• San Francisco has a vast network of services that capture and keep homeless transplants on the streets

• Nonprofits like the Coalition on Homelessness, funded in part by taxpayers, sue each time an encampment is cleared, and the city has paid out an average of $5,500 per homeless plaintiff for “emotional damages,” among other damages

• Fentanyl in San Francisco is cheaper than any other major U.S. city, costing a fifth of what it does in Los Angeles, and taxpayer-funded harm-reduction nonprofits enable the homeless to do more of it by making DoorDash-style deliveries of lighters and foil (which do nothing to reduce harm)

• This system is animated by an ideology that "homeless addict" is an identity category that deserves protection, even if that protection results in cold bodies on the sidewalk

It happens like this: In downtown San Francisco, a woman pushes a stroller down the street, stopping at each tent she passes and handing out two plastic bags from the pile in the stroller seat: one with foil, lighters, pipes, tourniquets, needles and syringes, the other with Narcan nasal spray and an instruction manual. In a few hours, some of the people she has met may be dead, but she will be back, if not tomorrow then the next day, to hand out more supplies to those who come to replace the dead.

Tent-to-tent drug paraphernalia delivery is just one of dozens of services San Francisco’s local government offers, either directly through city programs or indirectly through city-funded nonprofits, to “support” the roughly 8,000 people who sleep on its streets on any given night. Others include monthly cash payments of up to $712, prepaid grocery cards, subsidized vet care, and free public transit cards.

Taken together, these kinds of services help explain why the city’s homeless crisis continues to worsen despite dramatically increased public spending. The city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing estimates that for each person it places in public housing, another four enter its system. And though activists often claim these new entrants are long-term local residents pushed onto the streets by real-estate speculation and unaffordable rent, our analysis has found they are overwhelmingly from out of town. Add to this the data showing that a majority of those living on the streets struggle with substance abuse and the takeaway is clear: San Francisco doesn’t have a homeless problem, it has a drug tourism problem.