Lower the cost of building housing. Streamline permits, zoning, and environmental review. Publicly commit, in other words, to driving down housing prices over a decade. (Note: not land prices! That’s the compromise.) This makes it cheaper to...

Build enough shelters for the transient homeless population. Now that they’re a stable problem, we can focus on the gritty bits.

Fund mental-health intervention for the permanently homeless so afflicted. And there has to be an element of coercion. Leaving the mentally ill to waste on the street isn’t compassion, it’s dereliction.

Fund drug-addiction intervention for the permanently homeless so afflicted. Carrot is clean places to use, seek counselling and get preventative medical care. Stick has to be arresting (and preferably transferring to clinics, not prisons) public users of hard, illicit drugs.

With the above in place, encampments can be humanely cleared and/or relocated. It also lets law enforcement tackle the minority of the homeless who are threatening, violent or thieving, a minority that creates most of the problems for other San Franciscans.

(Oh, and regional transit co-operation. If you make it easier for people to get around the Bay Area, they don’t have to stack up on each other. Why is the Caltrain a single trunk? Where is the network of every-fifteen-minutes ferries? Why is the BART so loud and expensive?)