San Francisco Homeless People

In America’s finest city, vivid thoughts of beaches, sunshine, and excitement all come to mind. Pictures that do not come to mind are the streets that are lined with tents, trash bags full of clothes, old sleeping bags, and items that have value to the owner. All across America, homelessness perpetuates to expand and worsen. Homelessness has been a growing issue these past few years in San Diego and residents are finally speaking out about it. This is a concern that requires to be taken care in one way or another. Components of homelessness include lack of shelter, food, and medical care. One’s who suffer from homelessness are all different ages, races, and have a unique story of their own. It is time for the city of San Diego to find a solution to this matter of contention and pursue to put an end to homelessness.

When walking down the streets of Los Angeles, people will often encounter homelessness. Homelessness is currently considered a major problem in Los Angeles. Since 2013 homeless population in Los Angeles has increased by 12 percent. According to SCANPH (Southern California Association of Nonprofit Housing), Los Angeles has the highest street homeless population in the nation. There are about 26,000 homeless people in the city of Los Angeles, and about 44,300 homeless people in the Los Angeles County; about 75 percent of these homeless are individuals, 17 percent are families, and 8 percent are minors. People can become homeless for different reasons, such as illnesses, domestic violence, physical disability, mental disability, and etc.

Homelessness in the United States can be ended, not just maintained. Allot of cities now have plans to eradicate homelessness. Homelessness and housing instability are large issues that afflict a diverse demographic such as: Families, youth, veterans, and chronically homeless single male adults. Ending homelessness may require specialized solutions that are specific to individual needs. Factors like these make defeating homelessness a difficult task. Although solutions exist for some of the demographics, such as housing for chronically homeless adults, scaling up best practices remains a challenge. For other subpopulations, such as transitional aged youth, evidence-based interventions need to be developed. In this paper we argue that ending homelessness is a Grand Challenge that is big, important, and compelling—one that the profession of social work should be adopt. Meeting this challenge will require a focused, organized response from social work researchers, clinicians, and policymakers. Ending homelessness will require innovation and interdisciplinary or cross-sector collaboration. Key words: Housing First, Permanent Supportive Housing, rapid re-housing, prevention, poverty. The notion that homelessness in the United States can be ended, rather than managed (Mangano, 2002; National Alliance to End Homelessness, 2012), represents a fundamental shift in expectations from the 1980s and ’90s. Since the early 2000s, researchers, policymakers, advocates,

Social stratification is the hierarchical arrangement of large social groups on the basis of their control over basic resources (Kendall, 1998, p.24). By ranking each social class in society, those who fall in the underclass are referred to as the poor. They typically live in areas with high rates of poverty and few opportunities to improve their lives. But what about those who have less than the lower class. There is a rising population of people who have lost everything and therefore must take shelter in the local parks, abandoned buildings, overpasses, and any other form of protection against the elements (Schutt, 2011). Homelessness is a social problem affecting our nation, which can only continue to grow if society does not make

While the homeless population in the United States has declined over the past five years it is still much higher then it needs to be. Currently San Diego County has the fifth highest homeless population in the United States. The homeless population of San Diego County is mostly located in and around the downtown and beach areas of the county however it has started to spread into more areas of the county to include the San Diego River area of Santee. While there is a portion of the homeless population that choose to be homeless a large number of them are homeless due to falling on hard times. While it would be hard to get every homeless person off the streets there are something’s that can be done to help them. One way to solve this problem is to repurpose some of the currently vacant government building and unused county owned land throughout the county and convert them into homeless shelters. While this solution may reduce the homeless population we first need to look at who and why people are homeless in this country.

In 2015, there was an official homeless count in San Francisco for the homeless veterans. And it comes out that there were 598 veterans that are homeless on the street. And of those, 304 veterans were chronically out of home. Which implying that they had been in the city for a year or more. Mayor Lee plans to trim the city's general chronic homeless population of 1,700 to a half by 2022. As of May 2017,

The rate of homelessness in California is quite higher than other states. A homeless is defined as a person “sleeping outside or in an emergency shelter or transitional housing program” (The State of Homelessness in America, 2015). Twenty two percent of California residents are homeless coming out to 136,826, there were 91272 unsheltered and 66.7 are homeless and unsheltered, in an overall population of 38.8 million. That quiet high compared to other places like New York that are at 13%, Florida at 8%, Texas at 5% and Massachusetts at three percent. Los Angeles is amongst one of the largest cities in California with the second highest rate of homeless with 53798 people, San Diego ranked fourth with 8879 residents, San Francisco ranked 7 with

There is a dire, hard pressing, unrelenting fact that San Diego, CA is home to more than 8,500 homeless individuals. On any given night there are more than 800 homeless people living unsheltered on the streets of downtown San Diego, a 26 percent increase since 2014 (Wrath, 2015). In order to begin to effectively assess the homeless crisis in downtown San Diego, a needs assessment should be completed to examine and determine the full extent of the social problem. Key informants are identified as well as the engagement and assessment skills a social worker would utilize in completing a needs assessment of the homeless crisis in downtown San Diego, California.

As Super Bowl season draws near, many of the homeless living in San Francisco are being encouraged to head away from the vicinity of the recently built Super Bowl City in San Francisco, California and move towards local homeless shelters nearby. Home to nearly 7,000 homeless people and growing, San Francisco is ranked 8th in the nation for its substantial homeless population city. According to “The 2014 Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress”, “...Most (69 percent) [of the homeless living in the USA] were staying in residential programs for homeless people, and the rest (31 percent) were found in unsheltered locations.”(Henry, 5). However in San Francisco, “64 percent [of the current homeless population in San Francisco are] living outside of shelters”(Veckshin, 2). San Francisco cannot and should not just keep turning a blind eye on the men, women, and children harming their health by living on the streets.

The state of California has an enormous amount of homeless people. The homeless population consists of individuals that do not have housing, money, food, and even everyday necessities. Also, there are many homeless veterans in C.A. who previously served for the country. Homelessness is a major health concern and issue that affects a person’s physical, mental, and social well being. Since homelessness is a major issue in C.A. there are policies and programs to assist those in need.

My topic for my semester research project is homelessness in Los Angeles County. Over the past few weeks, I've done a significant amount of research on the background of my topic, its negative effects, and some solutions. One key solution I researched was the idea of supported housing. Since the idea of supported housing is largely built on the fact that there is a large percentage of homeless people that are mentally ill, I decided to go down to the root of the problem, which turned out to be the closing of mental hospitals in California. As I talked about in my first report, mental hospitals in California were closed in the 1970’s and 1980’s mainly because people believed they were violating individual rights. At the time, people could send

Taken from The New York Times, this article titled “As Temperatures Plunge, Call to Keep New York’s Homeless Off Streets Has Little Impact” discusses the overwhelming issue of homelessness in New York City, and how proper solutions to this issue aren’t being made. Throughout the article, it is evident that lawmakers and politicians who are involved in this issue can “talk the talk”, however they have trouble “walking the walk.” With an issue as broad and pressing as homelessness, there must be organized efforts to ensure that those without homes have a place to stay while preserving their dignity.

San Diego is known for its beaches, numerous attractions, multiple eateries, and scenic views. Even though it is known as “America’s Finest City”, a large problem is occurring all throughout our neighborhoods. With 8,692 sheltered and unsheltered people calling the streets their home, as of January 29,2016, homelessness is one of the largest and most well-known issue throughout the city (Black et al, 1). Likewise, depending on which studies you are looking at, San Diego is ranked number 3 or 4 with the highest homeless population in the country (McElroy,2016). In downtown, where a majority of the homeless individuals reside, this problem not only effects the appearance of the city, but can also have an impact on the local businesses and hotels.

When you think homeless what do you think? Some of you will probably will think dirty, gross, uncivilized. Maybe even the word ‘poverty.’ But near the Super Bowl, they want to erase the image of these things to make this event look like a treasure in history. So, workers have been trying to persuade homeless people to move to where it’s safer and point them to the direction of the shelters for them. The workers told the homeless that this is from construction, this is true, but the construction is for the Super Bowl and Super Bowl City. But the match striked the fire of curiosity was when I read the article “San Francisco nudges homeless away from Super Bowl fan village,” that studies show that employees don’t want to move the homeless from their spots and that is when I questioned why they wanted not to this.

The people of San Francisco are kicking out the people who are homeless because they are having a Super Bowl Party. When there is going to be cameras pointed on the city they don't want the people who are watching to think that all of San Francisco is nothing but poverty. San Francisco is the 13th-biggest city in the U.S by population and has about 6,800 homeless people. A spokesman from the Super Bowl Party will be donating $13 million dollars out of the $50 million dollars they are going to make and they hope with that donation it will decrease the poverty level by a lot. The reason they are doing this is because they want the Super Bowl to feel safe, secure and sanitary. The game will take place in Santa Clara on February 7th inside the