Proposition C
stripe.com
stripe.com
Can you provide independent citations that back your claims about the existence of a "homeless-industrial complex"?
The data is incredibly detailed, absolutely fascinating and messy as you'd expect, dispelling a lot of the overly simplistic rumors like other states "shipping" SF homeless people, homeless people all being one type of person or another etc etc etc
I encourage anyone who is interested to volunteer for the next SF homelessness count, likely in January 2019 (They do one every 2 years).
2013=7,350 2015=7,539 2017=7,449
Too bad they don't do it every year. Another survey is due in Jan 2019, and maybe it can help us understand this new level of homelessness going on.
The increase since 2013 is reported to be only ~2%, (which I find slightly surprising¹) so it may be a bit loaded to ask where the "increase" is coming from. Since the last survey, the population even appears to have declined, slightly.
¹It feels like it has gotten worse, but that's only my impression, and I only frequent a subset of SF, so I may not be seeing areas that have gotten better. The survey is much more comprehensive than my anecdotes, of course.
As I understand it (and as my friend who is an SF police officer where 90% of his job is dealing with the homeless), the much larger problem is SF's (& perhaps society in general's) failure to provide institutionalized care for people with severe mental disabilities.
No amount of money, support systems, or opportunity for getting off the street is going to help people with severe schizophrenia or dementia who have no family or safety net. A lot of these people the only solution is for them to be institutionalized. Unfortunately, there isn't much of a way for someone to be institutionalized against their will (unless they are causing danger of harm to themselves or others) so they continue to live on the streets.
I think what this city really needs is a place to send people deemed in need of institutionalizing, and the ability for that to be determined. Of course that would never fly in a place like SF, but I think it would be a happier life for those people than life on the streets.
You are right that mental health is a consideration, but the bigger problem is both simpler and easier to fix: the number of shelter beds (and other forms of supportive housing - including long-term housing) has decreased since 2004 and is woefully inadequate for the number of current homeless.
For more reading on this topic I recommend this detailed analysis: https://medium.com/@josefow/the-one-stat-that-explains-sfs-s... Also Mayor London Breed's analysis and approach: https://medium.com/@LondonBreed/a-bold-approach-to-homelessn...
You can debunk this with a simple observation: Homelessness has grown significantly in the past 20 years. Has severe mental illness grown significantly during that time?
The bigger problem here is Stripe's argument is misleading. They're comparing cost-per-resident instead of cost-per-homeless-resident, when SF actually has a higher rate of homelessness than other cities. We actually spend less per homeless resident than NYC. Totally invalidates their argument that "if it's just a question of money this issue would already be solved."
No, but protocols for involuntary commitment of people with borderline states may have.
> They're comparing cost-per-resident instead of cost-per-homeless-resident
It is pretty easy to derive one from the other, given homelessness levels, and given as SF is has one of the highest ones (slightly lower only than NYC) the conclusion seems to stay - expense level is very high.
> We actually spend less per homeless resident than NYC
Source?
That doesn’t follow at all. NYC spends 10x what SF does on homelessness. SF spends $3.8K [1] on each homeless person while NYC is around 10x that. [2]
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Bu...
[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/cost-of-housing-homeless-in-she...
Then there's another trick - the money which were strictly defined to help only current homeless (so if the program worked for somebody and she is no longer homeless, or is prevented from being homeless by the program spending, that money not counted) and then divided by the number of people who has been homeless at any point, including those that aren't homeless now. The yearly figure is divided by cumulative number, not by average at certain moment. That's like dividing number of seats in the class not by number of students in each class at the same time, but by number of students that will use that room over a year, and arriving to conclusion that school classes have 0.1 seat per pupil and we need 10x seats.
Maybe? Who's to say it has not?
There are two explanations, idealistic and cynical; I'll let you decide what percentage of accuracy applies to each (neither were 0% or 100%).
The idealistic justification was that the institutional option was pretty grim (think "one flew over the cuckoo's nest") and that many of those patients would do better at home or in halfway houses.
The cynical explanation was that this was at the beginning of the huge anti-tax / anti-government wave that began with Reagan's election and continues today: closing the institutions cut government expenditure.
Reagan and his failed economic policy.
> or how the resulting issues haven't been addressed.
The ongoing personality cult around Reagan and his failed economic policy.
The reaction to unacceptable conditions was correct and justifiable, but we've thrown the baby with the bathwater in the sense that now, mentally handicapped people are homeless all over the place...
on the one hand, it's really frustrating because it seems like his life could be greatly improved if he could be forced to undergo long term treatment. he might even be grateful on the other side. but on the other hand, living in a putatively free society, is there a point where you just have to take someone at their word that they don't want to do something? he doesn't seem to be hurting anyone but himself, and he claims to be happy.
There would probably be a person on the other side who would be grateful, but it's far from obvious that that would be the same person as the one you forced into long term treatment. It's a good thing that our society makes it this hard to involuntarily commit people, and as cco mentions, it would be nice if we could extend this to other kinds of forcible confinement.
Basically there’s no way you can “fight homelessness” and “fight apartments/evil gentrifying landlords”, and actually expect to do anything about homelessness.
A lot are also alcoholics and/or addicts - this is one of those things where saving money is the short term (not managing the homelessness problem before it got to this point) results in a higher cost in the long term - now you not only have to manage homelessness, you also hav to help the existing homeless recover from long term homelessness.
You also have the long term costs of assisting those with mental illness (as a result of "saving money" by closing down all state level support for mental illness in the 80s - I'm not saying that was a panacea, but having the support helped a lot of people that currently get no help).
Politicians love "saving tax payer money" through short term things like this, because they know that by the time someone has to fix their mess they've moved on/retired and they don't have to deal with it.
Although the people who fight housing seem to not grasp this.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/in-expensive...
Can somebody please explain how spending per resident is a fair measure of this? Isn't spending per homeless resident the relevant measure?
(SF has a much higher homeless rate and we actually spend less per homeless resident than NYC!)
Moreover, you're misunderstanding my question. That's how much SF spends per homeless resident. Great, in theory that's what we should be comparing with other cities (calculated correctly of course). But that's not what Collison did. He just compared how much cities spend per resident.. i.e. he took the homeless budget and divided it by the population of SF, not just the homeless. You see how that misled and confused you?
It makes no sense to me, except as a trick? Please, somebody explain how this makes any kind of sense.
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Bu...
I addressed that in another comment, it seems to be a sort of a trick, like those jokes that calculate that only two people work in the whole country by double-counting a lot of things.
> You see how that misled and confused you?
No, I do not. Combining per resident statistics with homeless/resident ratio - which is available - it is easy to see spending per homeless. Of course it's the total spending - then we need to see what the money is actually spent on and whether it is actually effective for reducing homelessness or just feeding some people who would wish nothing more but continue getting a paycheck for "helping homeless", but would not really like the problem to disappear and the paycheck be gone with it. I am not saying that's a common situation - I don't know - but this is something that needs to be checked, and the article seems to just throw out 78% of spending, showing no interest at all about what happened to it, and then declare "we spend very little on homeless". If that's true, then where's the rest of the money? What happened to it?
How does this make sense to anyone? Did he just whiff on logic here, or is he misleading us because he’s deep into a bare knuckle political fight, or am I missing something?
If you’re not going to answer that’s fine, but please don’t thread hijack. I’m really just looking for an explanation of what seems to be an obvious (fatal?) logical flaw in Collison’s post.
Connect the dots for me. How is the increase of the homeless population the direct result of the rise of tech cos like Amazon and Stripe?
[1] https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/11/06/west-coast-home...
But the fact remains that the tech boom has created a sudden surge in housing demand from people making a lot more than working class folks.
You see something similar in the phenomenon of how adding more lanes to roads doesn't necessarily relieve congestion.
The best thing that could be done with all this money is to spend it on providing support in other towns and cities where the cost of living is much better and the homeless people being helped have an actual chance to get back on their own two feet and support themselves.
Trying to support homeless people in the city with the most expensive cost of living in the world is counterproductive and condemns any homeless people supported here to a lifetime of support.
Furthermore, the money would go a lot further in other places since the cost of living would be lower and you could pay to have more social workers per homeless person.
For currently homeless people with no “special deal” like winning the affordable housing lottery, it’s just going to be implausible for them to find housing in San Francisco, as long as someone earning $30,000 a year can’t afford to live in San Francisco. That means any solution must get people into housing that is not located in San Francisco.
Or let's say San Francisco actually subsidizes some town out in Central Valley, I dunno, Hughson for the sake of argument, buys up loads of farm land adjacent to the town and turns it into a much nicer place to live because those dollars will go further, puts in some groceries, parks, a whole community basically. You've now turned Hughson into a much nicer town, and it will attract more people wanting to live there, and you're still subsidizing a whole other city in the process increasing the cost of living. Not to mention moving our entire homeless population there would effectively double the size of Hughson straining local resources and utilities, so probably a lawsuit and more money to subsidize it further.
So now you've done all of that, but since this is Hughson, there's no jobs except farm work, and the locals probably have that covered so now they need good transportation to the nearest decently large city (Modesto and Turlock) to find some jobs. Now that you've got this satellite city, how does it sustain itself? Because at some point, San Francisco taxpayers are going to start asking themselves, why are we subsidizing Hughson? Assuming you got them to agree to it in the first place (which you won't). City charter amendment hits the ballot, it probably passes, but the wording is so poor it has negative knock-on effects for all the other land the city owns outside of the county line (the Airport and Hetch Hetchy mainly), Hughson and Stanislaus County are left holding the bag on a largely unproductive neighborhood that is a drain on the local coffers and almost completely dependent on subsidies from people richer than them.
I'm sure by this point they'll be real excited about bulldozing some houses to make way for some bullet trains they were previously gung-ho about stopping at all costs, and depending on the legal status of the property left behind, they can either seize them because nobody is paying property taxes, or seize them with eminent domain and put them towards some new productive purpose that once again, leaves these formerly homeless people homeless.
This is still better than the alternatives: hoping the State of California steps in to do something about it (they won't because nobody in California likes San Francisco except people who live in San Francisco), or hoping the Feds step in (they won't because hating San Francisco and hoping it falls into the ocean is a national past time, as American as liking Baseball).
tl;dr we spend money trying to "solve" the "problem" locally despite the high cost of living because San Francisco only has San Francisco to depend on. Anybody in power that claims to like San Francisco doesn't actually like San Francisco, they just love our money.
[1] - https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/29-million-incre...
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.
There is a significant demand for housing in SF & the bay area. If housing is provided for free or even below market, demand will come from far & wide. Barrier-to-entry is basically a bus ticket.
Any real solution needs to at least attempt to balance supply & demand.
So let me ask you, which government obstructions would you like to see removed?
However, I have to ask you about height restrictions. There's height restrictions because not everyone wants to live next to a skyscraper, which is well, debatable. I can debate both sides of that.
There's also height restrictions because the bedrock of San Francisco is not uniform across the city. In many areas of the city, I don't think you even can build skyscrapers and expect them to remain stable, as we are seeing with the Millennium Tower and the incomplete dome on the Salesforce Tower.
I could consider reducing height restrictions, certainly, but I don't think you can eliminate them completely.
In cities without rent control, like Seattle, development happens a lot quicker. Over the course of half a decade (2010-2015 IIRC) Seattle added more than twice the number of housing units as SF. Rent control's perverse system of incentives leads cities like SF to shoot themselves in the foot.
Seriously though, I was reading just yesterday about how they're developing Treasure Island and it has a high chance of liquefaction (not to mention radioactive waste) because demand for land is that high.
This was shortly after the plans for what would become the Transbay Transit Center[1], the Salesforce Tower and the Millennium Tower were approved.
Make your case though, why ditch earthquake restrictions?
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/17/us/san-franci...
You probably could make a real nice camp on some dirt cheap woodland for 200 million.
Stack shipping containers 3 high, have one person live in each and have a shower block for every 15-30 residents. Cook cheap in large badges, get some teach for america out there to help them learn to read and write, require each person to spend a certain amount of hours working in exchange for food and housing...
The city wants to enable all of its homeless to escape homelessness.
It probably doesn't particularly want to house all of them, either directly (that is, the city itself) provides housing, or even have them housed within the geographic boundaries of the city. Having them acheive stable housing outside of the city would be just as much of a win.
https://taxfoundation.org/gross-receipts-tax-impact-san-fran...
Swap 'Prop C' for any other cause, and 'the homeless' for any other intended benefactor of it, and you get a good formula for how to strip all the nuance out of a debate and turn it into a battle between opposing sides.
I don't have an opinion on Stripe's position here but that sentence itself is a pretty eloquent summary for how dumb modern discussion has become in many circles.
That's how they roll.
> See "right-to-work" laws
I'm guessing you've confused right-to-work with at-will employment. Right-to-work laws mean that a union can't force you to join and pay dues. "At-will employment" means you can be fired for any reason or no reason (except if the reason is they're a member of a "protected class")
Patrick's view is essentially that instead of adding taxes for such companies, which could potentially impact middle class workers, we should let the current SF mayor take care of this issue, being in favor of additional taxes to fund whatever initiative is considered valid.
Now, here's my view. I've been living in SF for six years, I know exactly one homeless (Charlie), I'm not an expert on poverty or homelessness, but let's say I've seen my fair share of bad things in the world to at least have an opinion.
We don't have exact data on how and why people become homeless. We know that (mostly) they're not born homeless, they become homeless.
I think we should work on the causes. But "we", who? Patrick Collison, Sam Altman, Marc Benioff, etc, you can pick a trusted, smart serial entrepreneur, give him a big budget ($100M), and ask him to discover the causes and try to solve it by measuring how far these $100M go.
The recommended statement by Wiener addresses this: "A broad-based stakeholder group — including Mayor Ed Lee, then-Supervisor David Chiu, the Controller, the business community, labor, and social service nonprofits..."
Watching Bill Gates try to solve problems in education [1] was a real wake-up call for me. I had a rather involved conversation when the initiative was first announced with an education leader who was deeply suspicious and expected failure (and, what's more, for exactly the reasons that the RAND report identified).
It turns out that, sometimes, leaders who have dedicated their lives to problem X really do know better than people who have succeeded in the business world.
And perhaps more importantly, that more money isn't always a "no downsides" proposition. Big spends on the wrong ideas can suck the air out of the room and divert other resources away from more promising ideas.
But I suspect that the people whose names you mentioned already know that the most effective ideas are probably going to come, in part, from people who have put in their 10,000 hours working on actually solving homelessness.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-melinda-gates-foundatio...
I often cringe when I see non-education folks trying to tackle the problem of education in classroms by "automating" or pushing video courses. Solving the issue of education is far more than what's IN the classroom (Here in Jersey we had Abbot districts which gave more to low income schools, it's failed). While supplies are a big problem, more is to do with environment. Having done teaching in a low income district (every single prospective teacher should do this) and an upper middle-class district the difference was stark. I had kids in 1st grade who could not even tie shoes or zipper jackets, let alone have a pencil.
In short, you have to be very careful when you work on hard problems not to divert resources away from other approaches... that might be even more valuable.
For example, there's a longstanding rumor that the homeless are being "shipped from out of state" from places like Texas giving free bus tickets. Here's the messier statistics:
"Sixty-nine percent (69%) of respondents reported they were living in San Francisco at the time they most recently became homeless. Of those, over half (55%) had lived in San Francisco for 10 or more years. Eight percent (8%) had lived in San Francisco for less than one year. This is similar to the survey findings in 2015. Ten percent (10%) of respondents reported that they were living out of state at the time they became homeless. Twenty-one percent (21%) reported they were living in another county in California. California counties that respondents reported living in at the time they most recently became homeless include Alameda County (5%), San Mateo (4%), Contra Costa (3%), Marin (3%), Santa Clara County (1%), and some other California county (5%)."
learn more: https://www.google.com/search?q=sf+homeless+population+repor...
I found the section on primary cause of homelessness interesting:
---
22% of respondents reported job loss as the primary cause of their homelessness.
15% reported drugs or alcohol.
13% reported an argument with a friend or family member who asked them to leave
12% reported eviction
10% reported divorce or separation
7% reported an illness or medical problem.
---
I suspect mental health is something that is very pertinent. I used to volunteer with the homeless and drug addiction seemed like was used for self-medication. Quite a few people were suffering from anxiety, schizophrenia and other issues that prevented them to forming meaningful relationships, holding a job, staying in touch with their family (who often have disowned them).
Further under the section of "Health" I found:
---
41% drug or alcohol abuse
39% psychiatric or emotional condition
31% chronic health problem
Then
29% reported Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
23% a physical disability
12% a traumatic brain injury
11% reported having an AIDS or HIV related illness
---
I am so tired of reading this bullshit "statistic". It is a self-reported number. If a homeless person thinks it benefits him to say so, he will. And homeless people will say anything to survive, as they are barely surviving.
If you came where from Podunk, MN and crashed on your buddy's couch last year before he kicked you out? Congratulations, you were "living in SF before you became homeless".
If you came here from somewhere else and stayed in a shelter for a day before you got evicted? Congratulations, you were "living in SF before you became homeless".
If the question was, "were you a rent-paying resident of SF before you became homeless", the answer would be totally different.
There are 76 non-profits that feed from the trough of homelessness[1]. Don't they have admin overhead? How much money is wasted on this overhead?
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/S-F-spends-recor...
I'm more worried about this thought in the article:
> While cities report inconsistently, San Francisco currently spends around $430 per city resident per year on services and programs for the homeless, compared to $260 in New York and $110 in Los Angeles. Yet the problem in our city is worse, and despite increases in spending, has continued to worsen.
It's not a surprise that the city with more spending on services for the homeless has more homeless. That's exactly what you'd expect under pretty much any model.
Do you believe that subsidizing the homeless means you'll get more homeless? Then higher spending will directly cause more homelessness.
Do you believe that places with bigger problems will try harder to do something about them? Then higher spending will reflect more homelessness.
> [1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/S-F-spends-recor...
i laughed when I read that title. "Tracking results" is definitely a form of overhead, so the article is literally complaining that charities are ineffective because they don't have enough overhead.
In general, "minimize overhead" isn't equal to "maximize impact per dollar". The obvious software industry exemplar is the oft-repeated complaint about companies hiring expensive engineers and then refusing to buy a $200 monitor.
This is all you need to know. We should starve the beast, and then the city will actually do something about the homeless problem.
Tech companies like his--btw Stripe benefited from San Francisco tax breaks and the change from an income tax to a gross receipt tax in the mid-aughts--need to step up and give back to the cities that enabled them to become what they are today. And they should be more willing to take responsibility for the consequences good and bad of the tech boom.
Something must be done. This is something.
Any plan Mayor Breed might have will only be aided by additional funding.
Drug abuse is a serious problem. Giving the DEA more money will only help to solve it.
Additionally, the total cost of homeless services is helping more people than the 7,500 that are let mentioned as it's really closer to 20,000 where many are in permanent supportive housing and aren't considered homeless but would be without the same type of support.
If you look at the cost per person when using the 20,000 number, the cost is still far lower than what it costs to keep a person in prison each year, where with the passing of Prop C, that number would get closer to said amount. Add on the fact that SF is one of the most expensive real estate markets in the would (where there isn't cheaper housing anywhere nearby), with a related high cost of labor, and the spending makes far more sense.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Dorsey-tweetsto...
From SFChronicle article:
Dorsey estimated that Square could pay an additional $20 million in taxes under Prop. C next year, while Benioff has said Salesforce would pay an additional $10 million, despite its larger size.
“Taxes would grow at rates multiple times our (adjusted) revenue, which no company can sustain,” Dorsey said in a tweet. “Not an issue for Salesforce/Twitter, but unfair to (Square) and (financial) startups.”
The people in question are severely mentally ill, addicts, likely both. They are the people that shoot heroin at the bus stop you are trying to wait at, they're the guy with no shoes, covered in his own waste screaming at passers-by. These are the people that are causing the frustration, not people who could make it if they could level up their skillset and get a better job.
We really need to agree on the issue at hand because so often I see people talk straight past each other. The man covered in his waste needs help, desperately, he will not be someone who with a little help starts paying rent and holding down a job. He needs the community to pay for housing, medical treatment, and psychiatric care for a long time, likely forever to some degree. But we can't keep talking about different problems.
Anyone know why this discrepancy exists? I know this includes rental assistance for those "at risk" of becoming homeless (but not necessarily homeless), so the value, when calculated "per homeless" resident, is meaningless.
However, this calculation "per city resident" in general seems to point at some deep infrastructural issues. I'm trying to find an analysis as to why and coming up empty.
So really, a more meaningful comparison (if one is resigned to handwaving about tax bases, without delving into details of city finances) for SF would be Boston, with 865,000 people out of 8.2 million for its CSA.
What are the factors that make this untrue?
SF has a much higher rate of homelessness than the national average, so that explodes the per-resident cost. But we actually spend less per homeless resident than NYC. Surprised?
Stripe knows all this. They have this veneer of plain spoken honesty, but take note of the trick they're trying to pull here.
SF vs. Manhattan is a better comparison as New York city as a whole has more/cheaper space available than SF.
In San Francisco, you must be numb to that kind of logical fallacy by now. This sounds like 95% of all entreaties to spend more government money.
(I live a few blocks from the worst areas and see people dealing drugs and shooting up every day)
Physical illness and drug addiction (and even mental illness in some cases) are more likely a symptom of homelessness than a cause.
From accounts I've heard from homeless people, one of the biggest problems homeless people have is boredom. This leads to both depression and drug use, both of which can lead to both physical and mental illness.
The OP seems to be discussing the problem of solving it in a global sense, so that people do not become homeless. IMO, more housing is the solution to that problem.
The GP seems to be discussing the problem of solving it in terms of the existing homeless population, which, regardless of causation or the directionality of any causation, does require dealing with the mental illness and drug abuse issues.
IMO, it's not, because people don't become homeless (for the most part) because there are no existing vacant housing units, they become homeless because of joblessness, poor credit, drug addiction, mental illness, and criminal issues (often involving drugs), or a combination thereof, which make them unable (financially or otherwise) to either rent housing in the open market or take advantage of publicly operated or subsidized housing.
> ... which make them unable (financially or otherwise) to either rent housing in the open market or take advantage of publicly operated or subsidized housing.
This is made easier when there is more housing available.
Being physically ill isn't a correlation of having neither money nor a home. /s
Being addicted to drugs isn't a symptom of mentally checking out to avoid the problems you're literally unable to address. /s
Edit: yes, you're right, it's a lot more complicated than just housing. But housing, I think, is a big cause.
The difference can be illustrated by looking at how a measure meant to solve the latter, creates the former.
Suppose that we mandate that all housing created needs to be reviewed and a certain fraction of that housing needs to be set aside for affordable housing. You will indeed increase the amount of housing available at the price point that you have deemed affordable.
However the same action is a disincentive to build new housing, and also artificially reduces the supply of housing being sold at what would otherwise be a fair market price. This measure restricts supply, and in accord with economics 101 will increase average prices.
The result? More affordable housing AND a higher average price of housing. The net cost of housing goes up. (Which ironically will tend to cause more people who were on the edge of being able to afford housing to become homeless, making it likely that they lose their jobs, and thereby creating more need for affordable housing. Aren't you glad that we're doing something about the affordable housing problem to help them?)
Jack Dorsey's tweet on this "unfairness" today was the very first time I heard that as part of their argument against this tax. Why not explicitly say that up front long ago instead of hiding behind the singular argument that "we just support the mayor's judgement on the issue?" Seems disingenuous.
Citation please? Dorsey said they’d be taxed more than Salesforce but I assumed that’s because of where geographically they book their revenue.
Square has said that a quirk of the proposed tax could harm it and other San Francisco payments companies like Stripe. Gross receipts taxes are applied to a company’s total revenue generated from business activities in the city. In Square’s case, those include fees it splits with banks and Visa and MasterCard when it processes credit-card transactions.
Square, which is publicly traded, reports both net revenue, which includes those fees, and adjusted revenue, which excludes them. In the second quarter, those figures were $815 million and $385 million respectively. In Square’s view, imposing a tax on the higher revenue measure hurts it disproportionately.
If I'm reading this correctly, basically payment companies like Square and Stripe are disproportionately hurt because they would pay the tax on the ~2.9% + 10 cent fee they collect even though in reality both companies only keep a small fraction of that fee since most of that fee goes to the networks like Visa/MC/Amex.
As for adjusted revenue, do we actually know for certain that gross receipts applies to net revenue and not adjusted? Or is Dorsey just “hypothetically” spreading FUD?
Gross receipts is all revenue not including any cost or expense https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/gross-receipts.asp
If stripe really wanted to help then it could have created some safety nets with money it used to lobby.
But SF has one of the highest homeless rates in the nation. It's spend per homeless resident that is the relevant comparison.
So how do we do on that? As others have noted, we actually spend less per homeless resident than NYC. You would never get that from reading this! All you see is NYC: $260, SF: $770. Totally misleading! It comes across as disingenuous to me because, clearly, Stripe must know this.
"Look. We are just trying to exit with a billion dollars like everyone else in SF. We don't want to walk over the homeless either, but, it is super expensive to help them. So we propose just ignoring it until we get paid. Vote no on prop C!"
-Stripe
It's a drug and mental health issue, unless you are speaking to a broader philosophical point on what "high risk" means.
EDIT: I misinterpreted the thread: see comments below. Although Stripe's response was likely correlated to it.
"Companies like Square and Stripe would be taxed at a significantly larger total contribution than much larger companies like Salesforce."
It's Marc Benioff, from Salesforce, that has been calling both of them out.
They wouldn't be allowed to hang out along the streets like what happens in US. They will get picked up and will be forced to move and etc. We usually have a place called Slum for extremely poor people. They will need to make a living themselves. If they don't, I'm not sure where they end up (death, maybe).
Japan also doesn't think much about homeless people (https://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2013/12/30/yaku...)