San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Mixed views: Respondents agree solution won’t come soon
Homelessness is by far the issue San Francisco residents most urgently want solved — but they have little faith that will happen anytime soon, according to a comprehensive poll conducted for The Chronicle.
The SFNext poll, conducted in late June and early July, randomly selected 1,653 residents who reflect the city’s demographics and asked them more than 90 questions about life in San Francisco.
While homelessness being named a top priority is consistent with polls dating back years in the city, the SFNext survey found new, revealing nuances in the shape and extent of respondents’ sympathies, with two-thirds expressing compassion toward people
suffering in the streets. A commanding proportion of residents said homelessness was the city’s top problem, with 39% of respondents choosing it first compared with 23% of respondents who said crime and safety was their primary issue. Over 70% listed homelessness among the top three problems in the city.
Likewise, only 8% of respondents believed it to be “extremely” or “very likely” that the city’s most pressing problem would be “significantly less severe” three years from now, echoing a corresponding lack of confidence respondents held for the mayor and Board of Supervisors.
In a city with a progressive reputation and extravagant tech wealth, homelessness has nevertheless become the never-ending problem that overshadows everything else. It divides political leaders who wrangle over competing ideas on shelters, supportive housing, and responses to encampments and drug use. The prospects of significantly reducing homelessness for what’s estimated to be a daunting year-round count of 20,000 people remain stubbornly dim.
“People are desperate,” said Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness, a principal architect of Proposition C, the 2018 ballot initiative that raised $600 million in corporate income tax money by mid-May to invest in homeless services — a quarter of which had been spent.
Officials say they understand the public frustration, even as they noted that the latest one-night homeless estimate showed a 3.5% drop in overall homelessness since 2019.
“The good news is we’ve got more shelter beds and housing coming every day, and with that we will be able to get more people off the streets,” Mayor London Breed said in an email to The Chronicle. “Understandably people are frustrated, and we want to move faster. I want to move faster.”
The poll found that people earning less expressed deeper empathy for unhoused people than those with higher incomes. And people of races and ethnicities disproportionately represented in tents and shelters were more likely to be disturbed by baked-in societal injustice that partly determines who’s relegated to the streets.
However, nearly all San Franciscans — regardless of race — would like to see a narrowing of the yawning income inequality gap that contributes to homelessness.
The opinions rooted in race held perhaps the most eye-opening revelations.
Black people constitute 35% of the city’s homeless population, compared with just 6% of the overall city population, according to the most recent onenight homeless count. And when asked how much they think racism exacerbates homelessness, Black respondents said “a great deal/a lot” more often than people of other races — 60%, compared with, for example, 36% of white people.
Similarly, Latino people make up 30% of the homeless count but just 16% of the overall city population. And when asked how much homelessness is made worse by racism, 42% of Latinos said “a great deal,” the secondbiggest percentage after Black people.
“Racism has played a real role in creating homelessness — redlining, income inequality, all of it,” said survey respondent Barbara Cohen, who is 77 and lives in the Bayview. “The plight of African Americans like myself being able to keep their housing, being moved all over the city, from the Fillmore to the Bayview, and more, has had a tremendous effect, and not a good one.”
Asian people are the most underrepresented ethnicity among the unhoused — just 7%, versus 37% of the overall San Francisco population.
And they were the least likely to cite homelessness as the problem that most needs fixing, at 31%. Instead, almost half of Asian respondents — 38% — picked crime and safety as the most urgent issue in the city.
Lorin H., who asked that her last name not be used out of fear for her safety, said that statement resonates strongly with her. The 67-year-old Asian American survey respondent said she has lived in San Francisco for nearly four decades, and that since the pandemic started she’s been robbed and attacked at or near her South of Market residence, and her building has been broken into six times — all crimes, she believes, done by homeless people.
That, along with a few highly publicized attacks on Asian Americans in the city by homeless people, has her scared, she said. “It seems like there’s been hundredfold increase in drug use and sales on the streets of my neighborhood, and a lot of that is among the homeless,” she said. “Of course, we all have compassion for homeless people, but this is a public health and a safety crisis. I am fed up.”
When asked “how much would it upset you to live within a 10-minute walk of a building where homeless people are allowed to sleep overnight occasionally,” the biggest percentage, 41%, who answered “a great deal” or “a lot” resided in the upscale northwest part of the city. And the smallest percentage, 14%, lived in the less-moneyed center of town. People making below $50,000 a year said they were least bothered when they saw homeless people in the city, while those making between $100,000 and $200,000 were most bothered.
Nick Berg, who is 43 and and white and lives in the upscale Marina district, said he’s more upset by the human despair of homelessness than he is by the idea of unhoused people sleeping nearby in a building.
“Intuitively I can’t imagine that people in the Tenderloin, regular housed folks, particularly families, are happy with the conditions,” he said. “I manage properties in SoMa, and people are really fed up. I hope we never get to a place where we become numb and acclimated to this. What we need is to build sufficient shelter capacity to bring everyone in from the cold.”
Jeremiah Gillespie would like to see that happen. Age 45 with a long gray beard, Gillespie sat at the corner of Powell and Ellis streets this month with a hand-lettered cardboard sign reading, “Testing for human kindness, think positive.”
“Us being out here like this is absolutely the worst problem in the city,” he said. “There are just too many broken people out here like me with no place to go.
“Would I want to live near me sleeping on the street, doing meth? Heck no. I don’t want to be here either. I’d rather have a place to live.”
“Racism has played a real role in creating homelessness.”
Barbara Cohen, poll respondent