(calm music) - The reason that I spend all of my days working on housing and homelessness, even though I spent so many years training to be a physician is that I realize that there is no medicine as powerful as housing.

- [Speaker] Dr. Margot Kushel is a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

That's where she directs the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative.

- People have this idea that people experiencing homelessness are rushing into whatever city they're talking about.

People in Nashville are convinced that people are coming from other places.

People in San Francisco are convinced it's not true.

In general, people become homeless near where they live when they're homeless, but the opposite is true.

Lots of non-homeless people have rushed over the last decade or two into San Francisco.

We are the heart of Silicon Valley.

We are where people wanted to be.

We're a really common destination like Nashville is.

I see a lot of similarities between Nashville and San Francisco in that way of places that are interesting, exciting, there's a great economy for well-educated people, lots of new jobs.

In San Francisco, we did not keep up with the housing.

There was one statistic that showed in a decade period before the pandemic, for every 10 new jobs we created, we created barely one unit of housing.

What do you do when you bring a lot more people into a region and you don't create any housing for them, you drive up housing costs.

Housing costs went way up and everyone was kind of pushed down in the housing market until somebody just gets pushed out to the street.

San Francisco should be a cautionary tale for any other thriving city.

It's great to have great jobs.

It's great to have people wanna live there.

That's terrific, but you need to create the housing for everybody.

Seniors who've spent their entire life in San Francisco and Nashville shouldn't be forced out.

You need to be sure that you are creating the housing not only for all the educated workers who need to come in, you also need to create and sustain the housing for the full spectrum of people.