How Two California Cities Are Reducing Street Homelessness

San Francisco has experienced a dramatic 22 percent drop in unsheltered homelessness since 2024, while San Jose has seen a 23 percent decline since 2019. Streets are cleaner, and open drug scenes in San Francisco are noticeably smaller. Fewer RVs are parked near waterways in San Jose. What these two cities are doing differently than Los Angeles and Seattle can be summarized in two words: accountability and recovery.

Often, when we think of the homeless, we imagine someone sleeping rough on the street, or perhaps in an RV or a car. But homelessness is defined in several ways. If you’re sleeping in a shelter, a car, or an RV, you’re sheltered homeless. If you’re in jail, you’re homeless. And depending on the city or county, if you’re living in a single-room occupancy apartment, you’re still technically homeless.

But the category everyone notices and that draws the most attention is “unsheltered homelessness.” These are the people in tents on Skid Row in Los Angeles, alongside the freeways in Portland, or in the Tenderloin in San Francisco. It’s this subset of the population that receives extensive outreach and intervention.

So why is it that only San Francisco and San Jose have seen major decreases in unsheltered homelessness? Both cities’ success in tackling homelessness began with their mayors. Daniel Lurie was elected in 2024 on a promise to bring public safety back to San Francisco streets and reduce homelessness. Since taking office, the city has added hundreds of beds to its interim and transitional housing stock and opened the RESET Center—a facility where police can take people arrested for public intoxication as an alternative to jail. The catch is that a person must stay until he sobers up. In its early weeks of operation, the center has already begun moving people who were using drugs on the street into a clinical setting where they can be connected with treatment and recovery programs.

As for transitional housing, all of it consists of what the city calls “post-treatment recovery housing.” In practice, these drug-free facilities are built on the premise that, because as many as 75 percent of unsheltered homeless individuals struggle with drug or alcohol addiction, moving them into treatment and then into recovery housing can help break the cycle of homelessness.

In San Jose, Mayor Matt Mahan deserves some of the credit for the decline in homelessness. The reduction in both unsheltered homelessness and vehicle-dwelling accelerated after the city adopted his “Responsibility to Shelter” plan, which made acceptance of available shelter part of the city’s encampment code of conduct. In essence, a person who refuses shelter three times within an 18-month period can be cited or arrested for trespassing—though Mahan has since said that outreach workers should use discretion and evaluate each case individually rather than escalate automatically. Critics call this the “criminalization of homelessness.” But the city offers shelter long before pursuing enforcement. If you repeatedly turn down these offers of help, housing is probably the least of your problems.

Both California mayors’ policies have injected accountability into the effort to solve street homelessness. Perhaps coincidentally, their initiatives lined up with President Trump’s 2025 executive order “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets,” which authorized a restoration of civil commitment, particularly for those struggling with mental illness who pose a danger to themselves or others. It also offers cities and municipalities grants to help reduce homelessness and restore public order. That two of California’s bluest cities are embracing an approach similar to that of the Trump administration says something about the hard truths of homelessness.

What are some of those truths? That failure to remove encampments entrenches homelessness in a community. That overdose deaths among the unsheltered make up roughly 30 percent of all overdose deaths in cities like San Francisco. [Link to 30 percent stat?] That even when people with addictions are housed, a significant share still die. [Link?] That homelessness hurts small and large businesses alike and drives away tourism. And lastly, that homelessness is inextricably linked to drug use and mental illness, and to the behaviors associated with them.

These are hard things to admit, but San Francisco and San Jose have done so. When will Seattle, Los Angeles, and Portland follow suit? Most of the unsheltered homeless population in the United States is located in California, Oregon, and Washington. West coast mayors and governors need to look out for all their constituents—not just for the homeless, but for their communities as a whole.