San Francisco Mayor London Breed ordered city officials on Thursday to offer homeless people one-way bus tickets out of town before providing other services like housing or shelter.  

Breed said the number of homeless people moving to San Francisco from other states and counties has grown from 28% in 2019 to 40% of the total homeless population in 2024. 

“We’ve made significant progress in housing many long-time San Franciscans who became homeless,” Breed said in a statement. “But we are seeing an increase in people in our data who are coming from elsewhere. Today’s order will ensure that all our city departments are leveraging our relocation programs to address this growing trend.”

Specifically, the order mandates that all city and contracted staff who engage with individuals experiencing homelessness must offer relocation as the first option.  It also requires all first responders to provide information handouts on the city’s relocation services and a contact number. It also establishes a tracking system with publishable data to measure the effectiveness of the city’s various homelessness programs. 

“San Francisco will always lead with compassion, but we cannot allow our compassion to be taken advantage of,” Breed wrote in the order. “This directive will ensure that relocation services will be the first response to our homelessness and substance use crises, allowing individuals the choice to reunite with support networks before accessing other city services or facing the consequences of refusing care.”

The mayor’s new executive order marks a shift from how San Francisco currently handles its homeless population. 

The change in strategy follows a June 28 Supreme Court ruling that gave city officials more power to crack down on people living on public streets and in parks. San Francisco officials are also ramping up the number of citations and arrests against homeless people who refuse to move indoors. 

Breed’s new directive is her latest effort to clean up the streets of San Francisco, reduce crime, and address the overdose crisis. She is in the middle of a tough re-election fight and has taken a much more aggressive approach to the problems.

While the program of busing people out of San Francisco has been on the table for years, it saw a drastic decline during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“This is just a fundamental attempt of the mayor to cover up failings of her administration and rebrand something that had already been made permanent,” said Supervisor Ahsha Safaí, who authored legislation passed by the Board of Supervisors earlier this year to expand the city’s flagship relocation assistance program. “It’s very telling that this announcement comes two days after there are videos and reports of people being pushed off the streets, arrested and stripped of belongings, without anywhere to go.” 

Safai was referencing a Tuesday report from the San Francisco Chronicle about Ramon Castillo, a 48-year-old homeless man living in the Mission District. A group of San Francisco police officers came by his tent asking if he wanted shelter, and when he refused, they took him into custody. 

Castillo was arrested, detained for 20 minutes, given a misdemeanor citation for illegal lodging, and released. 

While he sat in the back of the squad car, public works employees came and threw out nearly all of his belongings. 

Castillo’s arrest and trashing of his belongings came two weeks after Breed, a Democrat, announced the city would launch a “very aggressive” crackdown on homeless encampments. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, also a Democrat, issued an executive order on July 25 that gave local authorities the green light to start sweeping encampments. 

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Homeless advocates and other critics have slammed sweeps, arguing they are ineffective. 

One day after Castillo was arrested and his belongings were thrown away, three new tents lined the same block.