Our Challenge

When I first came to San Francisco in the late 90s, we spent about $30 per homeless person per day, and we had about 5,000 homeless people. Today, we spend more than $80 per homeless person, and we have about 10,000 homeless people.

Whatever we are doing to fight homelessness - it isn’t working. 

Almost 1,500 homeless drug addicts have died from Fentanyl overdoses in the last couple of years, twice as many as have died from COVID. Open drug scenes are tolerated and attract ever more dealers and addicts. Passed-out addicts high on Fentanyl are scattered across our sidewalks. Addicts live in inhumane conditions in tent settlements, turning parts of our city into slums. There is drug-related crime. Emergency rooms are overwhelmed. “Safe consumption” sites only enable more drug use instead of funneling addicts into treatment.

The Solution

• Effective policies to address addiction and drug dealing do exist. The Portuguese model, successfully putting an end to the drug crises in Lisbon, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Zurich, will work in San Francisco, too.
  • Arrest, charge and seek conviction of drug dealers with the goal of protecting addicted homeless people in our city.
  • Put addicted homeless people before the choice to enter rehab or go to jail. 
• Create 4,000 more shelter beds in San Francisco instead of trying to build housing, which is too expensive and slow to make a difference.
• Dissolve tent campsites. 
• Create a city wide mental healthcare system for rehabbing the serious mentally ill or addicted. Unify mental healthcare on the state level instead of on the county level for more effective treatment of serious addiction.
• Introduce annual audits of homelessness non-profits and hold them to account based on metrics: for each million dollars spent, how many homeless addicts have been transferred into shelter and treatment? What’s the percentage of spending that went towards salaries and administration?