Otis Redding's only Number One hit was
Sitting On the Dock of the Bay. It was written about San Francisco:
I left my home in Georgia
Headed for the Frisco Bay
Now I have nothing to live for
Look like nothing's going to come my way
When things don't work out in this country, some people move west. The Okies didn't move to California during the Dust Bowl because they wanted to eat kale. And if things to work out by the time you hit the Pacific Ocean, you can't hitch-hike to Hawaii. I'm serious about this: If people could get to Hawaii easily, I would bet you would have large homeless camps in the jungle.
So places like Los Angeles and San Francisco become the catch points on the West Coast. Less so in Portland and Seattle, because of the rain and snow. I'm semi-retired, but for the past 4 years I've worked part time as a Tour Guide in San Francisco. The tours start at Fisherman's Wharf, and I would bet that a lot of the homeless at the Wharf are not from San Francisco.
In San Francisco, a typical one bedroom apartment is a little over $3500 a month. In some areas, the prices are North of Oh-My-Goodness. I've seen 3 bedroom apartments in a middle-class looking neighborhood in North Beach for $8,000 a month. We are talking about apartments that 70 years ago were probably inhabited by Italian Storekeepers and Fishermen. The cheapest apartments are in the Tenderloin district, a place with a lot of transient hotels that were built rapidly after the 1906 earthquake to house the homeless. Most of the rooms are 500 square feet, a bathroom sink in each room, a full bath at the end of each hallway, and a complete kitchen on the ground floor. Those rooms usually rent for $250-300 a week. If you are on General Assistance, good luck. There is section 8 housing and homeless shelters, but not enough.
Glide Memorial Church in the heart of the Tenderloin District, serves 750,000 meals to the homeless every year.
Minimum wage is $15/hour. Seems like the biggest thing growing in the city is the gig economy. You go to a restaurant and half the people there are waiting to make a delivery for some Doordash dot com delivery service, hoping to eek out a few more dollars. Every other car sports an Uber or Lyft badge.
Keeping your head above water in a city with a cost of living like San Francisco can be extremely difficult for a lot of people who are not wealthy. Police, Fire and Teacher's salaries are not enough to house the people who work here. The middle class cannot afford to live here.
It is a city with more dogs than children. Unlike Gertrude Stein's comment about Oakland across the bay, the problem with San Francisco is that there is not
enough there there. This city banned graveyards in 1905 because they were taking up too much room. 20% of the city is build on landfill (the landlocked neighborhood of North Beach used to have a beach). There is virtually no land available for housing.
San Francisco is a city for which there is too much demand and not enough supply. Geologically this is not a place where you would want to build New York scale buildings. How do you retain the character of a city that can provide homes for all the classes needed to make that city? It is not an easy problem.