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Comment by jm_l | Hacker News Reader

I think this is a common line of thinking that doesn't actually reflect the reality of how much the city is spending per year.

SF's spending in 2019 was 12b dollars (roughly $12,000 per resident).

Of that, 1.6b went to MTA ($1600 per resident, or 13% of total spending) and 360m went to addressing homelessness ($360 per resident, or 3% of total spending)

Comparatively, SF's GDP was 500b (500,000 per resident).

To conclude that we're spending all our money on this and getting no results seems wrong when we're spending so little of our budget, and our budget is so little comparatively to the economic activity.

*(these numbers are from http://openbook.sfgov.org/portalpagehelp.html#sfopenbook 2019 spending)

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One number you're missing there is the total homeless population estimated in 2019 to be around 8000 people [1], which works out to around $45k per homeless resident.

1. https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/2019HIRDRep...

Yes the point-in-time count is 8000, but a lot of homelessness services go to preventing people who are on the edge of homelessness.

If you use the estimate here (https://sf.curbed.com/2019/11/20/20973811/sf-homeless-count-...) that 18,000 people are homeless at some time in a given year then the figure goes down to 20,000 per homeless.

Also consider that an additional estimated 9,500 each year would be homeless if not for SF's existing supportive housing services (https://sf.curbed.com/2020/3/4/21152501/san-francisco-homele...)

Plus people being evicted. In 2019 there were 1600 eviction notices (https://sfrb.org/sites/default/files/Document/Statistics/18-...). If we assume that even just 25% of those are 4-person families, that's bringing us to around 10k a year per homeless/at-risk resident (and that's not even counting those who are at-risk of eviction but did not get evicted thanks to SF's existing eviction prevention resources.

This is a really good point, thank you for providing the links!

This is a misleading metric.

Say you had a $100k homeless budget, and 100 homeless folks. You’re spending $1k per resident.

But say your program REALLY works, and now you only have 10 homeless folks. Then, your program is spending $10k per resident!

the program didn’t get worse. As your program gets better, you should be spending MORE per resident, not less.

Another great point, it is entirely likely that happened in SF since I’ve heard the homeless population quoted as 20,000 a couple years ago. As the commenter above also pointed out, my original math was indeed misleading.

My understanding is that the city spends quite a bit of money on the homeless indirectly in various forms. The bigger problem is the growth in the budget:

2012: 7.3 billion for 829,027 people = 8805/resident 2020: 13.7 billion for 896,047 people = 15289/resident

Why did the budget increase 51% in 8 years when the population increased by 8% (1.13% inflation)?

The economic context has also changed a lot. In 2012 SF's total GDP was 350b, today it's 500b (a 40% increase). It shouldn't necessarily be that surprising that as the economy grows the government's spending does as well.

This does explain quite a bit! Although I'd assume there are economies of scale in running a city (or else they wouldn't exist in general).

That’s 51/40 in favor of spending more over those 8 years and in 2012 SF wasn’t frugal. Some increase is justified but not more than 1 to 1.

What do you think is the right amount of local revenue for a city to collect? SF by your numbers is collecting 2.4% of its local GDP which is about double what my cityseems to be doing. I also feel like having high state taxes would squeeze out what localities can justify collecting.

500 billion is substantially off, that figure is not for San Francisco the city, it's for the combined SF-Oakland-Hayward, CA metropolitan statistical area, which has a total population of around 4.7 million people.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NGMP41860

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