Humboldt County, CA, and San Francisco are the latest pair to start some drama about who is busing homeless people where and homeless relocation programs. This seems to be a huge bone of contention amongst local government leaders all over the place. The way they bicker about it brings to mind children who aren’t allowed to leave the table until they’ve finished their dinner, secretly trying to sneak their vegetables onto a sibling’s plate while no one is looking. I would have hoped our political leaders had matured beyond that stage.

As it turns out, people are going both places because they are — surprise! — full humans with freedom of movement and the agency to decide where they travel (for now). This trend of trying to close off the city gates to anyone below a certain income level through homeless relocation programs is becoming dystopian fast.

This latest tantrum started with a news article. A few Humboldt County supervisors caught wind of a story about San Francisco’s new Journey Home program. It’s a tweak on the old Homeward Bound program, which operated not unlike Humboldt County’s own homeless relocation program.

Journey Home has relocated 92 people through homeless relocation programs so far to locations where they’ve lived before or have connections. Of those 92 people, 25 have been relocated to other counties within California rather than out of state.

The issue county supervisors had with this homeless relocation program came in the part of the report that listed Humboldt County as one of the top 3 most requested in-state destinations alongside Los Angeles and Sacramento. This, they could not abide. Supervisors voted to send a letter to San Francisco Mayor London Breed to point out the homeless relocation program’s shortcomings and complain about the big city facilitating the movement of unhoused people into “our small, rural county.” Emphasis mine.

After the public letter came the big “gotcha” moment. The San Francisco Standard published an article with a title that says it all: Humboldt ‘dismayed’ with SF homeless bus program. Turns out they bus people here too, which exposed the truth and missed the point.

Read the full article about homeless relocation programs by Kayla Robbins at Invisible People.