[volkhavaar]

There's quite a bit of confusion in this thread regarding "chronic homelessness" vs "temporary/short-term homelessness". The solution for short-term homelessness is generally the use of "emergency shelters", of which San Francisco has many. However, emergency shelters do little to nothing to address chronic homelessness, which requires long-term supportive housing, something San Francisco has very little of.

This difference, which gets lost in discussions such as the one here, leads to bad-faith statements by politicians and others regarding the true amount of housing available for homeless people. For example, the number of "available beds" touted by Newsom and others are almost entirely within short-term emergency shelters, which do not address the real problem (chronic homelessness) much at all. Instead, this "number-of-beds" statistic is used to gloss over the fact that a real solution has not been found, and then justify (probably illegal) police action against homeless people. The true intent of such actions is probably to cause regular disruption in the lives of homeless people to increase the difficulty of simply being homeless in San Francisco. Whether or not you agree with such police action is up to you, but it's important to acknowledge that the argument that "there is available housing" is a bad faith argument, and that this argument is simply used to redirect attention from both police action against homeless people as well as the fact that a real solution has not been found.

Here's a citation that describes the differences between short term emergency housing and long term housing, which illuminates why the current approach being taken by San Francisco is not genuine as well as approaches that might actually work:

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2018). Permanent supportive housing: Evaluating the evidence for improving health outcomes among people experiencing chronic homelessness.