Lurie says San Francisco unsheltered homelessness hits 15-year low

Mayor Daniel Lurie said San Francisco’s preliminary 2026 Point-in-Time count showed the city’s unsheltered homeless population at its lowest level in 15 years, a claim that could bolster his argument that street conditions are improving after years of public frustration.

The new count points to real change on blocks where tents, encampments and sidewalk disorder once defined daily life. Recovery advocates said conditions have improved enough in some areas to be visible to people walking through the city, but they also warned that open drug markets remain stubborn in parts of San Francisco, a reminder that less visible homelessness does not mean the street crisis has been solved.

The timing matters for City Hall because the Point-in-Time count is one of the clearest measures officials use to track homelessness, and a 15-year low gives Lurie a concrete metric to cite as he tries to show progress on one of San Francisco’s most politically damaging failures. But the city’s own methodology changes limit direct year-over-year comparisons, which means the headline number cannot be read as a clean apples-to-apples verdict on how much the street population has actually fallen.

That nuance leaves room for both optimism and scrutiny. If fewer people are living unsheltered, the next question is whether the improvement reflects durable policy changes, better coordination of street outreach and shelter access, or simply a counting shift that makes the city look better on paper than it did before. Any assessment of the numbers has to account for what residents still see in some neighborhoods: persistent drug activity, disorder and people who remain without housing or a clear path into services.

For Lurie, the preliminary result is a political opening as well as a policy test. It suggests the administration can point to measurable progress on one of San Francisco’s defining civic crises, but it also raises the standard for what comes next. A lower count will matter only if the city can keep unsheltered homelessness moving down while proving that the gains are visible not just in spreadsheets, but on the streets where San Franciscans live every day.