A skull-shaped ring shimmered on Rudy McKnight’s finger as he stood up to speak in courtroom 501 in the state superior court in San Francisco. He wore a long beige coat, checked pants, and a fedora that hid part of his face. He was there to plead for one more week in the home he rented, after his landlord reported him for causing a nuisance and told him to leave (McKnight had a large dog that barked). It was the second time he was asking for an extension.
The building, on a quiet tree-lined street in the upscale neighborhood of Yerba Buena, looked freshly painted when I visited. It lay just behind the municipal gardens and was surrounded by museums, gardens, and cafés. McKnight, who is in his sixties, said he had lived there for a little over a year and paid a subsidized rent but had a hard time making ends meet. He was seeing a woman who also had a dog, he said; both dogs had puppies that roamed the apartment. His neighbors complained to the landlord, who sent an eviction notice.
In court, McKnight scrolled furiously through his phone to find evidence of the call he’d made to a lawyer at the Eviction Defense Collaborative (EDC), which provides free representation to low-income residents facing eviction, proving that he had taken the necessary steps to ask for the weeklong extension. But he could not find it. He was unsure if he had filed the right papers, his cool evaporating under questioning from the judge. A friend was printing the papers now and would bring them to the courtroom any minute, he said, looking back at the closed door, willing it to open.
Without the papers, McKnight’s plea could not be heard, the clerk reminded him. He would have to pack up his things and vacate the property. Sheriffs would come by the next morning to evict him if he was still there.
I started coming to this court in downtown San Francisco in spring 2024. I had moved to the city from Mumbai for a temporary teaching position two years earlier. The Bay Area’s housing crisis was evident all around me and seemed to deepen with every year that went by. California’s COVID-era rent moratoriums — which prevented renters from being evicted if they were unable to pay their rent — had briefly eased the problem. But once those moratoriums ended in 2023, unlawful detainers (a type of notice that can lead to eviction) doubled from June 2022 to June 2023. People like McKnight filed into the court, which hears all eviction cases for the city, with pleas to stay just a little longer in their homes. While most were facing eviction for unpaid rent, others were accused of being a nuisance. Accusations often involved unruly pets or drug use. Tenants complained that landlords were pushing them out so that they could increase rents.
Watching these cases, I began to understand that homelessness in the United States was at least as much about isolation as it was about material deprivation. Like McKnight, most tenants came to the court alone and walked the city’s streets alone. Being homeless was perceived, by themselves and by others, as an individual failure, the result of a series of poor choices, ignoring the fact that a tech boom had priced many people out of their homes and a drug epidemic had ravaged many parts of the city. There was a sense of isolation and shame among those who no longer had a home; they felt they were responsible for their situation rather than seeing themselves as victims of a broken system.
I was struck by how different this felt from what I had seen in Mumbai. I had reported on homelessness and slums there, and then run a nonprofit from 2010 to 2019 that gave micro loans to grow small businesses and offered skills training and jobs as well as after-school classes for children. The tiny makeshift homes that line the city’s streets and make up its slums are filled with children, neighbors, friends, and close and distant family members. The homeless and slum dwellers are not isolated; they don’t hide. They also advocate for their own rights. Organizations that help those living on the streets or in the slums are not run by the state or professional agencies, like many in the United States are, but by members of the community.
There is, of course, nothing to romanticize about Mumbai’s slums, which I visited often for more than a decade. In Mumbai, the scale of poverty and homelessness is so immense that the value of an individual life is often crushingly little. The city of nearly 20 million people is India’s commercial capital, home to the film and television industries as well as to some of the world’s wealthiest people. For decades, the dream of striking it rich or becoming famous or otherwise remaking their lives attracted people from rural India to Mumbai, even if it meant living on its streets and sidewalks. The city held out the shimmering hope of upward mobility, even if it turned out to be a hollow hope.
Before moving to San Francisco, I wrote a book about the people who live in a slum near the city’s vast garbage dump and pick through waste to resell recyclable materials; their life expectancy was just under 40 years. I met teenagers crushed by garbage trucks and young kids who later died of drug-resistant tuberculosis or brain infections likely caused by working with garbage. I saw children go to sleep hungry, saw their homes get flooded knee-deep with rainwater, their schoolbooks soaked beyond recognition with every downpour. Many sniffed glue and dropped out of school soon after their baby teeth fell out.
The people who live in these slums are at the bottom rung of India’s brutal caste and religious hierarchy. They are largely invisible to the wealthy. Their prospects of access to higher education and white-collar jobs are bleak. Many suffer from malnutrition and avoidable infectious diseases. They are forced to work hazardous jobs and face daily violence on the city’s streets. But despite these hardships, they also have a real sense of community. They lend each other what small amounts of money they have, accompany friends or family members at court appearances, babysit for neighbors. Unlike the homeless in San Francisco, they were not alone.
Back in courtroom 501, McKnight received a weeklong reprieve to stay in the apartment he rented, after an EDC lawyer stepped in to confirm that his papers had been emailed to the opposing lawyer on time. When I caught up with McKnight on his way out of the courtroom, he was beaming. He invited me to come visit him at home. It was beautiful, he said. There was a garden.
I wasn’t able to visit him there that week. A week later, he was back in the courtroom to ask for another extension. A lawyer appeared on a screen with a crackly connection to say McKnight had not filed the required papers. The EDC lawyer who had stepped in the week before was not there this time. When the clerk started to read out the orders, McKnight stood to hear his fate. He had been evicted.
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In my first weeks and months in San Francisco in early 2022, I often took the subway from Berkeley into the city to explore its neighborhoods. When the train emerged above ground, the sun-drenched landscape was strewn with plastic sheets, torn couches, and scattered clothes. I couldn’t help wondering whether I was back in Mumbai.
The tech boom of the last few decades has created more wealth in the Bay Area than maybe anywhere else in the world. The country’s biggest tech company, Nvidia, which is based in the Bay Area, was reported to have a market valuation of $5 trillion in October 2025 — far exceeding the GDP of India, the world’s most populous nation. The influx of tech workers, and the sharp rise in housing prices that resulted from it, has priced out many locals. While billionaires in the area nearly doubled, to 82, in the last decade, a poll by the United Ways of California, a non-profit, showed that a third of all Californians struggle to meet basic living costs, mainly because of the cost of housing. California is consistently ranked the most expensive U.S. state to live in.
I would often read about how California would be the world’s fourth-biggest economy if it were a country. The population of San Francisco is only about 820,000 — surely providing adequate housing for this number of people in a city so wealthy would be a breeze compared with housing the millions of people living below the poverty line in Mumbai, I naively thought.
And yet, whenever I took the subway into the city, I saw passengers enter the carriage who were clearly homeless, pushing shopping carts carrying their belongings. It was hard not to feel shaken. A "point in time" survey found that more than 8,000 were homeless in the city in January 2024; the survey also noted that 20,000 people seek homeless services over the course of a year. I saw them everywhere I went; they traveled on their own and often looked unsure of where to go next. In court, too, they were trying to navigate a system they mostly did not understand. One day in court, I heard the judge ask a man in a package delivery uniform for his written submission. The man presented the clerk with the papers he had got up early and stood in line to obtain from a legal clinic in the building. He seemed surprised to find out that these were just the clinic’s pamphlets, and that they would not get him the extension to stay in his home. He was handed an eviction order. During the hundreds of hours I spent in court, I watched as mostly low-to-middle-income workers, crushed by the impact of rising rents and unstable work, lost their homes.
I met one man, Alex, who started living in his car when he could no longer afford rent. When the parking tickets started to pile up, he abandoned the car and moved to the streets. When I met him, he was living in a shelter. He never told his parents he was homeless. When he visited them for the holidays, he showered in a gym beforehand and dressed as neatly as he could; he avoided questions about his housing situation. His sense of shame was palpable when we spoke. He had always worked, he told me — as a front desk manager in a hotel, in tech support — but he seemed to believe that he was responsible for his current situation. If he was not wealthy enough to afford rent in the city, it must be because he was not smart or hard-working enough.
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In the early 2000s, Mumbai took World Bank loans to widen its roads and train tracks. The goal was to give the city a facelift and provide better transportation and infrastructure to its more than 16 million residents. But the project could not begin without removing those who lived on the city’s sidewalks and along its train tracks. Thousands had set up makeshift homes made of little more than cloth, asbestos, and plastic sheets. They ran little shops to make a living.
When police and municipal authorities came to count the people who would need to be resettled and whose homes would need be torn down, residents did not cooperate. Reluctant to give up their makeshift homes and livelihoods, many hid or hurled abuse at the authorities. Eventually, women’s groups from these slums began to survey residents to better understand their concerns and share them with officials. Prema Salgaonkar, an activist who helped conduct these surveys, told me that she would also use the opportunity to remind residents of the benefits: A solid home would give them a sense of safety that they did not have on the streets, especially for women, she told them. It would give them their first real address to provide at job interviews; it would also allow them to receive benefits and even mail. In the end, more than 100,000 people were successfully resettled to homes on the outskirts of the city.
Community organizing also helped solve a major disaster years later, in 2010. An old rusted pipe had burst in an area where many people lived in makeshift homes; water gushed out, flooding their homes. (The area, whose pipes provide water for the whole city, had recently become famous, because the Oscar-winning Hollywood movie Slumdog Millionaire was shot there.) Authorities quickly blamed the residents and threatened to tear down their homes. Salgaonkar organized protests and put pressure on the municipal authorities; eventually, people were resettled in permanent housing in a housing complex on the edge of the city. While some disliked being sent so far away, they remained neighbors with the people they had lived next to before. At first, they commuted to work. Slowly, they found work closer to the housing complex or set up their corner store or vegetable-selling business again. They never returned to the street.
In Mumbai, sidewalk dwellers were often seen as freeloading on state and taxpayer resources, as they live on public land. People assumed they were migrants from other states or neighboring countries who wanted a share of Mumbai’s growing wealth. Many had, in fact, migrated from villages within the state. In Mumbai, they sold tea, cooked street food, fixed shoes, made deliveries, or provided other small services. Community organizing, of which there are countless examples across the city, helped give them a voice and helped to counter the narrative that they were criminals or a nuisance. They became participants, rather than victims, of the city’s modernization.
Over the past decade, Mumbai has witnessed an intense construction boom: The city has built bridges, a new metro, a monorail, and new financial districts, malls, and condominiums. A government policy dating back to 1995 mandates that people living in slums that are razed to build new housing or office blocks would have to be resettled in apartment blocks on the same plot of land. Although the quality of such housing can sometimes be poor, it enforces a degree of equity even as gentrification sweeps through the city, and it ensures that developers cannot simply raze slums to build multimillion-dollar homes.
But the measure is not always entirely successful: Many workers who lived in what was Mumbai’s textile mill district, for example, were forced out and not resettled. A textile workers’ strike in the 1980s had weakened the textile mills, whose owners began shutting down the mills and redeveloping them as malls and condos; courts upheld this redevelopment without ensuring housing for the people who lived and worked there.
When I first started reporting on slums in Mumbai, I remember being frustrated by what I perceived as people accepting their situation as fate. They seemed to have internalized the idea that low status and poverty were set in stone and that they had no control over what happened to them. My friend, the writer Manu Joseph, author of Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us, explained to me that the poor in India have no experience of being rich, and so they don’t fight for it or harbor anger toward the rich, even as Mumbai’s elite joins the ranks of the world’s wealthiest, building homes that touch the city’s monsoon clouds. This sense of acceptance is debilitating in its own way. But I’ve come to realize that it also means that Mumbai’s slum and street dwellers do not carry around the devastating sense of shame and loneliness I witnessed on the streets of San Francisco.
I had spent hundreds of hours in San Francisco’s eviction court, but McKnight was the first person I met who lost his home before my eyes. I was shaken. I had seen his eyes light up as he told me about where he lived, and I had seen his confidence dissolve as he faced the court alone. My heart sank as I watched him walk away.
Worried about where he would go the night after he was evicted, I asked an EDC staffer for his number. I tried calling several times, but he never picked up. For days, while walking city streets, I worried that I would spot him living there. The wait for shelter beds in the city could stretch into weeks. A recent court order allowed city authorities to remove homeless people from the streets even if the city could not offer shelter beds. McKnight did not seem to have any family members who could take him in.
Finally, 10 days later, McKnight called me back. A case worker had found him and his dog emergency housing where he could stay until he found a more permanent solution, he told me. The next morning, I walked down Polk Street, a fancy, bustling street dotted with pricey coffee shops and vintage clothing stores. McKnight was temporarily living in a crumbling budget hotel nearby. As I entered his room, his dog started to bark and wouldn’t stop. The dog was not used to visitors, he told me; it was usually just the two of them. McKnight was in good spirits. That morning, he had found a bed on the sidewalk. His room had been unfurnished, and he slept on the floor; now he had a place to sleep and for visitors to sit.
I sat next to McKnight on the edge of the bed, and he told me about his childhood. His parents separated when he was a child, and he moved around the country with his mother, first to New Jersey, then to Kansas, and back to California. He took courses in technology and gardening at a local college and held several different jobs but was never able to earn enough to buy or rent a place of his own. He had mostly lived in shelters or on the streets.
He poked his head into the communal kitchen, where he opened the fridge, took out a box of food belonging to someone else, and hid it under his coat. That’s mostly how he fed himself, he told me. He had spent the past days in his room looking out of the window at the young people in the cafés on Polk Street or on the phone with case workers and friends who might be able to help him find another place to live before he had to leave this one. While he still tried to look for short-term jobs, mostly in gardening, he spent most of his time searching for somewhere to live. He seemed to long for the kind of stability he had not experienced in childhood.
He wanted to visit his old place. When I reminded him that he had been evicted and would likely not be welcome there, he told me not to worry. We would visit his neighbor’s apartment, which had a similar layout; they were still friendly. We took the bus to his old neighborhood and sure enough, his old neighbor let us in. McKnight bounded up to the second floor, smiling broadly as he gave me a tour of his neighbor’s railroad-style apartment. “Mine is just like this,” he said, seeming to forget it was no longer his.
As we were admiring the well-kept garden, which was filled with trees and white orchids, a man appeared on the porch behind us. He lived in the apartment below and had been the one to file the complaint against McKnight. He threatened to call the police and followed us out of the house. We stood on the street for a while. McKnight seemed unsettled. Unsure of where to go, I suggested we get lunch. We walked down a restaurant-filled street until he picked a burger joint. We argued over our favorite burger chains; he ribbed me for not being qualified to pick because I was vegetarian, his mood lifting at his greater expertise. We parted on the street, each of us taking buses in different directions.
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In 2023, San Francisco had just half the number of shelter beds it needed to house its homeless population, according to an estimate by the Public Policy Institute of California, a San Francisco-based nonpartisan think tank. The next year, there was a nearly 10 percent rise in homelessness in the city, worsening an already difficult situation. Voters routinely listed homelessness and a perceived lack of public safety resulting from it as their top concerns.
The Democratic mayor of San Francisco, Daniel Lurie, an heir to the Levi Strauss company family fortune, ran in 2024 on a campaign to add 1,500 new shelter beds during his first six months in office, among other pledges. Six months later, that target had been missed.
Kunal Modi, the head of the city’s Health and Human Services, described the problem in The San Francisco Standard as one of efficiency. While the city spends more than $1 billion to fund more than 25,000 beds, the number of people living on the streets has not “gone down meaningfully in the past few decades.” The number of people reporting substance use as a reason for their homelessness has risen from 12 percent in 2022 to 19 percent in 2024, he noted.
“We have failed to rapidly connect people to treatment, deliver the right clinical support at the right time, and help people move from crisis to recovery to long-term stability,” he wrote in July 2025. “People get stuck on waitlists, bounce between emergency rooms and jail, or deteriorate in shelters not equipped for their clinical needs,” he added. The focus, he insisted, would now be on improving coordination between shelters and health and counseling services.
The issue has become more urgent, Modi acknowledged, because federal funding is shrinking under Donald Trump’s administration; city and state budgets have also suffered cuts.
Navigating the city’s shelter system alone can be dispiriting and fruitless. The waiting time for a bed is typically several weeks and involves a great deal of bureaucracy, Jacqueline Patton, a senior attorney at the Eviction Defense Collaborative, told me. The quality and layout of shelters vary. Most have dorm-style sleeping arrangements, though some also offer individual rooms, Patton and other activists said. They are often gender segregated and don’t allow even married couples to live together; others do not allow pets or accommodate those who work late nights, as many low-income people are forced to do. Some shelters offer pathways to permanent housing; most don’t. In most cases, a person can’t keep their bed indefinitely and will eventually be forced to move along. Any violations of a shelter’s rules can lead to an eviction notice, which residents often have little legal or emotional support to fight.
During my time in San Francisco, I met Mark Reid, a tall, well-built Black man who had been sober for more than a decade when he moved into permanent housing. (Living in shelters had been difficult because of the prevalence of drugs among the people who lived there.) Getting housing had felt like the culmination of his efforts to be a better person, he told me. But in November 2023, he got into a fight with his neighbor, whom he suspected of selling drugs, and punched him in the face. His landlord served him an eviction notice. With the help of an EDC lawyer, Jessica Santillo, he was able to get a yearlong reprieve. She asked him to call her when he was angry, rather than take it out on his neighbor or the building manager. On her advice, Reid began going for late-night walks and grabbing coffee in the early morning to avoid smelling the neighbor’s drugs. Some mornings, he would be waiting for Santillo when she got to the office, ready to talk about his case or how he was doing. The ritual has kept him out of trouble. Santillo said she hopes she will be able to get another extension for him to stay in the room he rents, thanks to the income from his job as a security guard, in a peach-and-green house near the city’s famed baseball stadium, Oracle Park. Her emotional support, it turned out, was as important as her legal expertise.
In Mumbai, too, this kind of support was key in the slums and among the homeless population. Speaking to Salgaonkar, I was reminded of how crucial it is to understand people’s specific needs and provide a reliable interface with municipal authorities — making sure that people are not going up against the maze of bureaucracy and state systems on their own. This informal system is far from perfect, of course. In Mumbai, some of those who lived along the train tracks and were supposed to be resettled into permanent housing decades ago are still living in temporary “transit camps.” Among those who have been moved out of the streets and into apartments, many are not able to pay to maintain elevators or for trash removal; their living conditions are no less squalid than they were in their previous homes, even if they are no longer on the street.
Still, the number of people living on the streets in Mumbai has reduced considerably over the last two decades, with many resettled into permanent housing where they are safer and can continue to make a living. When I went to these areas to meet with someone who wanted to take out a loan, a neighbor often acted as their guarantor. They might squabble over limited water supplies or paying for utilities, but they had been neighbors for decades.
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Some months after meeting Reid in San Francisco, I happened to be invited to a venture capital conference in the city. That afternoon, I walked from the train station to a chic minimalist office in the city’s South Park neighborhood and was ushered into a conference room. The blinds had been lifted, and framed in the floor-to-ceiling glass windows was the pastel-colored house where Reid lived. During the conference discussion on climate change, I felt that I could almost grasp Reid’s troubled home in my palm — and yet it seemed worlds away.
I also thought of McKnight. I hadn’t heard from him recently. What would happen after his emergency housing ended? City authorities had started destroying the makeshift homes of people living on the streets and impounding their possessions. The U.S. Supreme Court had opened the door for the crackdown by ruling that cities could evict people living on the streets even if there were not enough shelters to send them to. Soon after the judgment, California governor Gavin Newsom spoke from Los Angeles in support of the ruling for television cameras; behind him tent and encampment sweeps went on. San Francisco’s then mayor London Breed also spoke in favor of ordering these sweeps; her comments projected an image of being tough on crime, stating explicitly that anyone who refused help from the government would be removed from the streets. I often wondered where the people I could see scrambling to pick up their few belongings would sleep and how they would rearrange their lives.
I saw McKnight a few more times, but always from a distance. He was alone, walking his dog. I did not have the heart to go up to him and ask if he had found permanent housing and new neighbors.
PHOTO: by Isaac Garcia via Unsplash
SAUMYA ROY is the author of Castaway Mountain: Love and Loss Among the Watepickers of Mumbai (Astra House, 2021), a narrative non-fiction book about the waste pickers who live at Mumbai's vast landfill. It was translated into Chinese, Japanese and Marathi and was listed among the best books of the year by NPR, theprint.in, GQ India, Telegraph India and Washington Independent Review, among others. She is also the co-founder of Vandana Foundation, a non-profit that supported waste pickers, street vendors and other micro business owners in Mumbai. She has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, aljazeera.com, bbc.com, The Dial and thewire.in, among others.