Driving on family vacations, my father sometimes played and sang along to "Homeward Bound" by Simon & Garfunkel. The song evokes the longing many feel to return to the embrace of their hometown and family. Homeward Bound is also the name of a program that sends homeless people in San Francisco to someplace else. But it cannot return them to the place where their love life waits, silently for them, because that place probably doesn't exist.
In fact, as documented in the 2023 Benioff homelessness study, 75% of homeless people reside in the same county where they last had housing. We cannot ship this issue to another community. And the homeless I see living on the sidewalks are especially difficult to assist. Their challenges are substantial, including substance abuse, extreme poverty, past incarceration, physical and mental health conditions, broken homes, domestic violence, and more.
There is no single, simple solution to this challenge. As the Benioff study argues, we must build housing, increase outreach, re-invest in mental health and substance-l abuse infrastructure, support domestic violence victims, interrupt the pipeline from incarceration to the streets, and more. Implementing these solutions requires that our leaders understand their mandate is not simply to bulldoze the tents. That solution is naïve, cruel, and will fail in the end.
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