While some homeless are attracted to San Francisco for housing and services, many of San Francisco’s most visible homeless people don’t use them. When I visited the Tenderloin with Tom Wolf, he pointed to the doorway to a building. “I slept here,” he said, “because I was such an addict that I didn’t want to walk the five blocks to the shelter. I wanted to be right near the dealers.”33 In the context of cities with permissive attitudes toward drugs, like San Francisco, many homeless people stay in encampments to use illegal substances more freely and easily than they can in the shelters. Many
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