Linked from the article, the Urban Displacement Project's recovery ranking dashboards [1] place San Francisco dead last amongst 60 major North American cities.
Whoa, not only last, but last by a long shot. Most of the cities toward the bottom in that list are in the lower 50s and upper 40s. Then you have the bottom 3—Portland at 41%, Cleveland at 36% and San Francisco at 31%.
SF is small and its downtown has an oversized impact on its financials. There couple of relatively large areas with older residential buildings that pay fairly low property tax and have mostly small businesses. Business related revenue from relatively small area is what allows San Francisco its breathing space in the budget.
Really interesting that Salt Lake is at the top, and that's the only city I know of that (at least reportedly) had an innovative solution to tackling homelessness. I just tried to search for their solution, but was overwhelmed by links from the past few months talking about how homelessness is swelling in that city. Perhaps every city is just dying of homelessness right now. Makes me wonder if those numbers for downtown recovery are manipulated or accurate. How to tell?
I read some updates about the housing first program you’re talking about a while back. If I recall correctly it fell apart after a year or two and was quietly abandoned. The reasons why aren’t very clearly explained, but the coverage I recall insinuated that the government failed to fund it or build new affordable housing
That's quite a drop off.