![]() ![]() As a result, the homeless population has had a disproportionate rate of mental health needs met ever since the '80s.ĭianne Feinstein was the first mayor of San Francisco forced to address the homeless issue. The failure of deinstitutionalization is often attributed to the cuts to mental health services made at the same time, with mental health budgets decreasing by a third between 19. This transfer was not smooth, as many previously institutionalized patients found themselves back in society with less support than they were accustomed to and few possessed the professional skills or resources needed to successfully transition. The deinstitutionalization movement of the 1970s had succeeded, and saw the mass transfer of mental health patients to community based clinics. As these economic changes were occurring, social events also impacted the city's homeless population. This decrease in wages was compounded by the fact housing prices continued to rise, with average real estate value in the Bay Area increasing by 100% between 19. The economic shift from production oriented jobs in factories towards the service industry resulted in a loss of wages as factory jobs were more lucrative. The Reagan Administration made large cutbacks on affordable and public housing programs, such as Section 8, leaving much of the task of providing public and supportive housing up to local jurisdictions. Jennifer Wolch identifies some of these factors to include the loss of jobs from deindustrialization, a rapid rise in housing prices, and the elimination of social welfare programs. The prevalence of homelessness emerged both in San Francisco and the United States in general in the late 1970s and early '80s. Historical background Emergence in the late 1970s and early 1980s While poverty rates vary greatly across the SF Bay area, in 2015, the Silicon Valley Institute for Regional Studies published that the poverty rate was 11.3%, having a slight downward trend from 12% however, it was still above the historical average rate of 9%. ![]() The number of the people in poverty in the San Francisco Bay Area grew from 573,333 (8.6%) in 2000 to 668,876 (9.7%) in 2006–2010. As of 2018, this had begun to impact the city's largest industry, tourism (a $9 billion industry), as one large doctors' group has decided to move their annual convention elsewhere after members' concerns about threatening behavior, mental illness, and assault on one of their board members. This dramatically larger prevalence of visible homelessness in the city, relative to other large US cities, is widely noted by visitors as well as residents. San Francisco's dense, compact development pattern, its comparative lack of vacant land (i.e., beneath freeways, alongside creeks), and its high volumes of pedestrians tend to limit homeless encampments to the city's sidewalks and thus more readily visible to the general public. San Francisco has several thousand homeless people, despite extensive efforts by city government to address the issue. : 14,16 In San Francisco, a minimum wage worker would have to work approximately 4.7 full-time jobs to be able to spend less than 30% of their income on renting a two-bedroom apartment. In September 2019, the Council of Economic Advisers released a report in which they stated that deregulation of the housing markets would reduce homelessness in some of the most constrained markets by estimates of 54% in San Francisco, 40 percent in Los Angeles, : 1 and 38 percent in San Diego, because rents would fall by 55 percent, 41 percent, and 39 percent respectively. The Sacramento Bee notes that large cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles both attribute their recent increases in homeless people to the housing shortage, with the result that homelessness in California overall has increased by 15% from 2015 to 2017. Strong economic growth has created hundreds of thousands of new jobs, but coupled with severe restrictions on building new housing units, it has resulted in an extreme housing shortage which has driven rents to extremely high levels. The San Francisco Bay Area comprises nine northern California counties and contains four of the ten most expensive counties in the United States. Homeless person on Church Street in San Francisco
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