Sure! Only thing, is that it's first come, first served getting into the homeless shelters at night. Hundreds allowed in, thousands turned away. SF rolls out the welcome mat to homeless and illegals from everywhere, but the reality is that only the rich can afford to actually move into the city. Unless you have been there for decades, you can't get your foot into the door of property unless you can afford several thousands of dollars for monthly rent, or outright buy property for a million or more. Many districts have property values going up 10 percent a year, and rent increases that mirror the situation as rent control allows.
People running city government are idiots, but we all know that. No space to build new housing with an invitation for poor to come in is a fiasco. Cheaper housing is available miles away in surrounding towns, but poor people can't commute so they live in the parks or on the streets. We need a return of vagrancy laws; you can't afford to stay, then move on to elsewhere.
I was interviewing for a job out there when the dot com crash occurred, so it didn’t happen. But, it had gotten far enough along that I was perusing houses for sale. The only thing I could find even then than I could remotely afford that I would even want was a 1,200 sf dinky ranch with a tiny sliver of a Pacific view in Half Moon Bay, needed everything, in dire need of repair. True fixer-upper, handyman special. $350,000, which I thought was insane. No telling what that house would sell for now, though. Probably in excess of a million. I would’ve gone through two price collapses and would have had to maintain a very high paying job to get from then to now, which seems to me a questionable proposition, so it’s just idle speculation. Couldn’t have happened, not for me.
Even nearby areas are pricey.
A big part of the problem is that liberals just can't get their minds around the concept that people are not simply allowed to live anywhere they want, whether they can afford it or not. In San Francisco it's worse - because they see themselves as a sanctuary not just for illegals, but any misfit who wants the rebel against the mainstream. There is also the cynical motive - a plethora of homeless allows the Board of Supervisors to shake down downtown businesses for ever more revenue to buy sinecures for their friends and allies.