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Comment by ctlby | Hacker News Reader

The city spends $167 million [1] for a homeless population no larger than 15,000 (and probably closer to 7,000) [2]. The wealthy city isn't leaving anyone to his or her fate. To the contrary, it's expending vast amounts of wealth with precious little to show for it.

[1] http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/S-F-spendi...

[2] https://sfgov.org/lhcb/sites/sfgov.org.lhcb/files/2015%20San...

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And that $167 million is just services specifically for the homeless. It does not included other city services which are heavily used by the homeless such as medical, housing, police, sanitation, etc - probably well over another $100 million - or the extensive private, non-profit and church spending.

To boot, that would be 6-7% of the city's 2.5B in receipts from 2012-2013:

http://sftreasurer.org/sites/sftreasurer.org/files/TTX_Annua...

That there's not a significant dent in the continuing issue raises some questions.

Expatistan's crowd-sourced info finds SF housing to be the most expensive in the world, and cost of living in general nearly there:

https://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/san-francisco

That's between 12k and 20k per person. Way less than you'd need to provide accommodation and treatment for a person with mental illness. It's not surprising it doesn't work.

The people blasting the city claim the city isn't doing enough, and when shown that they are actually are providing a remarkable amount of support, it still isn't enough. 12-20k annually is more than a significant chunk of the population earns in wages.

Throwing money at a problem is one thing. Intelligent allocation of that money is another.

I'm not saying it isn't allocated effectively, just that the numbers themselves do not tell the whole tale.

Sure, I agree, but that's a bit different from whether they're supposedly ignoring the problem and/or not doing "enough".

I don't really know what your point is. The amount may be a large dollar figure, but it is clearly not enough to solve the problem, therefore the problem still exists.

I'm curious how many people live in SF on 12-20k, but that's irrelevant. If someone has accommodation and is able to earn wages as a steady state, it is obvious that their costs will be less than a homeless person who needs mental health treatment, rehabilitation and maybe even education before they are employable.

The figure that employed people can survive on is well below the lower bound for what is needed to rehabilitate a homeless person.

The point is that no amount of money will solve the problem with San Francisco's current approach (whatever that is). If they spend $50 million with zero effect, and they spend $100 million with zero effect, and they spend $150 million with zero effect, where do you guess the problem stands at the $200, $250, $500 marks?

What are you talking about? How do you know the approach has zero effect?

Check out the chart on page 18. $1.5 billion spent over 10 years, and the homeless population... increased! What a humiliating statistic for anyone who thinks this can be solved with mental-health treatment, rehab, empathy, or [homily of choice].

That's just the city's spending though. There (edit: is) other money: state and federal, private donations, churches, the VA system, and so on.

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