're coming from places that don't have social programs, and drug legalization, which SF kind of has? There are needle exchange programs and if you start to convulse in the street someone will run over right away and give you Narcan. There's free food. Showers and bathrooms are ... apparently a problem ... but it's warm out. It's not Chicago in winter. So maybe it just make sense for homeless to hang out in Tenderloin. As in, if a magic wand made us homeless, we'd just logically go there because it'd be good and healthy for us to do that. Going back to the article. Someone mentioned the Laffer Curve: if you tax the rich to get revenue, they'll leave and you'll get less revenue. Well maybe there's another curve: if you make it extremely comfortable and desirable for homeless people in order to solve the homeless problem, you'll have a bigger and bigger homeless problem? Maybe the problem isn't "high land prices" in San Francisco. Or even, "inequality." Maybe the issue is that the rest of the state / country don't have the same degree and quality of social programs and drug legalization as SF, and so SF is a natural place to go.