Relocating the homeless

Retired chef JJ Smith, 53, spends hours every day walking the streets and talking with homeless men and women of the Tenderloin, the neighborhood at the epicenter of San Francisco’s drug and homelessness crisis.

Smith, who goes by a pseudonym due to his concerns for his family’s safety, says the majority of the people he meets are not originally from San Francisco. Many traveled to California from other states. Last week, Smith spoke with a young man from Tennessee who came to the city to join his sister who was already living on the streets. “He got addicted to drugs out here with her,” Smith said. “He’s trying to get back right now.”

At the beginning of August, San Francisco Mayor London Breed directed agencies to clear the homeless encampments clogging sidewalks and city parks. City workers removing tents and personal items are required to ask camp occupants whether they would like a bed in a city shelter. But first, they must offer them a free bus ticket out of town.

An executive directive by Mayor Breed orders city staff to offer individuals help relocating via the city’s Journey Home program before providing any other city services.

Journey Home, launched as a pilot program in 2023, isn’t new. San Francisco has relocated nearly 11,000 homeless individuals back to other cities or states since 2005 through a program known as Homeward Bound, according to city officials. But the program withered as the pandemic narrowed transportation options and fentanyl use took off.

Breed’s renewed push for the approach raises hotly-debated questions about why individuals end up on the streets in the first place, and whether helping them move out of cities fosters a vital source of connection or merely shifts the problem.

According to the city’s most recent point-in-time count, a federally required survey conducted by volunteers during one night in January, found that a total of 8,323 people were homeless, either living in shelters or on San Francisco’s streets.

Forty percent of the homeless individuals surveyed in the count said they came to the city from another city or even out of state—up from 28 percent of individuals surveyed in 2019, according to data released by the mayor’s office. And of those previously housed, 37 percent admitted they had been living in San Francisco for less than a year before they became homeless. The number of people who had been living in the city for more than 10 years before becoming homeless dropped from 43 percent to 14 percent between 2019 and 2024.

“We know that some individuals come here from other parts of the state and country, and our data shows the volume is increasing,” Breed said in her recent order. “San Francisco will always lead with compassion, but we cannot allow our compassion to be taken advantage of.”

Paul Webster is the executive director of the Los Angeles Alliance for Human Rights, a coalition of residents, small business owners, and social service providers that lobby the city to provide more shelter beds and clear encampments. He said generous public benefits and easygoing attitudes toward public drug use and street camping draw many individuals to California’s big cities. The weather is also a significant pull.

In San Francisco County, adults who make less than $712 per month, do not have dependent children, and have resided in the county for at least 15 days can receive up to $619 in monthly cash assistance. In addition, California’s Proposition 47 lowered the penalty for possessing small amounts of illicit drugs from a felony to a misdemeanor. Though some cities have begun cracking down on public camping following California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s recent order, tents and tash piles often still crop up unhindered in public parks and on city sidewalks.

Webster said these kinds of policy decisions “make it easy to be homeless.”

Many homeless advocacy groups and research institutes argue that homeless migration is a myth. Last year, the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at the University of California, San Francisco, released a study that found 9 out of 10 homeless individuals in California lost their housing in the state and 75 percent were homeless in the county where they were once housed.

But Webster, who also served as senior policy adviser in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, said self-reported surveys are often inaccurate and don’t paint a complete picture of how an individual ended up on the street. He argued the federal government’s and California’s commitments to affordable housing as the solution to homelessness fuels the narrative that homelessness is always a local problem caused by sky-high housing prices.

Other cities have experimented with busing their homeless back to their cities and states of origin. In 2016, Portland, Ore., began a pilot program that purchased one-way bus tickets for homeless individuals who approached city staff saying they wanted to reunite with families in other cities. The first two individuals relocated to Spokane and Seattle.

Still, homeless ministry leaders told me they are skeptical that San Francisco’s busing program will effect lasting change in people’s lives. City staff perform only a cursory check to substantiate a connection before granting free transportation. In some cases, these individuals will likely become homeless in other cities, say advocates.

San Francisco sent 92 individuals out of town between last September and Aug. 2 of this year. Twenty-seven percent relocated to other California counties.

Jeff Hudson, interim CEO of Union Rescue Mission in Los Angeles, pointed to data showing his city is one of the top destinations for individuals relocated through San Francisco’s program. This year’s point in time count noted 75,000 individuals were homeless in Los Angeles County as of January. No two stories are the same, Hudson argued, and in most cases family reunification is a small piece in a complicated puzzle.

“It’s not a simple phone call to folks saying, ‘I’m lonely and I’d love to be picked up,” he said. “It is a serious, systematic challenge that people are facing down here and in San Francisco that will not be solved by providing a bus ticket back to Des Moines.”

Traditionally, private organizations and rescue missions have facilitated reunifications. Reuniting a homeless individual with his or her family embodies a key component of effective compassion, said James Whitford, founder and executive director of Watered Gardens, a homeless ministry in Joplin, Mo. Compassion that inspires lasting change typically involves the people with the closest relational ties to the person in need, he noted.

“I think to a great extent, we have neglected that principle, and in so doing, have inadvertently loosened the natural interdependencies that make communities and families healthy,” said Whitford.

When guests arrive at Watered Gardens, staff ask the clients if any family members should be involved in their journey toward stability. Whitford recalled one young man who told him about the burned bridges he had left behind in California. Convinced his family would never want to speak with him again, he reluctantly allowed Whitford to call his mom. “I tell her that her son, John, is right across from me, and she begins to weep,” he said. “That was just a vital piece of his recovery.”

West Coast Care has helped over 3,400 people reunite with family and travel home, which Executive Director Ron Hooks estimates accounts for about 10 percent of the people they interact with on the beaches or the streets. When Hooks and his wife moved to Santa Monica, Calif., to work with the homeless, the first thing they did was start looking for a building to rent as a shelter. But conversations with the homeless individuals that flocked to the city’s world-famous beaches convinced Hooks to take a different approach.

Hooks said that one exchange in 2006 with a homeless man called Moses changed the course of the Hookses’ ministry: “He said, ‘I really feel like I just need to go home.’” Originally from Atlanta, Moses didn’t have the money to get back and wondered if Hooks could help. That’s when Hooks realized that many of the homeless beachgoers didn’t need a cot in a shelter, they needed the support system they had fled in pursuit of a lifestyle that ended up trapping them in addiction and fear.

But heading straight home isn’t always wise, he added. Sometimes West Coast Care outreach workers, along with the individual’s family, encourage individuals to complete a treatment program first. Reunification only succeeds if it’s facilitated through personal relationships and preceded by months of building trust with everyone involved.

“The most powerful thing that we say is, ‘I will see you tomorrow,’” Hooks said.
“And so if we can’t get you home, we’re going to get you somewhere.”