The City of San Francisco, at the direction of Mayor Daniel Lurie’s office, is pursuing a “residency requirement” before unhoused folks can receive homeless services. It hasn’t unveiled the plan yet, or had planning meetings around it that are open to the public. The public doesn’t yet know which services or what this would look like, but the intent is obvious: more political scapegoating.
The “magnet theory” political trope is as old as mass homelessness in the U.S. During the Great Depression, an earlier episode of mass homelessness in the United States, it led to Sundown Towns.
In many ways it is the perfect trope: It allows politicians to simultaneously dehumanize homeless people by othering them as outsiders, diminish public sympathy and let themselves off the hook for doing anything at all. After all, if they expand solutions to homelessness, only more will come. In fact, there is not one major city in the United States that doesn’t consider itself a “magnet” for homeless people. Las Vegas thinks homeless people go there for the weather, so they conducted a study: Nope. Brutal winter cities like Chicago consider themselves magnets because of their great services. Nope. It doesn’t matter the city. They all claim to be a “homeless magnet.”
Our current administration, partially in response to its propensity to align with fringe elements on this issue, is leaning heavily into this concept. The latest narrative, first promulgated by right-wing internet trolls, is that San Francisco is full of drug tourists. No, they don’t mean tech bros picking up sex workers and slamming ketamine and cocaine. They are referring to a much smaller subset of SF drug users: impoverished fentanyl users, the ones who can’t have guests in their housing or are street bound. They assume they have means to travel from city to city because drugs are easier to find here.
Hmm. Have any of us met a drug user that couldn’t find drugs when they really wanted them? Like every city thinking they are a homeless magnet, they all also have easy-to-find drug supplies. This is the United States, after all, the world’s biggest consumer of, well, everything, including illicit drugs. We take in the largest overall volume on the planet. Other places, like Australia and New Zealand, lead us in per-capita drug consumption, but still, it is no hard hunt to find drugs in the United States. But that doesn’t make for exciting copy on Fox News and X, does it?
Back to a residency requirement. Ah yes, San Francisco, the City of St. Francis. Does our country’s crowing of liberty apply all the way over here on the West Coast?
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Nope.
I know during these Trump times, folks don’t like facts anymore. They like to lie, lie, lie.
Here are some facts:
The overwhelming majority of homeless San Franciscans became homeless as housed San Franciscans.
That proportion is roughly the same as every other big city.
For folks who do come to SF homeless—and there are some—why do they come?
Homeless people are not a different species of humans. They come for the same complicated reasons all migrants move—generally, family and jobs.
Why would they come for services? We have the highest rents, we have 12,000 homeless households already waiting for housing. It is very difficult to get shelter—you can only get on a waitlist for a large warehouse-style shelter. Also, do you ever hear unhoused folks saying the services are great in SF? You hear a lot about what they are not getting. And our weather? Not ideal for sleeping rough. Not terrible, but only affluent people can consider weather in their much more diverse choices of residences. Poor folks just aren’t that lucky. They have limited choices, limited mobility and limited cash.
So yeah, let’s get real.
We are sending far more poor folks out of SF than we are attracting. FAR MORE, especially Black and brown households.
And once they are in the East Bay or Sacramento, and lose their housing, they come back home. Even after they leave, they often want to keep their kids in SF schools, or have to commute in for work. When an analysis is done among homeless families, about 97% have some kind of connection to SF: school, jobs, family, etc. If you have a residency requirement, you knock folks who were born and raised here out of the running for affordable housing, because now their Medi-Cal is in another county or they were sleeping on their aunt’s couch in Berkeley. No longer a resident.
And how are unhoused people supposed to prove their residency—show a rent receipt?
And what about San Francisco being a sanctuary city? Are we not going to shelter those seeking sanctuary, like trans folks running from transphobic small towns, or immigrants fleeing political persecution from U.S.-sponsored regimes?
Hey, now this is San Francisco, not Trumpancisco. So let’s act like it.
