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Comment by funkaster | Hacker News Reader

from their website:

> Proposition C, called Our City Our Home on the November 8, 2018 San Francisco ballot would generate $300 million per year to address San Francisco's homelessness crisis by increasing the business tax on San Francisco's wealthiest corporations.

> Only businesses making over $50 million a year would be affected, and their first $50 million in revenue is exempt. Their tax rates would increase between 0.175 and 0.69 percent, depending on the type of business. (Compare that to Prop D, which will increase the tax on large cannabis businesses by 5%!)

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This is the worst description possible. Increasing taxes doesn't address homelessness -- doing something with that tax revenue does. I just read over Prop C and while it's not the most clear proposal, it doesn't seem unreasonable, and isn't very hard to actually ... summarize its effects, not just hint at the end goal.

ETA: Prop C would add a 0.175%-0.325% tax to large companies, which would go to: administering the taxes, permanent housing (short-term rental subsidies, construction/acquisition of apartment buildings for the homeless, operation of buildings for very low income households), homeless shelter expenditures, homelessness prevention expenditures, mental health expenditures for the homeless.

> doing something with that tax revenue does.

Not really. SF already spends more than $250 million annually on programs for the homeless[0]. That's about $33,333 per homeless (7,499[1]). And yet, the problem is worse than ever.

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

[1]: https://projects.sfchronicle.com/sf-homeless/2018-state-of-h...

I read through part of the Prop C text and I'm not convinced it's taking the right approach. The biggest problem with housing in this city is one of supply. The proposition does say that the money can be used for construction of housing, but that's just one option among many, and so the fund would be perfectly justified in constructing zero housing and instead simply trying to "acquire" more housing. Hell, it can even just be used to operate existing housing without even increasing the housing supply at all, or could be blown entirely on short-term rental subsidies.

Trying to acquire more low-income housing without increasing the overall housing supply is not a good idea. That's just going to make the overall housing market even worse, not to mention it will be quite expensive. I would be much happier if this proposition explicitly set aside money to be used for construction of new housing.

Yeah, I agree. My issue was mostly just with the site being intentionally vague and only talking about what their goal is, rather than summarizing what the prop ... is. That just struck me as exceptionally deceptive.

Note that "making" means gross receipts, not profit.

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