San Francisco does not have one program that puts homeless people onto buses and sends them elsewhere.
It has three, reports Mission Local. an independent news site based in the Mission District. Not including staff costs, the price of putting a homeless person on a bus and sending him or her out of town through what's known as "the Journey Home" program is about $275 a pop, Mission Local found. 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 it's not new for San Francisco to bus homeless people out of town. Between January 2005 and June 2023, the city transported 11,232 homeless people out of San Francisco via the “Homeward Bound” program. 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 -- and that person had agreed 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. Over several months, workers also called to check in and see how Homeward Bound participants were doing in their new/old digs. The standards are lowered for the Journey Home program. 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. And, until July — nine months after Journey Home commenced — nobody was making follow-up calls to see how participants were doing. “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,” said one longtime homeless advocate.
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