People don't talk about this very much. But it seems extremely unfair that Stripe/Square pay way more tax than Saleforce in terms of ratio to their revenues. (I don't recall the numbers. Anyone?)
Jack Dorsey tried to raise this point multiple times. But people just kept screaming that he didn't care about homeless :S
JFC, it's not because of a lack of money that SF has a problem with homeless people, and it's not that more money would make the problem magically go away.
However, when people talk about homelessness being such a big problem in SF, I think a lot of what they are talking about is the subset of homeless people who are "violently mentally ill". That's something that I saw a lot more of in SF than in cities in the Mid West. By "violently mentally ill" I mean things like:
- Yelling at pedestrians that they are the incarnation of Satan and were going to use their demonic powers to strike them down.
- Using racial slurs for minorities that walked past.
- Purposely invading people's personal space.
I don't know why this would be a greater problem, or a more visible problem, with the homeless in SF compared to other places. Maybe in the Mid West it is difficult for people who are too mentally ill to survive the winter. Maybe other cities use anti-vagrancy laws to round them up.
Coordination at the federal level could even out geographical imbalances in services and also prevent all services from having to be delivered in the few places where it’s most expensive to do so. Doing all the free housing in the most expensive market is crazy.
Poverty and homelessness are near all-time lows in the US right now, comparable to Canada. You wouldn't know that by looking at the streets of San Francisco (or Los Angeles for that matter).
At a national level homelessness has declined dramatically since 2000. While San Francisco's problem has only kept getting worse. The US as a whole isn't seeing the homelessness problems that San Francisco is.
While San Francisco was doing nothing, the US implemented the Housing First program under the Bush Administration. That policy was continued and amplified by the Obama Administration, to extraordinary results: homelessness declined through the great recession, rather than skyrocketing as would have been predicted (especially coming out of a housing bust).
Unsheltered homelessness is down 20% since 2007. Total homelessness is down by 15% since 2007.
https://www.hud.gov/sites/dfiles/Main/images/hudno.18-147.jp...
2010 > Obama builds on Bush success to help the homeless
https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-view/2010/...
2013 > The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development reported that the number of the chronically homeless declined by 30% between 2005 and 2007. You might have expected the numbers to spike again when the financial crisis hit but no. Since 2007, the number of chronic homeless has dropped another 19%.
https://www.cnn.com/2013/04/29/opinion/frum-less-homelessnes...
2008 > On a cold January morning in 2001, Mel Martinez, who was then the new secretary of housing and urban development, was headed to his office in his limo when he saw some homeless people huddled on the vents of the steam tunnels that heat federal buildings. "Somebody ought to do something for them," Martinez said he told himself. "And it dawned on me at that moment that it was me." So began the Bush administration's radical, liberal — and successful — national campaign against chronic homelessness.
https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article...
2013 > The Astonishing Decline of Homelessness in America
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/08/the-ast...
Texas still just buys their homeless bus tickets to California. When I ask homeless people in LA where they are from, Texas is the #1 response. The LA Times just ran an article this week about people who to come LA seeking stardom and are homeless within a few weeks because they didn't bring enough money to pay rent because they thought they'd be a rich megastar within a few days.
It's truly fucked up for LA and SF to get blamed for having a homeless problem when most of the homeless in CA aren't even locals.
What you're portraying is a myth.
Along the i5 from Seattle to San Diego the encampments have been growing. There are a few places where it goes away but mostly because of individual city efforts to do something. Source - been driving the route very actively last 5 years.
> And homeless are everywhere.
Maybe a $3k per month "small single apartment" contributes to "homeless are everywhere."
Of course, there are a lot more homeless people in SF than the very conspicuously unwell people I mentioned. There are also probably larger scale effects that together contribute to high rents, high income inequality, drug abuse, lack of medical care, etc. But there’s a lot more to say than that SF’s homeless problem is because rent is too high.
I can certainly imagine a 'homeless pipeline' where the children of the parents who get priced out of housing end up doing drugs on the street, but I also know about bussing the homeless and homeless moving to SF because they don't want to deal with a serious winter.
According to Wikipedia: As of 2014, the city is believed to have approximately 7,000 homeless residents. As of 2015, approximately 71% of the city's homeless had housing in the city before becoming homeless, while the remaining 29% came from outside of San Francisco
But I wonder why homeless people don't move to another city. If I'd be in their situation (living in a city where I can not afford to rent a house and live a normal life) I'd go to another city where with a regular job I can afford a normal life and just build my life there.
Sorry if it's a stupid question.
Because there are few cities in the country that are as accommodating to the homeless as SF. And I'm not talking about weather, I'm talking about services, aid, lack of police harassment, etc.
If you're homeless it's certainly the best place in the country to live.
In my experience, the serial startup execs mostly don't live in the city. In the 90s, I knew several who also had an apartment near the office, but that's much less common now that the sort of place they'd want is going for $8K/mo.
People are leaving sv and housing prices are the reason. It's going to lead to brain drain. Why bother with that congested hell hole when you can live anywhere else and cut your cost of living by 50 percent. Your average founder is 30 and they are not into partying. Sv is for 20 year olds
I wouldn't believe that a CEO of a company that has raised $40 million is leaving because his wife needs a roommate to make rent. His wife should probably live with him if she needs to save money.
Fwiw, housing prices (rents) have barely budged in much of the Bay Area for the past 4 years. If the exodus hasn't already happened, I doubt it will.
[1] https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/SF-Citi-video-plugs-...
Jack has been vocal about wanting to pay tax by revenue (or whatever way) to the city. The point that he objects is that Square pays tax more than Saleforce, when Saleforce's revenue is way way more than Square's.
This is an example of US political debate.
Everyone immediately accuses the person of being evil (i.e. not wanting to pay tax and of hating homeless). But nobody actually answers why it makes sense for Square to pay more tax than Saleforce.
Square has the one office in SF, so essentially all of its gross proceeds arise from that office and are subject to the tax.
Salesforce has offices everywhere and a substantial amount of its revenues come from the work of employees outside of San Francisco. This revenue should not be subject to the SF gross revenues tax (and it would be illegal for SF to tax such income).
The question boils down to this: is the disparity in taxes reasonable given the SF-based gross proceeds generated by Square and Salesforce?
EDIT: corrected username