This story aired in the December 18, 2025 episode of Crosscurrents.
When most Bay Area residents head to San Francisco International Airport, it’s so they can leave. But some locals go to SFO to stay. For years, unhoused folks have been spending the night at the airport. Sometimes, they stay for months on end. And helping them find other places to live is unusually complicated.
Part 1: LIZBETH, SFO INTERNATIONAL TERMINAL, 5 a.m.
REPORTER: If you show up at SFO’s International Terminal at 5 a.m., it’s surprisingly quiet.
LIZBETH SANCHEZ: In the early mornings, like you notice right now, it's so quiet. It's peaceful, no noise, no nothing.
REPORTER: Janitors push carts full of cleaning supplies, TSA agents straggle in with their lunchboxes, and Lizbeth Sanchez gets ready to begin a day of work.
LIZBETH: Hi. Good morning. Good morning.
REPORTER: Lizbeth is a Special Services Coordinator. She helps passengers who need assistance before they go through security: giving directions, pushing wheelchairs, and doing language translation. Her desk is in a nook of the departures level with a few rows of connected seats, where travelers wait for help. Or, sometimes, rest.
At this hour, a few passengers are fast asleep on top of their bags, waiting for the ticket counters to open. And a couple people sleep without luggage—because they’re not actually traveling anywhere. Lizbeth has made it her duty to help them, too.
LIZBETH: When I find the people in the morning, sometimes right here, it looks like a camp. Like a camping place. Yes.
REPORTER: She points to a person lying on the floor in a far corner, their body mostly blocked from view by a row of seats.
LIZBETH: Someone is sleeping over there, look!
REPORTER: Yeah, I see feet.
REPORTER: At first glance, they look like any other traveler. But to Lizbeth, it’s clear that they’re not.
LIZBETH: I see feet, and I don't see luggage. So you notice when it's a homeless, and you notice when it's people who are missing the flights and they decide to stay in the airport.
REPORTER: Lizbeth sees what many locals don’t: Unhoused people are staying at SFO — some just to sleep for the night, others to live. The airport tries to stop unhoused folks from staying here. But their efforts don’t always work. So for years, people experiencing homelessness have been spending the night at SFO.
REPORTER: Do you see homeless people every time you work?
LIZBETH: Yes. All day long.
REPORTER: Lizbeth helps out unhoused people as much as she can. She lets them rest in her seating area when it’s not too busy. And she used to walk them down the terminal to the food court to make sure they had something to eat.
LIZBETH: And I said, “You need a coffee, or you need a hamburger, or you need, what do you need?” Buying for this one, for that one, my check is not gonna — it's not enough. I cannot spend more money.
REPORTER: So, after that got too pricey, she came up with another solution.
LIZBETH: If I bought a sandwich right here in the airport, is $17, one sandwich. With $17, I can buy a pound of ham in my house, and then I can prepare sandwiches, more than one, so I can share. I made the sandwiches, and I said, “You know what? One for you, one for me, one for you…”
REPORTER: But it didn’t take long for Lizbeth to realize she could not offer people experiencing homelessness something else they really need: housing.
LIZBETH: I said, “God, please send me someone to help these, all these people. Like, exists some Robin Hood or something like that?”
REPORTER: Just weeks later, her prayer was answered.
LIZBETH: One day James appeared and I said, “Oh my God, I cannot believe it.” “Hi, my name is James. How you been? I'm looking for homeless — for people who are not have a place to sleep or live, we can help.”
REPORTER: Lizbeth’s Robin Hood is a case manager named James Paxton. For over a year, he made outreach trips to the airport with an organization called LifeMoves.
Part 2: JAMES, SFO, 6:30 a.m.
JAMES PAXTON: So this is the route, right here. We go to the AirTrains—
REPORTER: LifeMoves is based out of San Mateo County. And they connect unhoused people with housing and resources.
JAMES: —and then we'll go down and follow the route through the terminals and towards the baggage claims.
REPORTER: Though the airport is owned by the City and County of San Francisco, it’s physically located in San Mateo County. That’s why, back in 2018, LifeMoves was contracted to do homeless outreach here. Their staff has led four-hour trips to SFO every month since. Neither they nor the airport keep track of its unhoused population, but SFO says it is visibly increasing. There are reports of dozens of people experiencing homelessness here every day.
JAMES: We get a lot of clients that would sleep inside the stairways during the closing hours of the airport. So we just like to check ‘em.
REPORTER: I shadow James early one morning, as he leads his team all over the airport: through a maze of hallways and stairwells I’ve never seen, looking for unhoused folks to help. We arrive at SFO before dawn to catch people as they’re waking up, before they start moving around and become harder to find.
JAMES: All right, so next we're gonna go check around the corner.
REPORTER: Since James only makes outreach trips to the airport once a month, he leans on people who work at SFO to act as his unofficial eyes when he’s not here: food workers, bag checkers, rental car staff — people like Lizbeth.
JAMES: So they'll call me and be like, “Hey, I think this person needs help. They might need food, they might need a place to stay. Can you help them?” And I'll say yes, and I'll be on my way. So we like to make sure that we communicate with them so we can build a better system to reach more people. We're gonna go up to the AirTrain to see if we have any clients that may want some services.
REPORTER: James wears a backpack filled with food and hygiene products. He’s ready to connect unhoused folks with whatever help they say they need: from shelter beds to medical care to Lyft rides.
JAMES: So a lot of the clients we're — like, I need to reestablish their ID, I need to get their Social Security, their birth certificate. A lot of them don't have any of those items, and it makes it hard to get services.
REPORTER: Up on the AirTrain platform, we walk into a bare room that’s home to an elevator and an abandoned luggage cart.
JAMES: It feels really warm in here. So a lot of the clients sometimes like to sleep there, due to the fact that it stays warm throughout the night.
REPORTER: There are lots of reasons people choose to stay at SFO.
JAMES: It's open 24 hours. There's food, there's shelter, there's cameras all around the building.
REPORTER: The airport is safe. It has bathrooms. And water.
But no one is sleeping in the warm room on the AirTrain platform this morning. So James continues on to baggage claim.
JAMES: So we also get a number of people that may be sleeping around the baggage claim area because it's not a high-traffic area. People just come get their bags and leave. So sometimes you can look like you're looking for your bag and hang around here.
REPORTER: 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. James points toward a passenger’s bag.
JAMES: Little cues that we've noticed to look for, like the tag on the bag shows that he's flying out soon. And then other clients that will notice, they'll have bag tags, but it'll be for like weeks ago. So then we kind of — gives us like an inclination that they may need services.
REPORTER: James offered services to dozens of unhoused people he met at the airport over the past year or so. And he placed 15 of them into temporary shelters. One of his clients is Kim Snodgrass. Earlier this year, Kim moved from SFO to Safe Harbor Shelter, thanks to James.
Part 3: KIM, SAFE HARBOR SHELTER, 4:30 p.m.
KIM SNODGRASS: It's a thousand percent better. You don't have to worry about food. You have a comfortable bed. Um, even though, you know, you can hear people snoring and stuff.
REPORTER: The homeless shelter is located on a tiny peninsula in San Mateo County, just north of the airport.
KIM: You can throw a rock, and you can watch planes take off all day.
REPORTER: Kim tells me his story in an office near the shelter’s busy reception desk. He’s 73 years old, and he became homeless after he retired.
KIM: Got a fairly nice pension and Social Security. But even with that, in San Jose, I could not live on that.
REPORTER: So he got a job — and then an unexpected tax bill for thousands of dollars.
KIM: And so that's when I started going downhill.
REPORTER: Kim moved to Mexico in search of a cheaper lifestyle, but it didn’t work out. So he flew back to SFO with only a few hundred dollars in his pocket. His two sons both live in the Bay Area, but Kim says he didn’t want to put them out. So, after Kim’s flight landed, he just stayed at the airport.
KIM: I had no idea where else to go, and I saw other people there that were staying there. I mean, you can kind of tell people that are not passengers.
REPORTER: Kim lived at the airport for more than six months.
KIM: I had two suitcases. So I had lots of clothes and, for example, deodorant, razors to shave, lots of everything I needed until it ran out.
REPORTER: He had to drag his suitcases around the airport with him all day, so eventually he got rid of one. But not much else changed during his time at SFO. Each day, he would wake up and head to a bathroom to wash up.
KIM: And after that, I'd head out walking. Going from domestic to the International is quite a walk. So I'd do that a couple of times a day. I would spend some time in the Reflection Room. Could see the airplanes going out to the runway there.
REPORTER: Kim would visit the airport’s museum exhibits and learn about planes. He’d find travelers to chat with. And at around 6 p.m., he’d 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.
KIM: And it had nice chairs. It was pretty comfortable to sleep. 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.
REPORTER: Kim says most travelers didn’t seem to notice the unhoused community around them.
KIM: You know, they're in their own world. 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.
REPORTER: In Kim’s final weeks at SFO, he did get noticed—but not in a good way. Police officers, who had always patrolled the airport, began asking unhoused people to show their boarding passes. And when they didn’t have plane tickets, the cops would tell them to leave.
KIM: It all has to do with their trespassing language and times.
REPORTER: 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.
KIM: And so I was really harassed. 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.
REPORTER: The police made living at the airport a challenge. But getting enough to eat? That was even harder. Kim befriended a pastor who regularly traveled to SFO, who would buy him food when he came to town. When the pastor was not around, Kim would eat one Wendy’s chicken sandwich a day.
And he made sure other folks living at the airport had food, too. Kim 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.
KIM: And I would hand it out to some other homeless people that were, like, in really bad shape.
REPORTER: But on some days, Kim couldn’t afford food. Eventually, he was in really bad shape, himself.
KIM: Yeah, I considered suicide. You know, you get so hungry. That's very painful. You know, I think it was after I was hungry for, hadn't eaten for like seven or eight days that I contacted James and said, “I can't deal with this anymore. Can you get me in a shelter?”
REPORTER: So James jumped into action and found Kim 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, James can’t place them where they want to go. That’s what happens when I tag along with James on his early morning outreach trip to SFO.
Part 4: AMBASSADORS AND OFFICER WHITNEY, SAMTRANS STOP, 7:30 a.m.
JAMES: How's it going, brother?
AMBASSADORS: How are you?
JAMES: Alright.
REPORTER: In an empty hallway somewhere along James’ 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 ensure their safety. While Ambassadors don’t actually do any law enforcement, they do help James locate people experiencing homelessness.
JAMES: Do you guys have anybody around here that you've seen that you might want us to talk to?
AMBASSADORS: There's one, there's one gentleman down here.
REPORTER: The Ambassadors point James toward an unhoused man at the SamTrans stop on the lower level.
JAMES: I think that's him right there.
REPORTER: Downstairs, a man lies on the floor next to a curved bench. He’s almost entirely hidden from people passing by.
JAMES: My name is James. I work for LifeMoves. So you stay in San Mateo County?
REPORTER: The man accepts a snack pack from James — fruit, a danish, beef ravioli. He also takes a hygiene kit packed with products like soap, a toothbrush, and an eye mask. But he doesn’t want to talk with me — and he does not accept James’ offer of shelter.
JAMES: So he is a San Francisco native. He wasn't interested in receiving services in San Mateo County. Um, so I did give him my business card. So if he does return to the county and wants to seek services, he has somewhere to reach out to. He said that he's, he likes services in San Francisco, that's where he's from.
REPORTER: But LifeMoves cannot offer shelter in San Francisco. Remember, the organization operates in San Mateo County — where the airport is located — and connects folks to services there. But 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, its 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.
And things get even more complicated when the police get involved—like the SFPD officers who Kim says harassed him.
OFFICER ERIK WHITNEY: Yeah. You can get on the bus. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
REPORTER: Officer Erik Whitney has also spotted the man at the SamTrans stop. The SFPD says it encounters about 35 unhoused people at the airport every day. The first week of this month, records show that they made contact with nearly 250 people experiencing homelessness. Officer Whitney stands over the man, who still quietly rests on the floor.
WHITNEY: Out there. Not here. It's trespassing.
REPORTER: The SFPD and LifeMoves share a goal: They both want people experiencing homelessness at the airport to leave. But there’s a key difference. James and his team attempt to get them shelter beds in San Mateo County before they go. But the police usually just give unhoused folks a bus ticket to go somewhere else.
JAMES: When they do give 'em the bus passes and stuff, they leave. So it makes it hard to stay in contact with them sometimes at the airport, and especially if we don't go as often.
REPORTER: Officer Whitney waits for the man to go outside, but James needs to keep moving through the airport before his monthly shift is over. So he gives the man another snack pack and continues along his route. James is unlikely to see this man again — in part because, at certain hours, it seems like the police make sure unhoused folks are not even coming here in the first place.
Part 5: MARTIN, SFO BART STATION, 1:15 a.m.
REPORTER: I see it for myself when I ride the last BART train of the night to SFO. When the train pulls up at 1:15 a.m., about a dozen police officers on Segways are there to greet it. But no unhoused folks come off the train, and the cops whiz back into the airport on their two-wheelers.
MARTIN CROSKERY: They're here to make sure anybody who gets off the last train is flying.
REPORTER: Martin Croskery is a BART station agent who works the closing shift. As he locks up, he says that SFPD officers are here every night.
MARTIN: Cause there used to be a problem with a lot of homeless coming off the last train and then staying in the airport overnight.
REPORTER: 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 — and now it ends in Millbrae, a bit further south in San Mateo County. But according to public records, the SFPD did make contact with nearly 100 unhoused people coming off of the last two BART trains of the night during the first week of December.
MARTIN: Millbrae now has issues, but the last train has to go somewhere. 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 said, “We can't have this.”
REPORTER: Croskery locks the doors to the BART station, and I head into the International Terminal and toward a food court. A dozen people sleep here, about half apparently unhoused, based on their lack of luggage.
ERIN: I don't wanna talk to someone who's sleeping. I don't wanna wake them up. Kim told me these are the lucky ones. The ones who get entire benches to sleep on, who aren't kicked out by the cops.
REPORTER: They may not have taken the last BART train of the night to get to SFO, but they’re here nonetheless.
Part 6: JAMES, MILLBRAE BART STATION, 8:30 a.m.
REPORTER: I see far more people experiencing homelessness at SFO overnight than I encounter with James in the morning. So at the end of James’ monthly shift, he heads out to find more unhoused people just where Martin Croskery said they’d be: at the Millbrae BART station.
There, James easily finds two people experiencing homelessness who want services in San Mateo County. They fill out LifeMoves intake forms, and begin the process of getting shelter.
Part 7: LIZBETH, SFO INTERNATIONAL TERMINAL, 5:30 a.m.
REPORTER: James’ four hours of outreach have come to a close. So until next month, it will be up to airport employees like Lizbeth Sanchez to act as his eyes and alert LifeMoves about people experiencing homelessness they see at the airport.
LIZBETH: James needs to be here around here all the time. Yes. To help people. Yes. His work is important.
REPORTER: The SFO Airport Commission agrees. In June, they approved a contract for LifeMoves to expand its services, to staff an outreach team at the airport 40 hours a week. The contract is still being amended, but is expected to take effect in the spring.
LIZBETH: Really? Oh my God. That's all — like Robin Hood! Like I told you, now I can bring everyone over there. That's a great thing.
REPORTER: Still, James knows that solving the local homelessness crisis is beyond LifeMoves’ capacity.
JAMES: We do need more housing, I believe, in order to help this problem. That seems like that would be the best answer to help. But just gonna have to wait on that.
REPORTER: The Bay Area is in a housing crisis. The region needs more housing to ensure that people like Kim have permanent places to live after their time at shelters runs out. So, despite James and Lizbeth’s best efforts, every night, thousands of unhoused people in the Bay Area are left on their own to find a place to sleep. And, until the region has more housing, some of these folks will continue to seek shelter at the airport.
Kim Snodgrass is currently living at the Navigation Center, another temporary shelter in San Mateo County. He hopes to move in with his girlfriend at the end of the year.
