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Comment by alistairSH | Hacker News Reader

Are those numbers correct? If so, that's insane. For $77k/year, SF should be able to house every single one of them with money to spare.

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The latest tax increased it from 30k to about 60-70k. As to why it's doing so little, there's a variety of explanations. Some say that homeless often have mental or drug abuse issues that keep them from being able to live on their own. Others (including the mayor) say that the money is more than enough, and we need more accountability of what we already spend. 70k is about the median wage of a single person in SF.

Even losing half the bureaucracy, that leaves 35k/year for actual aid. Toss half of that at misc care and other programs. 17.5/year left for housing. Not much, but should still be enough for group home type arrangements. Or, at least I would hope so.

I've never been involved in these programs on either side, but it's amazing that $70k/year might not be enough to house somebody.

You're going to be real surprised then when you find out what assisted living or memory care costs for your parents. Hint it's at least double what normal cost of living is. And many of these folks do need that level of care and supervision.

Sure, that doesn't surprise me.

But how many of those 7000 homeless need that level of care? Half? 2/3? SF should at least be able to get the "easy" people off the street.

Maybe they already have?

They have definitely worked hard to do so. On BART I happened to start talking with somebody wearing a jacket from the Homeless Outreach Team. It's his job to talk people into getting the help they need and getting off the streets. The ones we talked about are definitely the difficult cases.

That doesn't surprise me at all. There's a homeless guy in my neighborhood I've been talking with at least 7 years. He has mentioned being born at the hospital 3 blocks from my place, and I'm sure he grew up in the neighborhood. He's polite, friendly, and very set in his ways. I suspect he has some sort of alcohol-induced anterograde amnesia. He has absolutely no interest in living in any sort of setting where he'd be constrained by others. From the way he talks about it, I expect there's some sort of history of abuse by authority figures.

I don't think it's impossible for him to get help. But I think it would have to include living in his neighborhood and I think it would need a lot of patient and intensive help from professionals. Otherwise he's just going to do what's familiar to him.

1/2 for bureacrazy? that sounds like a lot for just overhead

Well, whatever money you spend to provide a service goes straight into someones pocket first, before a homeless person gets anything in return.

There's a lot of bureaucrats and cronies taking their cut, I'd be surprised if 10% of that actually made it to the homeless

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