SF Mayor London Breed’s new tactic to reduce homelessness won’t be seen as particularly compassionate, as her latest executive order demands encampment sweeps where people are first offered a bus ticket out of town before they’re offered shelter.

Buoyed by a June Supreme Court decision that gives cities more aggressive powers to clear homeless encampments, San Francisco Mayor London Breed promised a hardcore encampment clearing campaign would begin in August. It actually started a little before August, and with it came tougher rhetoric from Breed that unhoused people would be subject to “criminal penalties,” as she announced to that population, “we want to make things less comfortable for you."

Now the Chronicle reports that Breed issued a new executive order Thursday for city workers to offer unhoused people a bus ticket out of town before offering them shelter within the city. The bus tickets out of town are an offering that has existed for years as the Homeward Bound project, now called Journey Home. But what’s new is that people are being offered the “please leave” deal before they are offered shelter or assistance.

“San Francisco will always lead with compassion, but we cannot allow our compassion to be taken advantage of,” Breed said in the executive order, per the Chronicle. “This directive will ensure that relocation services will be the first response to our homelessness and substance use crises, allowing individuals the choice to reunite with support networks before accessing other City services or facing the consequences of refusing care.”

It’s not just homeless outreach teams that will be offering tickets to leave as their first order of business when dealing with street campers, but also first responders like police, firefighters, and paramedics. And as seen in the above tweet from the Chronicle's Maggie Angst, the latest tactics sure do appear to meet the description of “criminalizing homelessness.”

"This is not compassion.  This is not love," Glide CEO and president Dr. Gina Fromer told KTVU. "We see the pain that people are going through when their encampments are moved. They have to lose their connections to organizations and resources.”

But Breed cites (preliminary) numbers from this year’s point-in-time homeless census count, which she says concluded that 40% of SF’s unhoused people are from another city or state. That percentage is up from 28% of them being from another city or state in 2019.

Moreover, Breed says the count showed 37% of unhoused people in SF had only been here for a year or less, hence her “ship ‘em back to where they came from” stance.

While the ramped-up encampment sweeps are directly enabled by that recent Supreme Court decision, Breed is facing centrist-moderate challengers in he reelection bid, and their harsh tone on the homelessness issue seems to be driving Breed to toughen up her talk.

But it may end up being mostly talk, as it remains to be seen whether many people will take the offer to leave town — which, again, has been on the table for a number of years. A pre-pandemic Chronicle analysis from 2019 found that only about 100-200 people a year took the one-way ticket out of town deal, whereas SF currently has an estimated 8,000 or so people living on the streets.

Related: SF Steps Up Homeless Encampment Sweeps This Week — Will Homeless Just Ping-Pong to Other Blocks? [SFist]

Image: @LondonBreed via Twitter