Can You Find A Place To Sleep Tonight?
See if you can make it through the night as one of the more than 6,500 homeless people living in San Francisco.
Between the thousands of San Franciscans without a place to live and the dozens of shelters meant to provide them housing lies a massive, many-armed social-services organism bound by complex rules and layers of bureaucracy. One wrong turn or a small procedural mistake can mean the difference between a warm bed for the night and sleeping on the street.
This Choose Your Own Adventure simulation is intended to replicate what happens after a person — in this case, a domestic violence survivor and mother of two — first loses their home.
The scenarios laid out here are personalized to a fictional (though all-too-common) situation, but they are based on BuzzFeed News reporting into every step of the city's emergency-shelter system. If you were to end up homeless in San Francisco tonight, chances are good your experience would look a lot like the simulation below.
Josh Edelson / AFP / Getty