At the same time, there is a large municipality right next to San Francisco (Colma) that consists entirely of graveyards. Homelessness in SF is not just a housing problem, but the housing crisis amplifies it and could be instantly ameliorated by just building the hell out of things.
No, but it revitalizes your downtowns and increases density, which keeps city centers from hollowing out and getting taken over by homeless camps. High density also puts pressure on police and city authorities to deal with the violent mentally ill. And abundant, low cost housing gives you blue collar immigrant communities, which have little patience for angry junkies.
Well it’s an expensive place to live so of course you have to hire experts and social workers at $400k/y! Then they make powerpoints and present them to each other. It’s probably the police department’s fault so they better be defunded and that money should be rolled into the homeless social services program so they can hire more people.