byJoe Eskenazi
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San Francisco does not have one program that puts homeless people onto buses and sends them elsewhere.
It has three. Because of course it does.
Once again, we’re reminded of S.R. Hadden’s first rule in government spending: “Why build one when you can have two at twice the price?” Or three. Why not three?
Except, when it comes to the price, these programs’ price tags are relatively infinitesimal. Not including staff costs, the price of putting a homeless person on a bus and sending them out of town is about $275 a pop. Those are the costs, at least, for the “Journey Home” program —again, one of three the city has.
But this is the program that’s top of mind. That’s because on Aug. 1, Mayor London Breed issued the Journey Home executive order, mandating that homeless people being swept off the streets be offered a bus ticket out of town before being proffered shelter or other services —or arrested.
Journey Home,run jointly by the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing and the Human Services Agency,is a relatively new program, initiated in September of last year. But San Francisco busing the homeless out of town is not new. Between January 2005 and June 2023, the city transported 11,232 homeless people out of San Francisco via the Homeward Bound program (which may or may not have been named after the Simon and Garfunkel tune).
City officials stress that Homeward Bound was not the crass “Greyhound therapy” of the sort that has resulted in so many out-of-state homeless people being funneled to San Francisco. In 2015, for example, the state of Nevada agreed to pay San Francisco $400,000 after City Attorney Dennis Herrera filed suit over that state’s longstanding practice of busing mental patients here.
In contrast, before a homeless individual was placed on a bus through Homeward Bound, city workers had contacted a family member or friend in that person’s hometown, who had to agree to offer housing and care. City workers also performed warrant checks, to ensure they weren’t sending someone to a place where they had committed serious crimes. And, finally, over the course of several months, workers called to check in and see how Homeward Bound participants were doing in their new/old digs.
“What made Homeward Bound successful and meaningful,” said a longtime city worker, “is that you had to connect with family members on the back end willing to do the work to help these folks.”
So, we’re not doing that anymore.
Journey Home participants do not need to have friends or family in whatever town they are being sent to. Nobody needs to vouch for them and offer to provide housing or care. They simply need to prove “a connection” to somewhere else. This could be fulfilled with a former address.
Participants are only required to self-report any outstanding warrants. And, until July, nine months after Journey Home commenced,nobody was making follow-up calls to see how participants were doing.
Journey Home is specifically aimed at people who may be in the throes of drug addiction. And if someone has an epiphany that street life in San Francisco is not for them, city workers may be able to act on that, forthwith: Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing spokesperson Emily Cohen says that it’s conceivable that someone could opt into Journey Home in the morning and be journeying home in the evening. It’s unclear how often this has happened, but it is possible.
“We tried to make it even lower-barrier,” explains Cohen of the differences between Homeward Bound and Journey Home. “We tried to make it more accessible to people living out of doors.”
While many homeless advocates reflexively recoil at busing programs, there is not enough shelter and housing for all who need it. And, even if someone is lucky enough to receive housing, not everyone may want to live in a Tenderloin SRO if they have better opportunities elsewhere. If someone doesn’t want to be in San Francisco, it is often more humane —and, let’s face it, always more cost-effective —to pay them to go elsewhere.
But for many veteran politicos and homeless workers, Journey Home raises red flags. While the homeless department insists that this program will not be offered coercively, an interaction with a police officer, who is not required to offer a homeless person shelter before arresting and incarcerating them, is inherently coercive. And the mayor has made it resplendently clear that, in this an election year, the streets must be cleared —come what may.
“At least with Homeward Bound, there was the assumption that someone needed to be expecting you on the other end,” says Joe Wilson, a formerly homeless man who is now the executive director of Hospitality House. “There is no such assumption with Journey Home. I guess it’s just the journey.”
More than one veteran homeless worker we spoke with bristled at attempts to paint Journey Home as “low-barrier.”
“It’s unconscionable to put anybody on a bus, with public money, with no accountability that you’re doing anything but pushing someone someplace else,” says one. “That’s not low-barrier. That’s just reckless.”
Kevin Adler, the founder of the homeless support nonprofit Miracle Messages and the author of “When We Walk By,” was taken aback that the safeguards built into Homeward Bound have been deemed cumbersome and removed.
“That is disingenuous, considering how those safeguards emerged,” he said. “Because of a lot of scrutiny of Homeward Bound programs, they developed much better protocols for having caseworkers and social workers doing basic due-diligence and making sure a person was going to a situation where they’d be well-received.”
Between 2015 and 2019, he continued, “60 percent of successful shelter exits were as a result of family and friend reunification, 30 percent were from supportive housing and 10 percent were from transitional housing. So, to me, the program more than paid for itself. I wouldn’t characterize safeguards as burdensome or cumbersome, in terms of bureaucracy.”
Eric Jaye knows about those safeguards. In 1999, the longtime political strategist became involved withthe progenitor of what would later be called Homeward Bound, when he was helping Willie Brown run for re-election against Tom Ammiano. Then, as now, homelessness was an issue. And police were informally taking homeless people to bus stations and providing them with tickets out of town.
“While it was not the intent, there was the potential of coercion,” he says. “There were certain stages that were being missed, including warrant-checking participants and making sure individuals had a supportive place to go.”
When Homeward Bound was formalized under Mayor Gavin Newsom in 2005, these safeguards were baked in. Jaye, then Newsom’s political adviser, notes that they not only make humanitarian sense,they make political sense.
“Those safeguards were designed to protect the individuals who were going home, the communities they were being sent to and, frankly, the city and city leaders from embarrassment and litigation,” he says.
If Bakersfield or Humboldt or Tulsa or Rapid City or wherever else object to San Francisco busing people to them, it is not hard for them to begin reciprocating and busing people to us.
“You don’t need to be a political genius to understand that when you start putting vulnerable people on a bus, things can go wrong,” Jaye continues. “So what have we done, from a human standpoint, to make sure people aren’t getting hurt and from a political standpoint to make sure you’re not hurt as a city? Did you check they had someplace to go? Did you follow up? [In 2005] I asked those basic questions. There were answers.”
There are answers now, too. But they’re not the answers everyone is thrilled to hear. In its biggest year, 2006, Homeward Bound sent 934 people out of town (the city, more than a bit disingenuously, counted these people as “exiting homelessness” when it’s hardly clear they did).
But Breed has loftier goals for Journey Home. Cohen says the mandate from the mayor is now 1,000 exits a year.
That’s … a lot. Especially considering that, nearly a year into its existence, Journey Home really hasn’t taken off yet. A recent San Francisco Standard article noted 92 clients between September and July, fewer participants in 10 months than Homeward Bound often had in one month.
But that tally of 92 was actually high: Remember, San Francisco has three relocation programs, not one. It appears the data sent to the Standard commingled the 68 Journey Home clients from September through July with the 24 who were relocated by the County Adult Assistance Program run out of the Human Services Agency.
What’s more, in the last fiscal year, 342 homeless people left town via the Problem Solving Relocation Assistance Program run by the Department of Homelessness.
It warrants mentioning that the city’s two other relocation programs appears to be far more meticulous than Journey Home. Participants engage in detailed planning with a caseworker; they aren’t placed on a bus in a matter of hours.
So, it’s unclear why the “low-barrier” Journey Home is, so far, so seldom used.
“A bus ride to somewhere else? I guess it remains to be seen if that’s an improvement or not,” says Wilson with a sigh. “It doesn’t seem to matter if people have an alternate place to go, as long as they’re not in San Francisco. We can do better than that. And, frankly, the city of San Francisco is paying us to do better than that.”
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Managing Editor/Columnist. Joe was born in San Francisco, raised in the Bay Area, and attended U.C. Berkeley. He never left.
“Your humble narrator” was a writer and columnist for SF Weekly from 2007 to 2015, and a senior editor at San Francisco Magazine from 2015 to 2017. You may also have read his work in the Guardian (U.S. and U.K.); San Francisco Public Press; San Francisco Chronicle; San Francisco Examiner; Dallas Morning News; and elsewhere.
He resides in the Excelsior with his wife and three (!) kids, 4.3 miles from his birthplace and 5,474 from hers.
The Northern California branch of the Society of Professional Journalists named Eskenazi the 2019 Journalist of the Year.
More by Joe Eskenazi
48 Comments
All three programs seems to put in significantly more effort than the bus and flight programs taking people from Florida and Texas.
Those programs also weren’t very efficient and cost an average of $1500/person.
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perhaps the latest one not so much if they are not even taking the time to run background checks or at least make sure they have someone who will be able to help them when they get to their destination. Seems like it’s more of a clean up the streets to make the mayor look good for her re-election year and if there are lawsuits from other places, it will be after the election has been won or lost so who cares about the political costs.
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Homeless advocates have long insisted that the homeless have a right to self determination. We’re told that city disrespects their autonomy by not allowing them to camp on the streets, commit crimes, use drugs, and obey the laws that everyone else must follow.
Let’s stop infantilizing these adults. They have a great deal of volition when it comes to refusing services and advocating for their “rights” to live on the street. Let them take responsibility for their actions by accepting transportation elsewhere. Someone has a warrant elsewhere knows it. SF is under no obligation to protect them.
California has 30% of the country’s homeless. It’s time other states did their part.
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“City workers also performed warrant checks, to ensure they weren’t sending someone to a place where they had committed serious crimes. “
First wow, ok and then what? The city and non profits tell the fugitive. “ You have warrants, Please stay here!”
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Doesn’t a warrant mean they are wanted by the Authorities? Seems like Thats where you’d send them.
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This is insane. Anyone fitting this description should be sent back to where they have an outstanding warrant, pronto!
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> City workers also performed warrant checks, to ensure they weren’t sending someone to a place where they had committed serious crimes.
Hard to read this with a straight face. Was it hard to write? City workers stopped helping criminals evade warrants, the horror!
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Hi Jake —
You’re not going to believe this, but before San Francisco funded someone’s transit to another city, they used to do their due diligence to ensure they were not sending a person who has raised hell in the destination. This could lead to negative outcomes for everyone involved, problems for the residents of the destination city, litigation and a major political black eye. This should not be difficult to comprehend.
JE
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At the end of the day, I don’t want us to be a city that lets people fall through the cracks for the simple reason that: I could fall through the cracks. I could be the person in the tent. I could be the one who’s seen as a problem and a disgrace and not as a person.
You could too.
Recessions happen. Unexpected medical problems happen. Natural disasters happen – most of the city was homeless after 1906, and we’re due for another Big One. Multiple people I know who used to have highly paid tech jobs have been laid off, or have been unable to work after getting Long Covid. It’s simply a fantasy to believe that any of us, however secure we feel right now, couldn’t have a string of rotten luck and end up in the situation of being homeless.
If you applaud these cynical efforts that are as futile as they are cruel, consider that next time it could be your childhood friend, your elderly parent, your cousin, your child, or yourself treated exactly the same way.
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I remember when former Atlanta mayor Bill Campbell did the same thing when the Olympics came here. He ordered vans to pick up homeless people in Atlanta and carry them to a downtown building and issue them one way bus tickets to Birmingham Alabama. After they arrived in Birmingham they started lingering around the Greyhound station and downtown Birmingham. The police and the Alabama governor noticed it. The police asked the homeless where they originated from and why did they come to Birmingham. They all revealed it was Bill Campbell’s plan. The governor sent Campbell an official statement that accused Campbell of sending homeless people to his city without notifying him or at least asking him he he would accommodate them. The governor promptly sent them back to Atlanta.
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I’m curious how many of these homeless adults actually originated from another state and came here for the benefits, the weather, etc.?
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I am staying at Nextdoor shelter on Polk St & I see why people don’t want to go to a shelter bed all it is allowing people to use drugs & the case managers tell you to lie when you take the housing assessment so you qualify for housing. They put you in a SRO which is a run down old hotel that it’s infested with co*ckroaches.
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Omg.. let’s just shovel people out of the city and into another. What’s the good in this. BUILD SOME DARN TINY HOMES get these people help… Not everyone is drug addicted or alcoholics or thieves. Some of us need housing that don’t cost a cupl thousand a month. Because the price to move or the rent now even in my rural city near Oregon border is up 500.00 bucks I was homeless for two years till I finally asked for help from my grown up kids. Ya know it kicks our egos and our abilities to feel adult when u are all day moving n grooving just to find a good place to cook. N no hassle. I live on SSI. It’s not much money. Food stamps for myself. I have my dog that is for love and support. With this and rent I actually have 150 bucks for my extras. Now I finally got in HUD. And hopefully I will someday qualify or even see a tiny place built here like what newsome gifted my county about 18. Million to start. My county has held supposedly this money for three years and no encampment seen in near future. No tinys.. yet money in place to help those that don’t own homes and apts. And charge 2000.00 for a two bedroom run down property!!!!
Get it together cuz people turn senior every day n make no money sorry!!!+1
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Sounds like deportation
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Sounds like Trump.
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Segregation, deportation and exile.
You have to agree not to return to San Francisco.
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I thought the narrative was that the majority of homeless people in the city weren’t from out of town. I believe Stanford came out with an absurd study that stated up to 80% of homeless in California were local residents. Where exactly are we bussing them if they’re all locals?
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Review all the PIT Counts for two decades and roughly 70% of (voluntary) respondents declare they were homeless elsewhere before coming to SF. The others claim to be “residents”, although that def changes from survey to survey. Every year, several thousand get placed in housing (that is what the majority of Homeless funding is spent on – the formerly homeless). And with every survey there are several thousand new homeless residents from elsewhere. It’s not SFs responsibility in the majority of cases to provide for individuals; some are truly indigent, others freeloaders. There is simply no excuse for blocking sidewalks.
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That is the point of this story.
Go back in history of San Francisco and you will figure out that in fact, they are deporting their Ellis act evictions that the local government approved.
One case in point, about 12 years ago, a tech millionaire bought a 150 unit apartment complex. He used the Ellis act to evict all the tenants, made it a mansion and then sold it for 10 times what he put into it.
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If there are 8000 homeless in SF and 20% from out of town, that means you could send about 1600 home to somewhere out of town. It’s still dumb though.
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Oh, I get it. It is just an expansion of current policy that has homeless being swept from one neighborhood to the next, except on a grander scale, from one city to another.
At some point, Breed is going to need medical attention for that foot because she is kicking that can down the road so often.
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Here’s a proposition. If you were born and raised in San Francisco and you made it through SFUSD to high school, wether or not you’ve graduated ( if you can read and write you’re a rock star) then you deserve the taxpayer’s support. Everyone else can go the f*ck home. Not to be rude
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This is simply an un-American and unethical notion.
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Why should other citas have to deal with San Francoacos homelessness. If you going to bus people find out there hometowns and send them home. Don’t take a bunch of people and drop them off in another city or rural area. We all dealing with the homeless whereevet we live. The state needs to step up and build housing and half way houses for those who cannot maintain an apartment or house. Turn run down hotels into a better housing situation. The majority of homeless people need help, in turning their lives around. Yes I know some homeless will always live on the streets.
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So that explains the vans dropping off people in our Sacramento neighborhood! Not OK! Help these people don’t just dump them in another area. Our tax dollars at work California do better!
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“not hard for them to begin reciprocating and busing people to us.” –
Disagree to the extend that these people would have to call SF “home”. I’d venture they wouldn’t find all that many.
OTOH agree, given the chaos everywhere, they could just go ahead and send people wherever, including SF, as has been the case in the past.+1
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The question is, “Where can the homeless go?”
The answer is, “To work.”
Work and sobriety are the answers to homelessness. The homeless need to be incentivised to try it. California has been removing those incentives for a long time. What they have today is the harvest of what they have sown.+1
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What kind of job do you want the 80 year old person Ellis Acted out of their home to do exactly? Roofing?
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You may not believe this but not all homeless people became homeless because they are lazy and just don’t want to work. Rent in San Francisco is ungodly expensive. Apartments.com states that the average price of rent for a one bedroom in San Francisco in 2024 is $2,718 per month. Experts generally say that rent should not exceed 30% of your gross income, if we went by that 30% metric that would mean a single person would need to be making over $9,000 a month before taxes to be able to afford their rent, utilities, food, and other bills and life necessities. To earn $9000 a month if you are working 40 hours a week you would have to have a job that pays you $51.95 an hour. How many employers do you that pay $51.95 an hour? The highest paying job I’ve ever had paid me $26 an hour. How much does your job pay you? I lived in San Francisco for a year because I needed specialized health care that I could not get many other cities in the nation, while there I met many people with jobs most people would consider good jobs that just could not find a rental they could afford. I specifically remember meeting more than person who had a full time job working for a big national bank, who went to work everyday in a suit and tie who lived in a tent on the side of the road. And as for drug addiction many people who become homeless don’t start with a drug addiction problem but end up using drugs as a way to cope with the way they are treated as less than human by the general population and/or as a way to stay awake to protect what few possessions they have from being stolen or destroyed when they sleep as when you are homeless when you fall asleep more times than not you wake up to all your things you didn’t sleep on top of being gone or destroyed, literally like everytime you end up getting any sleep. Personally I was homeless for a time, I became disabled and lost my job. I tried getting other jobs but because I was now disabled I couldn’t get and keep a job. I filed for disability benefits but it took me 2 years and a lawyer to be approved for SSDI benefits, until my benefits were approved I had absolutely no way to afford rent, even the worst most ghetto studio was leaps and bounds more than I could afford. Luckily I did end up getting approved eventually for disability and with those benefits I ended up finding a very ghetto place in my hometown of Modesto that I can barely afford but I am able to afford it barely, thank God.
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The state spends $24 billion over 5 years for 180,000 homeless…
Shouldn’t the focus be on that mind boggling statistic? Over $100,000 per individual.
And yet, with all of the vacant land in tax default in the state, there is still so many barriers to building a home that California is effectively off limits to the poor.
Rent a home for 20 years and get kicked out by the city because the landlord doesn’t pay his tax bill, city then sells the house to property speculators who keep it vacant.
The homeless crisis in California is 100% artificial, just like it’s housing crisis.
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“. . .quietly lowered standards. . .”
Wouldn’t wanna shine a light on attempts at (false) modesty.
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I think the bus tickets are from AC Transit as Oakland looks like San Francisco did not so long ago.
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S. R. Hadden from “Contact”? 😂
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Sir or madam —
Is there another?
JE
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I liked the recontextualized Carl Sagan joke! As an art historian i was tickled by the name play. S.R. Hadden = Essarhaddon (6th Century Assyrian King)
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Good! Let’s clean up the city.
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Agreed! Defeat Mayor Breed for her senseless and inhumane actions. Clear out exploitive real-estate billionaires and technofascists of the Network State. Fire and prosecute bad cops.
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As one of my comrades mentioned last week, living in this city resembles more and more like a bad season of the Twilight Zone. A cruel and incompetent mayor who is feted by a bunch of inhumane and rich people who don’t want to see misery blocks away from their doorsteps. None of these homeless tents have been erected in rich people’s neighborhoods but the rich inhabitants of uppity hoods are the ones who are supportive of these programs and this mayor who’s now enjoying a 10% increase in her favorability thanks to her tough talk on homelessness and her “busing” program.
Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore and neither are we in San Francisco! We’re in a bad season of the Twilight Zone!
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> A cruel and incompetent mayor who is feted by a bunch of inhumane and rich people who don’t want to see misery blocks away from their doorsteps.
Extremely great slip here: the best explanation of progressive policy is that they indeed love seeing misery at their doorstep which is why they spend so much effort creating and preserving it.
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Great.. dump your homeless on other communities to deal with. PDX has approximately 4000…please don’t send us more.
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My idea should garner me the noble peace prize.
Newsom signs into law that all homeless person now are required to work as extras in movies, cinema, television, etc. All production companies have to accept these people who will have their SAG credentials. Paid for by the state. Housing paid by for the state until they can afford to buy or rent from elsewhere. This program is for life. Every Californian must accept the tax raise to help defer the cost.
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Joe,
I’m honestly sure that every person in the photo including the cops, of course and I didn’t see Rachel but everyone else on the DPW crews from dump trucks to meter maids was there this morning at the encampment around the corner from my house this morning.
My dog, Skippy (chick magnet but then he bits them !) and I came across it on our morning doo doo and wee wee and Trash Pickup and I did a short video but figured Joe already had this story so went around the corner to front of Armory where I’ve been trying to use my influence with Sean Elsbernd and Rachel Gordon to sit one of those new 2 dozen double Toilet Rigs over a puddle of piss that has been there behind the bus stop for all of the 9 years I’ve lived up the block.
There are pics on my blog but don’t play the audio on the short video cause Queen is singing on Alexa in the background and we’ll get sued.
Seen, ‘Veronica’ ?
h.
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All the ppl who find it unconscionable to.put ppl on a bus, without someone to care for them at the other end, are renters. They don’t mind ppl coming from all over to s.f. for free services surpassing any other u.s.city for homeless, because it’s only mostly property owners who.pay. and these high-minded k ow thei rent rate is protected regardless of how $ the city’s programs are. No wonder we have the problems we have.
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Part of the rent that renters pay is the property tax. Maybe you didn’t understand that.
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Actually 6 years ago the rent board stopped allowing passthrough increases for property tax reassessments. Increasingly, below inflation rent controlled tenants pay for nothing. Maybe you don’t understand that.
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Owner here. Completely disagree with you. Speak for yourself.
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And this is just one of the reasons Bilal Mahmood is proud to have Breed’s endorsem*nt. His latest campaign blather says his is “not part of the failed status quo at City Hall,” but he sure is happy to be supported by the apex of that failure.
For her part, Autumn Looijen has offered three local options for addressing homelessness: shelters, compulsory residential treatment, and jail cells. Her fourth option is identical to Breed’s: a bus ticket out of town.
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test
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