A homeless man lives on the Civic Center Plaza in San Francisco. City Hall is in the background. (Photos: China Daily)

Cities, counties spend more, but exorbitant housing costs are big obstacle; Google pledges $1B to help

During her 10-minute walk from her home to the subway station, Sophia Zhang, a resident of San Francisco, said she saw homeless people lying on the street every day. Occasionally, she saw them injecting themselves with a needle or shouting at passersby.

San Franciscans have found themselves increasingly frustrated by the swelling population living on the street. Pictures of homeless camps and human feces on the street are sent to the SF311 Mobile, an app for residents and visitors to report quality-of-life issues, almost every hour.

Although the city has cracked down on homeless encampments since Mayor London Breed was elected in July 2018, Zhang said the situation hasn't improved significantly. "I think it takes time," she said.

Breed, in her budget proposal unveiled last month, increased spending on homeless and mental health services, street cleanliness and affordable housing.

The city has recently voted to implement a mental health conservatorship bill passed by state lawmakers last year, which expands the city's ability to involuntarily treat people suffering from mental illness and alcohol abuse.

Despite those efforts and the millions of dollars that San Francisco spends on homelessness every year, the city has seen a dramatic increase in the homeless population in the last two years.

The city and county of San Francisco have more than 8,000 homeless people, up 17 percent from 2,107, according to the biennial homeless count conducted on a January night and released in May.

Alameda and Santa Clara counties in the Bay Area counted more than 8,000 and 9,700 homeless, respectively, during the overnight tally, an increase of 43 percent and 31 percent over two years ago.

In Southern California, the number of homeless people also increased by double-digit percentages as local authorities struggled to tackle the problem, including a 12 percent increase in Los Angeles County and 42 percent in Orange County.

Most cities found the numbers also increased for the unsheltered population and the "chronically homeless'' — those with mental or physical impairments who have been homeless for more than a year.

While the increases left people questioning why the millions of dollars spent have failed to decrease the number of homeless people, officials and activists blame the high cost of living and the shortage of housing for making the problem worse.

Officials in Santa Clara County, home to the headquarters of big-tech companies such as Google, Apple and Facebook, said the number of newly homeless residents continues to outpace the capacity of the county system to place people in stable housing.

So far, the county has committed $234 million to add about 1,500 apartments for homeless people. For each person who exits homelessness, nearly three new people are seeking assistance from the county, according to a press release from Santa Clara County in May.

On Tuesday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that the Mountain View-based company will build 20,000 homes in the Bay Area over the next 10 years, three-quarters of the units owned by the company.

"First, over the next 10 years, we'll repurpose at least $750 million of Google's land, most of which is currently zoned for office or commercial space, as residential housing," Pichai wrote in a company blog post. "This will enable us to support the development of at least 15,000 new homes at all income levels in the Bay Area, including housing options for middle and low-income families."

The CEO also said that Google would start a $250 million investment fund to provide incentives to developers to build at least 5,000 affordable housing units in a decade.

"We have the largest unsheltered population on the West Coast, fewer proportionally number of shelter beds, and a massive number of people trying to get shelter — that's what creates the problem," said Jennifer Friedenback, executive director the of San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness, in a recent interview with the Los Angeles-based non-profit organization Invisible People.

She said "skyrocketing" rents are "outrageous" and "prohibitive", leaving more people displaced from housing and making it harder to get off the streets.

A number of syringes are scattered in the remains of a tent city being cleared by city workers along Division Street in San Francisco. Drugs and needles are widely used by homeless people in the city.

Her organization led a campaign for a homeless tax proposition in San Francisco, which would raise about $300 million annually and was approved by voters in November. But it has since become subject to litigation.

In affluent regions of the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles, wages among lower-income people haven't kept up with rising living costs.

Los Angeles and San Francisco were named the 10th and 25th most-expensive cities in the world, according to The Economist's 2019 Worldwide Cost of Living Survey.

In San Francisco, the median price of a two-bedroom home is $1.3 million, and families of four earning $117,400 a year or less are considered low income in the Bay Area, according to data of online real estate company Zillow and the US Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Los Angeles also is affected by a widening income disparity between rich and poor. The region ranks seventh in income inequality out of the largest 150 US metro regions, according to a report by the University of Southern California's Program for Environmental and Regional Equality.

"At this point of unprecedented wealth in the county of Los Angeles, we are equally confronted with unprecedented poverty manifesting itself in the form of homelessness," Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas told the Los Angeles Times.

Los Angeles has long identified its homelessness problem, and in 2015, the city declared a state of emergency. A bond measure was passed in 2016 to free up to $1.2 billion for assistance services and shelter construction. Another local sales-tax measure was passed in 2017 to add $355 million each year to combat homelessness for 10 years.

Still, the number of homeless persistently rises. In the city of Los Angeles, there has been a 16 percent increase in the homeless population since last year.

Critics have targeted Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti for removal from office over his handling of the homelessness issue. In an open letter to residents on June 12, Garcetti said he took "full responsibility" for "our response to this crisis".

California had about 130,000 homeless people as of 2018, according to the US Interagency Council on Homelessness. The number is second-highest in state history, after the Great San Francisco Earthquake in 1906, which left more than 200,000 people homeless.

"Affordability is the issue in the state of California. Housing is the biggest issue in relation to affordability," California Governor Gavin Newsom told reporters following the release of the homeless count last month in San Francisco.

In a revised state budget last month, Newsom increased the state's support of addressing homelessness by $1 billion, including allocation of $650 million to local governments for homeless emergency aid.

Aside from funding, local governments also have encountered community pushback in their effort to produce low-income and market rate housing.

While recognizing the "extremely" serious problem of housing and homelessness, 74 percent of the residents in the Bay Area expressed resistance to new development, according to a survey of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group in February.

Controversies often erupt over where to build homeless shelters in the region. San Francisco plans to build a 200-bed "navigation center", a temporary homeless shelter, in the waterfront Embarcadero area that is popular with tourists. But residents are fighting the city's proposal, to avoid attracting homeless people to their neighborhood.

In San Jose, center of the Silicon Valley, Mayor Sam Liccardo proposed two small-home villages consisting of around 80 short-term units for the homeless. His project also met with fierce opposition from neighbors who worried about crime, traffic and property values. The project was approved, and residents are expected to move in this month.

"It's time to end the reign of the NIMBY (not in my backyard) in Silicon Valley," Liccardo said in a statement. "We all have a shared responsibility to address this crisis — every city and every neighborhood. That means we must house homeless neighbors here, not the proverbial 'somewhere else.'"