Journey Home-less: What Really Happens to San Francisco’s Exiled?

Two officers check on a man who appears to be sleeping.

San Francisco Mayor London Breed has recently dusted off a Newsom-era homeless relocation policy and rechristened it Journey Home. It began in 2005 under the similarly saccharine-named Homeward Bound. Portland, Seattle, Las Vegas and New York enacted similar policies, sending unhoused people across the United States. According to the SF Standard, this is where we’re sending ours: 

Many go to Los Angeles.

Los Angeles has more room than San Francisco, but does LA provide them resources once they get there?

This program is hardly new; “Greyhound therapy” has been around since at least the 1960s, initially a means of relocating ex-cons. Busing people around the state, beyond its borders and back again, merely passes the buck from city to city. It’s no surprise to hear we’re bussing people to Los Angeles. Batting the unhoused back and forth between California’s two richest cities is too ironic. It’s a circuit of unaccountability. 

Los Angeles already struggles to support its homeless population, so why not exacerbate it? 

San Francisco’s Journey Home program is more like the mystery door at the Winchester house that opens to a twenty-foot drop. The objective of Journey Home isn’t reunification with families or connection with temporary (“halfway”) housing. It’s about making undesirables disappear. As long as we don’t have to look at them anymore, who cares what happens once the bus leaves town?

Some go to Sacramento.

And I thought I couldn’t feel sorrier for the homeless. Sacramento is what we do to politicians and people who strike out of the Bay Area but not California altogether. It’s also where Mayor London Breed is sending a number of San Francisco’s unhoused. Sacramento does not want our neglected, and they don’t deserve Sacramento. 

Important things happen in this building like Gavin Newsom plowing a nanny.

I’m suspicious of Mayor Breed’s renewed interest in SF’s homeless relocation policy. It comes too close to her decision to reinstate encampment sweeps. She wants a second term and less homeless people around the way Meredith Blake of The Parent Trap wants to ship those brats off to Switzerland. She recently ordered all city officials working with the homeless to push this program before offering shelter. Is Mayor Breed’s Journey Home policy just placating bleeding heart-liberals by sending their pet cause to ‘live on a farm?’

Others, Humboldt County.

Coastal Humboldt County is rarely this sunny. The mostly rural area has barely 135,000 people, and very limited resources for the homeless.

Another in-state destination, Humboldt County has seen its share of San Francisco’s unhoused population relocated. Homeless people suffering substance abuse and mental health crises are allegedly straining Humboldt’s already limited resources. In 2021 the mostly rural county saw its highest recorded overdose mortality rate with an overwhelming number attributed to fentanyl. It is widely thought that Greyhound permanently closed their station in Eureka, Humboldt’s largest city, partly due to the influx.

Top 3 out-of-state destinations: Oregon, Nevada, Texas

Heaven or Las Vegas? If you’re homeless, neither.

If you’ve lived in Portland, Oregon, you learned to stay quiet about coming from California. Californians are notorious for driving up the rent. For this offense to count towards you however, you’ll need to rent a home there first. If you have no home, you’re practically invisible. 

I lived there for five years, having made the move after going broke in Oakland in 2013. People in Portland have more in common with San Franciscans than they care to admit. For instance, some enjoy kicking the hell out of homeless people, sometimes to death. No matter where they hail from, the unhoused draw contempt—that winning West Coast inclusivity at work. I assure you, Portlanders are too preoccupied with their own homeless to care whether the leathery man flashing his genitals on MAX is from California or Connecticut. 

Nevada and Texas share second place for states that receive our homeless according to the SF Standard. I moved to Portland via Greyhound and it took, stops included, sixteen motherfucking hours. Imagine taking a motorcoach to Texas. Is it healthy to sit that long? And Nevada… why? 

In fairness (to Oregon I guess?), Portland isn’t the only destination for the homeless—or nearly, like I was. Salem, Corvallis, Medford and Eugene have also seen a rise in their unhoused populations. It’s almost as if…

Homelessness is America’s problem.

Has anyone told you, “Well, why don’t you move them into your house if you care so much?” That’s the stance Journey Home is really taking. It’s a bullshit argument (the fancy term is ‘derailment’) that throws focus from the issue at hand with flawed logic. It is not up to any one city to solve homelessness, nor should it be. Homelessness is America’s problem. 

That’s why Mayor Breed’s reinvestment rings false. Forget about her securing votes from San Francisco’s all-but-admittedly right wing elite. Homeward Bound/Journey Home claims to have “helped end homelessness for nearly 11,000 people.” Is she telling the truth?

Moreover, her program asserts, “There is a report of very low return rate to San Francisco.” Was that report conducted before or after 2022, when the city stopped tracking what happened to people they railroaded? Why did a municipally/state-funded program geared towards assisting the homeless get away with dropping a statistic like that? What really happens to the people who take the Journey Home? 

Perhaps the answer might be found in this particularly damning New York Times report from 2019, when Journey Home (then Homeward Bound) still updated their records.

“In San Francisco, city officials checking on people in the month after busing them out of town found that while many had found a place to live, others were unreachable, missing, in jail or had returned to homelessness. Within a year, the city found that one out of every eight bus ticket recipients had returned and sought services in San Francisco once again.”