Humboldt officials accuse San Francisco of busing the city's homeless problems north

San Francisco and Humboldt County officials are trading jabs over Mayor London Breed’s plans to more aggressively promote a city program that pays to relocate homeless people to other communities where they have family or other ties.

During their Tuesday meeting, Humboldt County supervisors debated sending a draft letter, addressed to Breed, questioning whether San Francisco was making sure the homeless people it’s busing out actually land housing and jobs.

“We are concerned that providing bus tickets to other jurisdictions without verifying access to housing, family support or employment does not alleviate homelessness; it simply shifts the person to another county,” the letter states.

The supervisors were responding to a recent report in the San Francisco Standard that found the counties of Sacramento, Los Angeles and Humboldt were the top three destinations for homeless people bused out of San Francisco since September 2023.

“We don’t need to be a dumping ground,” Humboldt County Supervisor Rex Bohn said at the meeting. “Our cost for taking care of a homeless person that has nothing up here … it’s expensive.”

Breed’s office says the notion that San Francisco is dumping its homeless problems up north is overblown — and noted that Humboldt County has sent people south, too.

Over the last year, San Francisco has helped five people relocate to Humboldt County, which in turn has sent four people to the City by the Bay, according to data from both jurisdictions.

Humboldt County’s concerns center on a San Francisco program called Journey Home that Breed launched in autumn 2023 to assist homeless people in returning to their home states or relocating to other cities in California where they have family, friends or some history. The city covers the cost of bus, plane or train fare and provides a meal stipend.

The program is a critical component of Breed’s high-profile campaign to more forcefully clear out the sprawling tent encampments that have mushroomed across the city in recent years. The effort, launched in July, is buoyed by a pivotal June 28 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that gave local communities greater legal standing to ban homeless people from sleeping in public spaces.

In recent weeks, outreach workers, backed by law enforcement officers, have spread out across the city and ordered people to dismantle their tents, offering them treatment and housing — and issuing citations if they refuse to accept help.

As part of the initiative, Breed issued an executive directive Aug. 1 requiring outreach workers to offer homeless people who aren’t from San Francisco free relocation assistance through Journey Home “before providing any other city services, including housing and shelter.”

An estimated 8,300 people are living homeless in San Francisco, about half of them sleeping in parks and on sidewalks in makeshift shelters, according to the city Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing. According to the city’s 2024 homeless survey, about 40% of people living on the streets said they were not from San Francisco.

Humboldt County, about 300 miles north, is struggling with its own homeless problems. The numbers are far smaller — about 1,600 people are living without permanent housing — but in a rugged rural setting with far fewer resources, local officials are straining to meet the need.

“It is not that Humboldt has seen an influx of people experiencing homelessness being sent to the county from San Francisco,” Christine Messinger, spokesperson for the Humboldt County Department of Health and Human Services, wrote in a statement.

“It is that the county and the Humboldt Housing and Homelessness Coalition member agencies are already seeing our resources stretched thin to take care of the folks living here, and an influx of new people could be detrimental to those efforts.”

As part of its efforts to move people into housing, Humboldt County also operates a relocation assistance program. Over the last year, the county has helped 142 people travel to locations throughout the country, Messinger said, including the four who relocated to San Francisco. They have denied assistance to nearly 100 more.

But the supervisors critical of San Francisco’s approach said Humboldt’s program is far more involved. County workers are supposed to verify that participants have family, friends and employment opportunities waiting for them, and to follow up with people on the other side of their travels.

In contrast, Bohn claimed, San Francisco hasn’t tracked people who relocated to Humboldt County to make sure they landed on their feet and have found employment and stable housing.

“All you have to do is ask, ‘I want to go here,’ and you get a bus ticket, and you get to go. No follow-up, no everything else,” Bohn said.

In addition, he said, San Francisco is essentially giving homeless people a choice between leaving town and legal action.

“I don’t want to hurt San Francisco’s feelings,” he said. “But on the other hand, I don’t care.”

Jeff Cretan, Breed’s spokesperson, rejected the depiction of San Francisco shipping homeless people out of the city without due diligence. He said Journey Home helps “reconnect them to friends, families or communities they previously lived in.” Before busing people to Humboldt, he said, city staffers spoke with family members or friends who expressed that “they wanted them.”

And though he acknowledged Humboldt County is among the more popular Journey Home destinations, he said the numbers are small.

In addition to the five people sent to Humboldt County in the past year, Cretan said, six were sent to Sacramento, five to Los Angeles and 13 to other parts of the state. Seven people have been relocated to Nevada and nine to Oregon.

Cretan said he wasn’t aware of any requirement for city workers to follow up with Journey Home participants once they are relocated, but he added: “Sometimes you can’t find people, too. That’s the reality.”

For now, Humboldt leaders have put a pause on formalizing the draft letter to Breed. Messinger said county officials will follow up with San Francisco staffers directly “to have more discussions before a final decision is made about whether a letter will be sent to the mayor.”