[ketzo]

> custodians can be hired

SF has one of the largest city budgets in the country — >$15billion — and struggles to staff park workers making $70-90k.

If the park workers only make $60k, but the city budget is 1/10th, 1/20th, 1/100th of SF’s, how does the math here ever work?

[edm0nd]

>In fiscal year 2023–2024, San Francisco spent $690 million on homelessness, notes the San Francisco Chronicle. This is a 142% increase from five years ago.

Spending $700M/year on homelessness crisis is straight up insane. There has to be a better way that doesnt cost as much. SF is kinda fucked.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/homeless-questions-an...

[oefrha]

When there is an enormous budget somehow used up but with barely any noticeable effect (and frankly, without much of an expectation that there’s noticeable effect), you can bet there’s someone or a lot of someones siphoning from it.

Btw even $690m isn’t the full picture:

> While that amount does not include what the Department of Public Health or SF Public Works or many other departments spend related to the crisis

[ryandrake]

They could just take that $700M and divide it up among the ~8000 homeless in the city. That $87,500 per year would be enough to help get someone on their feet pretty quickly. Probably more effective than whatever the hell they’re spending it on today. Salaries for administrators administrating other administrators?

[bombcar]

There’s got to be some Appalachian town that would love to get paid $700m/yr to house and care for 8,000 people.

[bagels]

Maybe its facetious, but I also do not understand why they have to be accommodated in a top 5 most expensive place in the world to live in.

[bombcar]

It's half facetious but also half serious, as the amounts of money are simply staggering.

There has to be some middle ground between "homeless in a park" and "living their own life with a job" and "locked up in prison at great cost" that would be satisfactory to everyone.

[galimalint]

Park rangers make $30k-40k in small cities/towns. Not to mention big cities can help pay for some of the transition costs for these homeless, with their 15 billion budget. Also, it would be way cheaper to house these homeless once they choose to transition from park to an apartment.

[tsimionescu]

The point would be to still use SF's money to do this, I assume. The point was that SF's money would be better spent on park rangers in a smaller city than in SF itself.

Now, I think there are otherajor issues with this idea (mostly that having a 0.1% population of assisted people is much more workable than a 10% population, as would happen if SF moved every homeless person to a smaller city).

[s1artibartfast]

SF park workers are closer to 120K from those I know. A lot of labor intensive hand weeding because the city shuns herbicide. However, this is less than the median SF city employee, which makes 150k

https://opengovpay.com/employer/ca/san-francisco

[edmundsauto]

SF budget is city and county services, fwiw. It is good to make apples to apples comparison.

[Redoubts]

It’s also services for less than a million people