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Comment by sroussey | Hacker News Reader

It was upped to about $600m. Good luck getting an audit.

Okay, that is something on the order of $10,000 per person if there's a homeless population of 60,000 people. I doubt if SF has such a large homeless population.

Does this $600 million cover things like Churches sheltering the homeless, pantries, and such? Or is it in addition to the the $600 million? Something is very rotten here.

Looks like 8k or 10k as of January [1], depending on which standard you consider, though obviously that may have gone up with recent events.

[1] https://sfgov.org/scorecards/safety-net/homeless-population

You're off by almost an order of magnitude [1]. Even if we say the official estimates are off by a huge margin and there are actually 20,000 homeless in SF, that's $30K per person, on top of however many millions are given out via begging and other programs. It's insanity.

[1] https://sfgov.org/scorecards/safety-net/homeless-population

Oh my. I feel like I will never understand California politics. Such blatant corruption and such a large vulnerable population, but also such a huge 'woke' electorate. It would take some crazy mental gymnastics to reconcile these things.

Said electorate is gradually moving elsewhere due to the issues and voting for the same policies that cause the same problems.

Yes. I have lived in the Bay Area for a long time now, but never really liked the general holier-than-thou attitude (interestingly, I keep meeting older people who have never turned conservative, but have instead turned even more rabidly leftist.) It's dispiriting to realise that moving elsewhere, to Texas, say, is no guarantee of being rid of this. The same cycle will likely be repeated, perhaps in the next decade or so!

Being woke doesn’t translate to voting for good policies. You’re even more susceptible to voting for heartstrings boondoggles when you’re extra woke.

Completely agree with everything you said. But how does woke and liberal politics square with almost complete apathy to the the plight of the homeless (or of those verging on homelessness)? Almost nothing has been done to make housing affordable (even very modest, incremental bills in this regard have been shot down). If you consider the plight of agricultural workers and housing for them, you would be even more befuddled. 9.2% sales tax? Regressive tax on the poor. Gasoline tax? Again, hurts the poor the most. What am I missing here?

What you're missing is the "left" has long since transferred its affections away from poor people who are not wards of the state.

"Woke" politics magically appeared in 2008 when leftists were manning occupy wall street, which pretty much immediately degenerated into escalating virtue signalling instead of, you know, making some reforms to wall street. I'm sure that was a total coincidence.

Well, it did appear to result in the CFPB (the thing that Elizabeth Warren was heading?) and Dodd-Frank, perhaps (one can never attribute these things to some particular movement or event, I feel). I don't know if they have been defanged already.

Anyhoo, so what is the pet constituency of the left? They do appear to be falling over themselves to regularise illegal immigrants (perhaps the Latinos in Texas handing Trump a win will give them pause?), while doing nothing for legal immigrants (who power the only growth sector America has going for it, technology.) They certainly don't care much for the working poor, as you have rightly pointed out.

Related: a "stirring" defense of child labor from a Gates foundation apparatchik that got published in the left-leaning guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/nov/06/c...

Pretty sure Gates is a Democrat! Yeah, man, Child Labor laws are so 19th century.

It's because CA voters are bombarded with propositions every election. At least a half dozen. People barely have time to study the issues, so they go off what makes sense from the headline or the title of the measure on the ballot. Hence being fleeced by Prop 22 and the new privacy laws, which sure looked pretty when they were sitting there in the ballot.

Prop 22 passing is what I simply can't square with the woke/liberal politics of CA. Workers' rights, whether they are cabbies, schoolteachers, government workers, construction crews, or really any other large workforce that can be unionized should be sacred to people of this persuasion. Yet, dispiritingly, it passed.

I don't blame them. I got texts from supposed "uber drivers" who really were paid actors (didn't even change their actual name for the advertisements, you can search for these actors websites yourself as I did) encouraging me to vote yes on 22. For people not keen on reading between the lines, this could have passed the sniff test.

Not only that, all these props are just propaganda to me. I see a bunch of youtube videos constantly telling me that people are gonna die if I don't vote for prop something. No information, just appeals to emotions.

SF does have a huge homeless population. Yes it go's to homeless shelters and other charities/programs. We sometimes forget that not all homeless are chronic homeless which is what most people associate as homeless.

Someone may be having hard times making rent and go to a church or other organization for financial help and other services. Battered women, at risk children also exist and may require a shelter with more security or women only shelters - which are funded too. There are many other services that exist that use that funding.

I didn't see waste. Actually, I would go so far as say most charities that receive federal and state funding rely on reporting to receive those grants and funding and things are very transparent. HMIS is the tech side of things that build the systems to track and report on everything.

SF has 10k homeless people. You can give everyone $60k a year outright right now and they would live a very comfortable life on that in the midwest.

I don't have the bandwidth right now to consider the actual numbers, but one thing worth noting - as it's often overlooked in these discussions - is that much of the money spent on homelessness is spent keeping people in housing such that they're not homeless. Dividing by the number that still remain homeless isn't the right choice of denominator for anything meaningful.

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