Once a Last Stop for the City’s Homeless, SFO Ramps Up Outreach and Support

I. LIZBETH, SFO INTERNATIONAL TERMINAL, 5:00 a.m.

It’s 5 a.m., and San Francisco International Airport’s International Terminal is surprisingly quiet. A janitor pushes a cart full of cleaning supplies. A Transportation Security Administration agent straggles in with her lunchbox. And Lizbeth Sanchez prepares for a day of work.

In the Special Services area outside of security, where Sanchez works, a few passengers are asleep on top of their bags, waiting for the ticket counters to open. When they wake up, Sanchez will be ready to help them out by giving directions, pushing wheelchairs and offering language translation.

But some other people asleep in this seating nook aren’t actually traveling anywhere. She points to a person lying on the floor in a far corner of the Special Services area, their body mostly blocked from view by a row of seats. They look like any other traveler. But to Sanchez, it’s clear that they’re not.

“I see feet, and I don’t see luggage,” she says. “So you notice when it’s a homeless [person], and you notice when it’s people who are missing the flights, and they decide to stay in the airport.”

Sanchez sees what many others don’t: Unhoused people are staying at SFO — some just to sleep for the night, others to live. And while technically not part of her job, Sanchez has made it her duty to help them, too. She lets them rest in her seating area when it’s not too busy, and she brings extra sandwiches from home to share. But it didn’t take long for Sanchez to realize she could not offer people experiencing homelessness something they really needed: housing.

“I said, ‘God, please send me someone to help all these people,’” Sanchez says. “‘Like some Robin Hood or something like that?’”

II. JAMES, SFO, 6:30 a.m.

James Paxton is Sanchez’s Robin Hood. For over a year, he made outreach trips to the airport as a case manager for LifeMoves, a San Mateo County-based organization that connects unhoused people with housing and resources.

People experiencing homelessness have had a presence at the airport since at least 2018, but airport officials say their number has grown. The San Francisco Police Department says it encounters about 35 unhoused people at the airport every day. Records show that in the first week of December 2025, they made contact with nearly 250 people experiencing homelessness.

While LifeMoves tries to help these individuals find a stable place to live, the process can be complicated, and the program is, at present, limited to only 4 hours per month.

In 2018, LifeMoves was contracted to do homeless outreach at SFO because the airport is physically located in San Mateo County, even though the city and county of San Francisco own SFO.

LifeMoves staff has led outreach trips at the airport ever since.

Such airport outreach is not unique to SFO. Since 2020, a homeless outreach team has been staffed at Los Angeles International Airport for 40 hours a week. Their presence makes a difference: In the team’s first six months at LAX, the airport’s unhoused population decreased by 90%.

On this August morning, Paxton and his team arrive at the airport before dawn to connect with unhoused folks as they’re waking up, before they start moving around and become harder to find. Paxton leads his team all over SFO, looking for people who want help. Paxton wears a backpack filled with food and hygiene products, ready to provide unhoused folks whatever they say they need: from shelter beds to medical care to Lyft rides.

“A lot of the clients, I need to reestablish their ID, I need to get their Social Security, their birth certificate,” Paxton says. “A lot of them don’t have any of those items, and it makes it hard to get services.”

Since Paxton only makes outreach trips to the airport once a month, he leans on people who work at SFO — food workers, bag checkers, rental car staff — to act as his unofficial eyes when he’s not there. People like Sanchez.

“They’ll call me and be like, ‘Hey, I think this person needs help,’ and I’ll be on my way,” Paxton says. “We like to make sure that we communicate with them so we can build a better system to reach more people.”

Paxton says that there are lots of reasons people choose to stay at SFO. It’s open around the clock. It has food, water and bathrooms. The airport is secure. It’s also easier for people experiencing homelessness to blend in at the airport as they lug around their bags or sleep. In fact, it can be hard to distinguish them from travelers.

“ Little cues that we’ve noticed to look for, like the tag on the bag shows that he’s flying out soon,” Paxton says, pointing at a passenger’s bag. “And then other clients that we’ll notice, they’ll have bag tags, but it’ll be for like weeks ago. [That] kind of give[s] us an inclination that they may need services.”

Paxton offered services to dozens of unhoused people he met at the airport during his year or so as a case manager for LifeMoves. He placed 15 of them into temporary shelters.

III. KIM, SAFE HARBOR SHELTER, 4:30 p.m.

One of Paxton’s clients is Kim Snodgrass, who became homeless after he retired.

“Got a fairly nice pension and Social Security, but even with that in San José, I could not live on that,” Snodgrass says.

So, he got a job — and then an unexpected tax bill for thousands of dollars.

“That’s when I started going downhill.”

Snodgrass moved to Mexico in search of a cheaper lifestyle, but ended up flying back to SFO with only a few hundred dollars in his pocket. He says he didn’t want to put out either of his sons, both of whom live in the Bay Area. So, after Snodgrass’s flight landed, he just stayed at the airport.

“I had no idea where else to go, and I saw other people there that were staying there,” Snodgrass says. “I mean, you can kind of tell people that are not passengers.”

Snodgrass lived at the airport for more than six months.

Each morning, Snodgrass would head to a bathroom to wash up. Then he’d take a long walk between terminals. He’d spend time watching planes from the Reflection Room, visit one of the airport’s museum exhibits, or chat with travelers. At around 6 p.m., Snodgrass would stake out a good place to sleep for the night. He had a favorite spot: a dimly lit seating area tucked in between check-in counters in a domestic terminal.

“It was pretty comfortable to sleep,” Snodgrass says. “You know, you have to sleep sitting up — and that’s kind of hard to do, too. There’s lots of people that want to sleep there. Not just homeless people, but also travelers that maybe are catching a flight the next day.”

Snodgrass says most travelers didn’t seem to notice the unhoused community around them.

“They’re in their own world,” Snodgrass says. “They’re going somewhere nice or coming back from someplace nice, and are just oblivious to you, really. It’s like you don’t even exist.”

Eventually, Snodgrass did get noticed. Police officers, who had always patrolled the airport, began asking unhoused people to show their boarding passes. When they didn’t have plane tickets, the cops would tell them to leave.

Even though SFO is a public place, it has restricted public hours. In May, the airport shortened the time it’s open to the public — so anyone found at the airport without a plane ticket from 6 p.m. to 8 a.m. the next day would be considered trespassing. This shift didn’t prevent unhoused people from seeking shelter at SFO, but it did change the way they were treated.

“I was really harassed,” Snodgrass says. “One morning, a policeman woke me up, and he told me that I was trespassing and that I needed to leave and not to come back. He wasn’t kind at all.”

The police made living at the airport a challenge. But getting enough to eat was even harder.

Snodgrass befriended a pastor who regularly traveled to SFO, who would buy him food when he came to town. When the pastor was not around, Snodgrass would eat one Wendy’s chicken sandwich a day.

Snodgrass made sure other folks living at the airport had food, too. He would stand by the security line, and when travelers went to throw out their water or food, he would ask if he could have it or grab it from the trash.

“I would hand it out to some other homeless people that were, like, in really bad shape.”

Eventually, Snodgrass could no longer afford food — and he was in really bad shape, himself. He considered suicide.

“You get so hungry,” Snodgrass says. “That’s very painful. I think it was after I was hungry for, hadn’t eaten for, like seven or eight days, that I contacted James [Paxton] and said, ‘I can’t deal with this anymore. Can you get me in a shelter?’”

Paxton jumped into action and found Snodgrass an open bed at Safe Harbor Shelter in San Mateo County. But getting unhoused folks at SFO into temporary housing does not always work out. Sometimes, when people want to move to a shelter, Paxton can’t place them where they want to go.

IV. SFPD AMBASSADORS AND OFFICER WHITNEY, SAMTRANS STOP, 7:30 a.m.

Back at SFO, in an empty hallway somewhere along Paxton’s route, he runs into two men in bright blue shirts. They’re “ambassadors,” retired San Francisco police officers stationed at the airport, whose job is to assist passengers and employees. Ambassadors don’t actually do any law enforcement, but they do help Paxton locate people experiencing homelessness.

They point Paxton toward the SamTrans bus stop on the lower level, where an unhoused man lies on the floor next to a curved bench, almost entirely hidden from people passing by.

Paxton offers him a snack pack with fruit, a Danish and beef ravioli. The man takes it, along with a hygiene kit filled with products like soap, a toothbrush and an eye mask. But the unhoused man does not accept Paxton’s offer of shelter.

“He is a San Francisco native,” Paxton says. “He said that he’d like services in San Francisco. That’s where he’s from.”

But LifeMoves cannot offer shelter in San Francisco, because the organization operates in San Mateo County — where the airport is located — and connects folks with services there. And that’s a problem: Unhoused people arrive at SFO from all over the region, just like travelers do — and 95% of the Bay Area’s unhoused population lives outside of San Mateo County.

While the local homeless community is fluid, the Bay Area’s housing strategies are not. The region’s homelessness efforts are largely siloed by county, and this fragmentation challenges the Bay Area’s ability to provide services to unhoused folks where they need them, when they need them. So, when people experiencing homelessness at the airport want shelter, LifeMoves cannot house most of them in the county where they need it.

The SFPD says none of the unhoused folks officers encountered in December received “admonishments” or “citations”; none were arrested.

At the SamTrans stop, SFPD Officer Erik Whitney also spots the unhoused man.

“You can get on the bus,” Officer Whitney tells the man. “Out there. Not here. It’s trespassing.”

The SFPD and LifeMoves share a goal: They both want people experiencing homelessness at the airport to leave. But there’s a key difference. Paxton and his team attempt to get them shelter beds in San Mateo County before they go, while the police usually just give unhoused folks a bus ticket to go somewhere else.

And at certain hours, it seems that the police make sure unhoused folks don’t get into the airport in the first place.

V. MARTIN, SFO BART STATION, 1:15 a.m.

When the last train of the night pulls up to the SFO BART station at 1:15 a.m., about a dozen police officers on segues greet it. But no unhoused folks come off the train, and the cops whiz back into the airport on their two-wheelers.

“They’re here to make sure anybody [that] gets off the last train is flying,” BART station agent Martin Croskery says. As he locks up, he says that SFPD officers are there every night. “Cause there used to be a problem with a lot of homeless coming off the last train and then staying in the airport overnight.”

According to public records, the SFPD made contact with nearly 100 unhoused people coming off of the last two BART trains of the night during the first week of December. But Croskery says he hardly sees people experiencing homelessness get off the last train these days, in part because the line no longer ends at SFO. In 2021, BART changed the train route to end in Millbrae, further south in San Mateo County.

“Millbrae now has issues, but the last train has to go somewhere,” Croskrey says. “The problem has shifted from — it’s gone back and forward for years. It used to be the airport, then it was Millbrae, then back [to] the airport. And the airport says, ‘We can’t have this.’”

VI. JAMES, MILLBRAE BART STATION, 8:30 a.m.

At the end of Paxton’s monthly homeless outreach shift at SFO, he heads out to find more unhoused people right where Croskery says they’d be: at the Millbrae BART station. There, Paxton easily finds two people who want services in San Mateo County. They fill out LifeMoves intake forms and begin the process of getting shelter.

And with that, Paxton’s four hours of monthly outreach come to a close. But soon, the LifeMoves team may be working longer hours.

In June, the SFO Airport Commission approved a contract to staff a homeless outreach team at the airport 40 hours a week. The SFO contract is still being amended, but is expected to take effect in the spring.

Still, Paxton knows that solving the Bay Area’s homelessness crisis is beyond LifeMoves’ capacity. The region needs more housing to ensure that people like Snodgrass have permanent places to live after their time at shelters runs out.

“We do need more housing, I believe, in order to help this problem,” Paxton says. “That seems like that would be the best answer to help. But [we’re] just going to have to wait on that.”

Erin Bump is a radio reporter and podcast producer who lives in San Francisco. Find more of her work at kalw.org or in the Century Lives podcast feed.