[rajeshpant]

I completely agree with Stripe here. The homeless problem will not be solved by increasing taxes. The problem is whether the money is being used correctly. I see huge issues with that. The department of homelessness currently has an annual budget of $250Million[1] for providing shelter to homeless. I wonder if govt. is spending $250 Million every year on providing them shelter why are they still living in streets? Where is all that money going?

[1] - https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/29-million-incre...

[erentz]

So google tells me there’s around 7,000 homeless in SF. Let’s up that to 10,000. That’s $25,000 per homeless person per year. Am I missing something or is something very seriously wrong here?

[abalone]

Yes, you’re missing something: Much of the funding goes into prevention. SF only directly spends about $3K per homeless person. There are a lot more people staying housed because of those funds.

[orangecat]

While I'm certain SF could be doing a much better job with their existing budget, that's not a very meaningful statistic. You'd need to know how many more people would be homeless in the counterfactual scenario where they weren't spending that money.

[tomjakubowski]

For what it's worth, that's way less than (less than half) the amortized yearly cost of a California prison inmate: about $70,000.

https://lao.ca.gov/policyareas/cj/6_cj_inmatecost

[tomjen3]

That is the average cost? How much would that be if we looked only at the min-sec cost?

If it is anything like the institutional system, the people who need dedicated watchers 24/7 are so, so much more expensive that person like my family member, who needs only occasional help managing his normal life and doesn't need anybody to guard him.

[lacker]

At a single moment in time there are about 7500 homeless people in SF, but about 20,000 are homeless at some point during the last year.

[LegendZ3]

Break down of money spent on Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing

http://hsh.sfgov.org/overview/budget/