Is it right for San Francisco to provide free housing for homeless people who do illegal drugs in their taxpayer-subsidized homes?
If you’re a progressive, your answer is, “Yes. These people are desperately in need of our help, and that includes the right to do drugs in their own homes, as well as free drug treatment programs.”
If you’re sane, like I am, your answer is, “Hell no.”
And yet San Francisco’s liberal government does exactly that: let people do their drug/s of choice in apartments that taxpayers pay for.
How do we know this? The numbers.
• There were 8,323 homeless people in San Francisco in 2024, according to the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing.
• Some 37,500 San Franciscans suffering from drug addiction are at risk of an overdose, according to a new analysis by UCSF and the S.F. Department of Public Health.
• The same UCSF analysis “shows that about 3 in 4 people (75%) dying of drugs overdoses [in SF] have a fixed address—in city-funded hotels where the city provides permanent, subsidized housing for people who were formerly homeless.”
That means that about 28,125 people at risk of drug ODs are housed, more than three times the number of homeless people in San Francisco. So that’s how we know. Clearly, a lot of addicts living in city-sanctioned housing are doing a lot of drugs; the numbers don’t lie. Says San Francisco Supervisor Danny Sauter, “There are concerns and struggles with people doing drugs in shelters all over San Francisco. I know that myself.”
Case in point, according to the S.F. Chronicle: The Adante Hotel, on Geary Boulevard in the Tenderloin, which is largely being used as a city shelter for homeless people. “Multiple sources confirmed drug abuse still happens in those areas.” According to the conservative news website Beyond Chron, “Without having to pay rent, many occupants of these converted hotels have ample disposal income for drugs. The drug scene outside these hotels exploded.”
Another notorious example is the infamous SAFE Navigation Center on the Embarcadero. You might remember all the brouhaha when the city announced plans to open it. Many local residents protested, leading then-Mayor London Breed to tweet (Nov. 2019), “Big news today as the courts denied the last remaining claim in the lawsuit challenging the construction of the SAFE Navigation Center on the Embarcadero! By the end of the year the Nav Center will be open and operating, helping people get the care and shelter they need!”
But things didn’t quite work out that way. The San Francisco Standard reported last month that “The block around the Embarcadero SAFE Navigation Center now sees more ODs than almost any other part of the city… [as part of] a continuing wave of overdoses near the Embarcadero SAFE Navigation Center…” Locals responded with “I told you so” comments on Twitter. “This not good,” said one. Another:“Walking within 3 feet of drug addicts shooting up on Market and Sansome every single day. That’s going to change?” And another: “Will they slip in human waste and land on a needle while they are trying to get to the shelter?”
San Francisco’s new mayor, Dan Lurie, who seems like a serious guy, recently announced his “new plan,” called Restore, to require drug addicts to accept treatment in return for shelter. The treatment program will be run at the—you guessed it—Adante Hotel. Sauter, the Supervisor whom I quoted above, says he will be “watching the progress closely.” Now, all this costs money—a lot of money. And yet San Francisco continues to pour its badly-needed funds into allowing drug addicts to continue doing drugs in the shelter it gives to them to live for free. This cannot be right. It doesn’t make any sense, fiscal, moral or public-policy-wise. The city can make all the rules it wants against drug use in shelters, but unless it’s prepared to enforce those rules—with mandatory drug-testing—they’re not worth the paper they’re printed on.
Steve Heimoff