A ticket out of town San Francisco’s program to bus homeless people out of the city has undoubtedly saved lives. But, for others, the program has led them right back where they started. Is it fair for the city to count both groups as a success?

A ticket out of town San Francisco’s program to bus homeless people out of the city has undoubtedly saved lives. But, for others, the program has led them right back where they started. Is it fair for the city to count both groups as a success?

After years of being homeless in Iowa, 26-year-old Isaac Langford decided to give San Francisco a try. In San Francisco, he heard, social services are plentiful, anyone is welcome and the weather is pleasant.

A few years before, 18-year-old Wade Southwell came to San Francisco to live with his father after spending years bouncing around the country, back and forth between divorced parents who constantly moved. But Southwell ran away from his dad’s home when he became addicted to drugs and soon found himself without a stable place to live.

Both men found being homeless in San Francisco was full of unrelenting challenges. Drugs, lots of them. No housing. Barely any shelter beds and seemingly endless waiting lists every night.

Their best shot at a better life? A one-way, city-funded bus ticket out of San Francisco.

For Langford, a three-day bus ride back to Iowa around 2014 ended with him being homeless again, just somewhere different and much cheaper, though now he’s living in a trailer. But Southwell said the bus ticket to Missouri in 2012 may have saved his life, reconnecting him with his family, who gave him a place to live.

Despite their vastly different outcomes, though, San Francisco officially deemed both a success, designating them as two of the hundreds of people a year who “exited homelessness” through the city’s Homeward Bound program.

As the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing looks to increase its use of Homeward Bound, several months of program data obtained by The Chronicle show the program clearly helps many people, but doesn’t succeed all the time.

Within a month of leaving San Francisco, 56% of those who used the program from late 2018 to early 2019 said they were stably housed, according to the data. The rest couldn’t be found or were struggling somewhere else. Some couldn’t be tracked by the city, while others were in jail, homeless elsewhere or reported missing by their caretakers. A few returned to San Francisco, and one never left.

Homeward Bound officially follows up with those who use the program only within the first month after they boarded the bus. The city has limited knowledge of what happens to them long-term.

The data highlight a conundrum for San Francisco: As rents rise and the homeless population swells, it’s much cheaper to give someone a bus ticket rather than try to house them here. But when they leave, how responsible is the city for making sure they find stability at the other end of their journey?

How it works A homeless person is connected with Homeward Bound either through a caseworker or through word of mouth. To receive a bus ticket, the person must first be assessed at an intake center on Mission Street. To qualify for a ticket, a Homeward Bound caseworker must first make contact with the caretaker on the other end. Then, the person looking to use the program must pass a warrant check. The person is often sent to a service-intensive homeless shelter — called a Navigation Center — where they can shower and spend the night before boarding the bus. A caseworker then picks them up from the Navigation Center, or wherever they spent the night, and brings them to the Greyhound bus terminal. The person is given $10 a day for food and drinks during their journey. Within a month after the person leaves, Homeward Bound caseworkers call them or their caretakers three times to check on how they are doing in their new location. Source: Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing

In the city’s biennial homeless count, San Francisco officials categorize all Homeward Bound clients as having “exited homelessness,” regardless of whether they did. City officials — including the mayor and head of the homelessness department — also often tout Homeward Bound as a success on par with other programs that place people into housing, such as permanent supportive housing and rental assistance.

From 2013 to 2018, the city says it helped 11,031 people “exit homelessness,” according to the city data. A little more than half of those people were connected with permanent supportive housing or Rapid Re-Housing, a federal rental assistance program.

The rest boarded a Greyhound bus out of the city.

While the program has long been hailed as a lifeline for those who want out of San Francisco, some say it is misleading for the department to say it helped all its clients overcome homelessness.

The data obtained by the Chronicle — which cover September 2018 through March 2019 — include 262 bus tickets and show what happened to participants within a month of boarding the bus. Outcomes are based on three follow-up calls caseworkers make in that first month.

About 800 people use the Homeward Bound program every year. But the data provided to The Chronicle through a public records request span a time period when use of the program dipped significantly, and more homeless people were placed into permanent supportive housing.

While the 262 bus tickets analyzed by The Chronicle are just a snapshot of a program that has served thousands of people since it was created in 2005, that provides a window into a major portion of the city’s homelessness response.

Nearly half the people who used Homeward Bound over those seven months — 125 — told caseworkers they were living with a caretaker, such as a family member, friend or significant other. An additional 24 said they were living on their own. That’s 149 people who might otherwise have been living on San Francisco’s streets or in its shelter system.

Outcomes for many others were far less positive.

Thirty-five people either never showed up at their destinations or disappeared from their caretaker within a month. Six ended up in jail, four were homeless elsewhere in the country, and six returned to San Francisco — where it’s unclear whether they were homeless or housed. One never left.

Sixty-one other people who used the program and their caretakers didn’t respond to the follow-up calls, so the city wasn’t able to learn their fates.

SF Homeless Project This week, The Chronicle again joins with other Bay Area news outlets in the SF Homeless Project, a media collaboration exploring causes and solutions to our regional homelessness crisis. Online: We answer your questions on homelessness and offer a guide to ways you can help. This week: Our “Fifth & Mission” podcast addresses homelessness. Tuesday: San Francisco Mayor London Breed and an expert panel discuss homelessness at the first of two public events. Wednesday: The Chronicle presents an in-depth report, “24 Hours of Homelessness.” Aug. 8: San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo and an expert panel discuss homelessness before a live audience. To purchase tickets to the public events and find all our reporting on this topic: www.sfchronicle.com/homelessness Supported by Cisco

To Jeff Kositsky, director of the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, someone who reports being stably housed on the third follow-up call is considered successful in the program.

“People are dying on the streets, and if we can get them somewhere safe, that is great,” Kositsky said. “Reconnecting people to their loved ones can be profoundly impactful.”

He said it’s not surprising that some people can’t be reached by three follow-up calls. Many who use Homeward Bound and their caretakers are transient and low-income, so may not have a consistent phone number, he said.

But as for those who are either back on San Francisco’s streets, in jail or homeless again somewhere else?

“I wouldn’t consider that a success,” he said. “That was not the intended outcome.”

In the 14 years since the city created the Homeward Bound program under then-Mayor Gavin Newsom, San Francisco’s homeless crisis has indisputably worsened. San Francisco’s homeless population grew by an estimated 17% over the past two years, despite the city building supportive housing and spending more than $285 million annually on the Department of Homelessness. About $1.2 million of that funding is spent on Homeward Bound each year.

The average bus ticket and $10 per diem given to someone for the journey costs the city about $270 per person — far less than what it would cost to shelter or house them. A bed at a Navigation Center costs the city about $100 a night.

According to the department, the city spends $25,000 annually to operate a single permanent supportive-housing unit; it costs about $700,000 to build one of those units.

Other cities around the country, including Seattle, Denver and New York, also provide homeless people bus tickets out of the city. But few follow up with clients to the extent San Francisco does. Seattle, for example, has no follow-up protocol in place, while Denver makes just one check-in 30 days after someone leaves.

Like Langford, the man from Iowa, many people on San Francisco’s streets first became homeless somewhere else. According to city data, some of the city’s homeless population say they first lost their housing somewhere else — either in a different city in California or in another state.

Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the advocacy group Coalition on Homelessness, said she supports giving people the option to take a bus home if they feel stuck. But, she said that should be “counted for what it is.”

“It shouldn’t be counted as a homeless exit,” she said. “It’s a bus ticket out of town.”

Nan Roman, president and CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, said it’s nearly impossible for any social service program to ensure a 100% success rate. But because Homeward Bound accounts for much of the city’s homeless response, she said it should be more diligent in tracking outcomes.

“We have so many unsheltered people that we can’t be taking care of everyone who has ever been homeless forever,” Roman said. “It seems to have worked well with 50%, so that’s great. But that’s still a lot of people where it’s unknown, or it didn’t work.”

The department recently started checking city records six months after people use the program to see if they returned to San Francisco and applied for public benefits. For the future, Kositsky said his department is working on ways to be more transparent about the program’s results. He also wants the department to look at the demographics of those who aren’t successful to try to figure out how the city could better help them.

But now, he said, his department is stymied by understaffing.

“Not 100% of the folks are successful. … Every one of our programs has people who return to homelessness, whether it’s permanent housing or rapid rehousing,” he said. “No program is perfect, but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it.”

Southwell, who’s now 29, said he would still be stuck on San Francisco’s streets — or maybe dead — if it weren’t for the bus ticket to Missouri he got in 2012.

He said he lived with drug dealers and was in and our of rehab for years in San Francisco. At 22, he said, he desperately tried to quit drugs but couldn’t. Somehow, he said, he found Homeward Bound and took the first bus ticket he could get to Missouri to reconnect with his father, who had moved there.

By “being in a new place where I didn’t have any of the drug connections, I sobered up and got a clear head pretty quickly,” he said. “Then I started school within a few months, and it turns out I was pretty good at it.”

Over the spring, Southwell graduated from a special program at Yale University for students whose education was interrupted for five or more years. Now, he said he’s getting ready to start Johns Hopkins University’s business school.

Others found success via Homeward Bound in smaller ways: A woman in Illinois, for example, told The Chronicle that her uncle, who had lost touch with her family for 14 years as he slept on San Francisco’s streets, has been safely living with her for the past few years.

But others are like Langford, still struggling to get back on his feet several years later. He said it was unfair for the city to count him as someone who exited homelessness because of Homeward Bound.

Langford, now 32, said he ended up back on the streets as soon as he got to Iowa and spent a few months cycling in and out of the shelter system. A few months later, he even returned to San Francisco — where he volunteered for the Coalition on Homelessness — to give the city one more shot when Iowa wasn’t working out for him either.

Nothing seemed to have changed in San Francisco, he said. He found himself in a shelter for another few weeks before deciding to go back to Des Moines again. That time, he said, he borrowed money from a friend to pay for his own bus ticket.

Now Langford, who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, said he saved up enough money to move into a “raggedy trailer” in Des Moines. He pays the $650 a month rent with Social Security Disability Insurance.

The city “needs to figure out a solution instead of shipping people out,” he said. “People want housing. They don’t always want to go back to their cities.”

Trisha Thadani is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: tthadani@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @TrishaThadani