Housing the Homeless: How Organizational Modifications to the San Francisco Homeless Outreach Team and San Francisco Housing Authority Has Impacted the Unsheltered Homeless Population

Abstract

This study examines one of the most visually observable issues associated with growing wealth inequality in the San Francisco Bay Area, unsheltered homelessness. The paper focuses on two of the city’s most recent efforts to combat the growing problem, the 2013 privatization of the San Francisco Housing Authority and the restructuring of the San Francisco Homeless Outreach Team. Though both policies were city-wide initiatives, their implementation and resulting impact varied across different geographic areas. To quantify the impact of these policies, a difference-in-differences regression analysis was performed across the city’s eleven supervisorial districts. Districts that experienced greater improvements in policy-targeted organizations were denoted as the treatment group, while those with minimal improvement represented the control. Ultimately, the results suggest there were no statistically significant effects on population-controlled unsheltered homeless rates due to the analyzed policy changes.