Forced into the streets by the economic downturn, hundreds of newly homeless people have been showing up in San Francisco - in cars and camper vans.

Crushed by the same pressures, the number of families without homes has also gone up, according to San Francisco's latest biennial homeless count, to be released today.

The increases come even as the city has managed to reduce the number of hard-core people living for years on the streets, a reduction that has kept the overall homeless population in check.


"These bad economic times have created some challenges."

Overall count down

The new report, based on a count taken Jan. 27, shows that the city's overall homeless population dropped less than 1 percent, from 6,514 in 2009 to 6,455 in 2011.

A breakdown of that count, however, tells a more nuanced tale of newly homeless people hitting the street, while the entrenched population found housing.

For instance, the number of single homeless people on the street - those not with a family or in a shelter - actually shot up 48 percent, from 1,269 in 2009 to 1,882 in 2011. But those people were staying on the street for far less time than before.

In 2009, 62 percent of the city's indigents fit the federal definition of chronically homeless - basically, without housing for at least a year. That percentage has now fallen to 33 percent - a reflection of city policies enacted in 2004 that called for replacing temporary shelters with permanent housing that has counselors to help people find a job, kick drugs or alcohol, or get help for mental problems.

In the past two years, 208 beds in shelters, temporary rooms or drug-treatment programs were cut - but at the same time, 695 supportive housing units were created.

Still panhandling

Homeless counts all went down by as much as 14 percent in the traditional panhandling areas of the Tenderloin, mid-Market, Union Square and Fisherman's Wharf. There, many of those asking for spare change are now living inside but have been unable to change their daytime habits, counselors and Kayhan said, making it hard to discern the decline in homelessness.

But noticing the changing population is no problem in the one area that saw a huge rise in homelessness: Bayview-Hunters Point. The homeless count there shot up more than any other area - by 159 percent, from 444 in 2009 to 1,151 in 2011.

On some streets in the city's southeastern waterfront and industrial neighborhoods, ramshackle vehicles with blankets on the windows for privacy can be found bumper to bumper. The area has always been a draw for the vehicular homeless, but there are more of them now.

Unlike the disheveled panhandlers whom many regard as the typical homeless, those living in cars and vans are often either working or looking for work.

Jobs hard to find

"There are more and more every day," said Gwendolyn Westbrook, director of Mother Brown's Dining Room, the main homeless service center for Bayview-Hunters Point. "It's people working at little jobs after they lost big ones. They just can't afford a place to live. It's sad."

Kayhan said many of the new campers are coming from out of town to look for work, creating a "modern-day carpetbagging phenomenon."

Peter Jones, 52, won't argue that point. He came to San Francisco a year ago from Los Angeles to be near his daughter and look for a job, and he never found an apartment he could afford. He parks his camper-van along the southeastern waterfront and bicycles to a warehouse job a few blocks away.

He doesn't see how he can afford a place to live, so he's sticking to his van for now.

"The rents are insane in San Francisco," he said. "I may go back to L.A."

Lee Frieder, 46, takes convention set-up jobs and sleeps in a camper near Jones. What put him in the camper this past year was an argument with his San Francisco roommate. He's saving his cash to move back inside.

"Most of us are pretty functional out here," Frieder said. "These are just hard times, so we're doing what we have to do."

Those same hard times pushed up the number of people in homeless families by 15.7 percent, from 549 in 2009 to 635 in 2011. That rise has been reflected nationally in federal housing reports showing the tally of families in homeless shelters up 13 percent since 2007.

One reaction has been the Homeless Prevention and Rapid Rehousing program, funded in 2010 as part of President Obama's stimulus package. The goal is to find housing for recently homeless people quickly or to keep them from losing their homes in the first place.

San Francisco got $8.75 million to spend over three years, and so far the program has supplied housing for 1,100 people inhomeless or about-to-be-homeless families.

Firsthand view

Mia Carter doesn't need any reports to convince her that the number of homeless kids, moms and dads has shot up.

She sees the proof at the Hamilton Family Shelter in the Tenderloin, where she lives with her four young children and where every other unit is full. She hears it on the street and at church when other moms tell her of doubling up with their kids on relatives' couches.

"It's hard enough to be homeless, but homeless with children? You look around, and we're everywhere," said Carter, 41. "The bad economy has hit so many people in so many ways, it's amazing."

Without the added federal funding, the number of families without roofs would have been greater, program managers said.

"Homeless families are different from your chronic population, and take a different approach," said city Human Services Director Trent Rhorer. "In the chronics, you find substance abuse, mental illness and other factors that have put them on the street. But if a family is intact and homeless, it's generally about income.

"That's where the rapid rehousing approach helps."

Same story elsewhere

Obama's homelessness policy director, Barbara Poppe, said San Francisco's numbers are typical for the times.

Family homelessness numbers "in many communities are up slightly, and they would have been much higher if not for the rapid rehousing program," Poppe said. "And like in San Francisco, the chronic numbers are down."

Paul Boden, organizing director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project in San Francisco, praised the rapid rehousing efforts - "nothing ends homelessness like a home," he said - but said the need for permanent, affordable housing is more important.

"When the city says it has created hundreds of new supportive housing units, most of them are just SROs (single room occupancy hotels) taken out of the private market and put into these programs," Boden said. "That means poorer people who were living there have to move out to make room for the new thing. It's just shuffling people around."

S.F. homeless count for 2011:

General homeless population: 6,455 (down 59 from 6,514 in 2009)

In the street: 3,106 (up 397 from 2009)

In emergency shelters: 1,479 (down 37 from 2009)

In transitional housing: 796 (down 168 from 2009)

In jails: 317 (down 77 from 2009)

In hospitals: 169 (up 71 from 2009)

In treatment centers: 241 (down 52 from 2009)

In stabilization rooms: 202 (down 105 from 2009)

In resource centers: 145 (down 88 from 2009)

Source: San Francisco Department of Human Services

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