San Francisco Mayor London Breed made waves recently with a major policy shift: Before providing a shelter bed or any other services, city workers must first offer every homeless person they encounter a bus or train ticket to somewhere else.
An examination of the matter showed that the number of people who benefit from such a policy is small, and it’s hard to tell what happens to them at the other end of the bus ride, as Marisa Kendall reported for CalMatters, in a piece republished by Governing.
City leaders are motivated to create bus programs so that they can clear homeless encampments without having to pay for an apartment or shelter bed for everyone in the camp. But at the root of the programs is a misunderstanding of who is homeless in this nation’s cities. CalMatters notes that data from throughout California consistently shows that most people who are homeless are from the county they’re in.
That data is also mirrored nationwide. But often, city officials and complaining residents often believe that homeless people come from elsewhere to be homeless in their cities. The CalMatters piece notes that 41% of homeless people surveyed in San Francisco's annual Point in Time count reported that they were living in another city or state when they lost housing, a number that’s risen in recent years. Often, people gather in cities from nearby regions, because cities are more likely to have services for homeless people.
In other cities, Kendall found, busing is one solution. “For an unhoused person who wants to move in with family in another city or state, or who got stuck somewhere after a job or housing prospect fell through and needs help getting home, these types of programs can be a game-changer,” Kendall writes. Or as Niki Jones, executive director of the Sacramento Regional Coalition to End Homelessness puts it: “In general, the ability to travel back to a place where you have a home is really important and can be a lifesaving service, in fact, and can help to reunite families. When done in good faith, it can be an important and powerful intervention.”
But often, homelessness, addiction and other traumas have marred many people’s relationships, leaving them with no one to help them in another city.
So, in Los Angeles, before putting someone on a bus, a nonprofit serving homeless young people asks a therapist to call the client’s family in the destination city, to make sure the client is going into a safe, welcoming environment.
Those connections are much less defined by Journey Home, one of San Francisco’s three relocation programs, which only requires that the person being bused have “vague connection to their destination city,” Kendall found. Journey Home requires only that someone be healthy enough to travel and prove they have some connection to their destination city. That proof could be a phone call to a friend or relative in the city or a receipt showing the client once got food stamps there or an ID with an address in that city. Clients do not need to prove they have housing in the destination city. Since July 2022, San Francisco has relocated a total of 1,039 unhoused clients via Journey Home and other programs, according to city data.
It’s harder to tell what happens to those people once they reach their destination. San Francisco only recently started requiring staff to check in with clients 90 days after they leave, but staff often can’t get hold of them in their new city, a city official said. About 15% of people who left San Francisco through the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing’s relocation program between July 2022 and July 2023 ended up back in San Francisco, using the city’s homeless services, within a year. A city official described that as an 85% “success rate.”
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