The most important walk you can take in San Francisco is not to the grand Golden Gate bridge, down crooked Lombard Street, or to the brightly painted Victorians in Alamo Square.
You'll realize that San Francisco doesn't have a homeless problem-it has a substance-abuse crisis.
San Francisco launched Project Roomkey last year, ostensibly as a way to thwart the spread of Covid-19.
At last count, approximately 8,000 people live on San Francisco's streets, and starting in April 2020, a few thousand were routed to leased "Shelter-in-place" hotels and motels.
In 2020, San Francisco saw 713 fatal drug overdoses, mostly from fentanyl.
As Dr. Hali Hammer of San Francisco's Department of Public Health admitted in an April 2021 New York Times story on the city's epidemic of drug fatalities, "What we as the public health department are responsible for is preventing death by giving people the resources they need to use safely." The entire system erodes the desire and willpower to accept detox and rehab.
Newsom and San Francisco officials are aware that Project Roomkey does nothing to heal homelessness because the absence of a home isn't the real sickness.
https://www.city-journal.org/san-francisco-substance-abuse-crisis
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