The San Francisco Bay Area comprises nine northern California counties and contains five of the ten most expensive [ 1 ] counties in the United States. Strong economic growth has created hundreds of thousands of new jobs, but coupled with severe restrictions on building new housing units, it has resulted in a statewide housing shortage which has driven rents to extremely high levels.
San Francisco has several thousand homeless people, despite extensive efforts by the city government to address the issue. San Francisco's dense, compact development pattern, its comparative lack of vacant land i. This dramatically larger prevalence of visible homelessness in the city, relative to other large US cities, is widely noted by visitors and residents.
The number of people in poverty in the San Francisco Bay Area grew from , 8. The prevalence of homelessness grew both in San Francisco and throughout the United States in the late s and early '80s. The deinstitutionalization movement of the s had succeeded and saw the mass transfer of mental health patients to community-based clinics. This transfer was not smooth, as many previously institutionalized patients found themselves back in society with less support than they were accustomed to and few possessed the professional skills or resources needed to successfully transition.
Dianne Feinstein was the first mayor of San Francisco forced to address the homeless issue. Her administration operated under the belief that the growing homeless problem was temporary and a side effect of the recent recession. The response to the problem was to open temporary shelters that provided a sandwich and a bed for a night, hoping that those served could find permanent housing soon. Feinstein's successor, Art Agnos , took a more involved approach to addressing the homeless problem as part of a broader progressive mayoral campaign.
Agnos' view of homelessness was that it was the result of structural inequalities and could only be resolved by intervention from state welfare programs. Despite Agnos' official support for homeless people, his administration was not without some controversy. A group of young anarcho-activists, Food Not Bombs , began to distribute free vegetarian meals to homeless people in parks around the Haight , which was opposed by a group representing developers and business interests.
