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Agree entirely, maybe if some of the billions of dollars available went to providing the homeless with good, free mental healthcare they would be a good start to making San Fran a better place. I’ve never seen anything so sad as the streets of San Fran on a cold night, disgusting.

Edit: Go for the downvote button, most of the world thinks the state of the valley , San Francisco and the living conditions and poor infrastructure are a joke given the insane amount of wealth housed there. You can take ownership of it or blame someone else (which it seems many of you are doing a great job of).

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People aren't downvoting you because they hate homeless people. They're downvoting because the city already devotes a ton of money to homelessness, and has proven itself extraordinarily inept or corrupt at solving that problem.

There are many possible solutions to what is a horrible and obvious problem. Throwing billions more down the SF government money maw is not one of them.

Much of SF's homeless population is not local to SF. Part of the problem with spending money on the homeless is that it draws more homeless seeking those services. And in many cases, other states and cities have "solved" their homeless problem by shipping their homeless to CA. (Texas, especially, is notorious for this.)

Not saying that SF is well-run or not, merely that the homeless problem isn't simply due to the city's response.

This is simply not true, and is a huge misconception about homelessness in SF.

69% of people had housing in San Francisco before they became homeless and 72% of those people have been in San Francisco for at least five years.

https://atthecrossroads.org/news/myths-facts-about-homelessn...

The city uses an expanded definition of homelessness that includes people who are "doubled-up" in the homes of family or friends [1]. The survey referenced in the source you've linked counts people dealing with LGBTQ-related issues that, while terrible, aren't what most people think of when they picture homelessness in SF.

The "man shooting heroin on the street" sorts of homeless folks are, in my limited experience volunteering, generally not from SF but some other part of CA.

[1]: http://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017-SF-Poin...

that's less than half: 0.69 * 0.72 = 0.4968

There really are cities that pay for bus tickets to ship homeless out, generally under the banner of a name like "homeward bound." The reality, though, is that SF is a net exporter under those programs: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...

I mean... that's how the cookie crumbles unfortunately. California is the most survivable climate for the homeless and for some reason people applaud local governments busing the homeless to California - as long as those two factors remain in place it's up to California to fix it.

With that understanding there should be more national funding going toward the homeless issue - and if there's one local economy that could actually afford to fix the problem it's SF.

Land is pretty cheap in Texas. It’s often unrestricted. SF could buy up a ton of land and start building an eco village with tiny homes; robotic organic food production; etc. and start providing services to the Texas homeless population as way to stop them from coming to SF.

This would probably be much cheaper.

SF spends $400 million a year on what it terms behavioral health (encompassing both mental healthcare and drug abuse treatment). How much more do you think ought to be spent?

San Francisco’s budget is the same as Chicago’s, despite Chicago having three times the population and twice as large of an economy.

The top-line figure of the SF budget is misleading because it includes the SFO airport. This arrangement is unusual in the United States. Chicago operates ORD and MDW out of a separate budget, like most US cities do [1].

Notice the large difference in the size of Chicago's enterprise budget [2] and San Francisco's enterprise budget [3]. SFO is considered part of the enterprise budget of the City and County of San Francisco, but it's a separate fund entirely for Chicago.

(As an aside, this setup means that the mayor of San Francisco doubles as the CEO of the SFO airport, which is also unusual.)

[1]: https://www.flychicago.com/business/CDA/factsfigures/Pages/f...

[2]: https://budgetblog.ctbaonline.org/chicagos-city-budget-101-5...

[3]: https://datasf.org/blog/unpacking-a-10-billion-budget/

It also includes operation of the water district which other cities split out.

SF's budget is actually much larger than Chicago's budget in 2019, $11B vs $8.9B.

However, Chicago has significantly more debt, and is on the verge of bankruptcy. SF is not.

To add to this, I'm assuming "twice as large of an economy" must be hyperbole because I'm not finding any data that comes even close to that. Chicago's GDP, for example, is only ~1.3x bigger in total. In terms of GDP per capita SF is actually ~1.5x bigger (for metro areas, because that's the data I could find).

Definitely not arguing that SF doesn't have its share of management problems, but this feels like a pretty poor example.

I’m looking at just the city proper. 1.5x the GDP per capita, with 1/3 the population = half the GDP.

Then you're not looking at the city proper and we're mixing measures here. The 1.5x I mentioned is at the metro level, while your 1/3 population is city proper. That said, I'm struggling to find any kind of useful data broken down at the city level in terms of economic output, so I certainly wouldn't die on this hill.

Right, I’m assuming the relative ratio is the same for the cities as for the metro areas. Both cities have a lot of their jobs and major companies in the suburbs, so that’s probably not an unreasonable assumption.

Chicago’s problem is that it’s in a state that until quite recently taxed like a red state (3% flat income tax!). But that’s on the revenue side—it has nothing to do with how much money is reasonable to spend on city services.

If taxes are the issue, nothing is stopping the one party that rules Chicago from implementing their own progressive income tax.

San Francisco is a county, so it includes county budgets like prisons. It is not an apples to apples comparison

I’m not downvoting you but I’m skeptical that the problems with homelessness can be fixed by putting more money toward mental health care. Are there a lot of skilled mental health practitioners who aren’t working due to a lack of demand?

Mental healthcare is absolutely a salve for a lot of homeless folks. We used to have sanitariums and institutes - some of those were terribly abusive (seriously, they were horrific in some cases). Instead of fixing the abuse issues people found it easier to solve the problem by shutting down the evil institutions... then everyone who had been receiving treatment was forced onto the street and expected to take care of themselves.

Anecdotally, my wife (at the time a developmental psychologist) was commuting to SF from central valley every day because her pay wasn't enough to pay both rent and student loans.

In the end she left psych and went into tech. Problem solved!

Too bad most of the world doesn't realize you can't solve national problems at a local level

There you go again, it’s someone else’s problem right ?

For example, what if some of the money used by Google et al, went to lobbying the government to change its stance on healthcare ?

Probably the same reason Volkswagen doesn't spend its billions lobbying the German government to change its stance on refugees?

VW does a huge amount of lobbying:

https://lobbyfacts.eu/articles/29-10-2015/volkswagen-top-10-...

https://www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-influence/2019...

I'm going to guess they lobby for their benefit, not to solve social ills.

https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/sustainability/refugee-aid.h...

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