You’re linking to an article from mid 2018, before SF passed the largest tax in the city’s history: 2018 Prop C, a gross receipts tax for homeless services expected to raise another $300M. Several other additional tax measures were also passed since then to raise funds for homeless services.

If you read that article it talks about how some of that money is spent on prevention so it's a bit unfair to just use existing homeless as the denominator- it's still an obscene amount of money per person. So saying it's "totally incorrect" is a bit of a stretch.

San Francisco absolutely has a Homeless industrial complex that isn't trying to solve the problem but just keep their cash flowing.

a Rube Goldberg machine of non-profits and inefficient, non-transparent spending leaving little to help the plight of the less fortunate.

I remember an article from somewhere in the valley that they considered to support families in need with some money for housing. Family in need was defined as yearly household income below $250,000.

Follow the drugs.

In 2015 84% of Santa Clara homeless where from the county when they lost their home. Only 6% where out of state when they became homeless. Source: https://www.sccgov.org/sites/opa/nr/Documents/SantaClaraCoun...

I live in SoCal so I thought you would even see more homeless migrants because of the weather. However, from speaking with homeless I would say in my experience most have lived in the area for a long time, with only one beach bum guy I spoke with who actually was "fresh off the bus". Until I saw the statistics though I was also under this misconception.

There is pretty powerful statistical evidence that when Regan moved homeless services from the federal level to a state responsibility it cratered the numbers of beds (especially in small towns) and created an unsolvable situation in that when you're struggling in your small town who has zero homeless support, you make a move to some place else, somewhere where being homeless is not has bad weather wise and has a bit of infrastructure. So now you have all of the struggling people from "Mainstreet usa" moving toward the main cities all at once (over a couple decades) an essentially a burden on them to deal with EVERYONES homeless problem instead of historically their own.

This problem was working much better in the 70s and 80s when their was a national framework for it. While SF and LA's government is flawed, this blame state/city is like blaming the individual ushers when the fans run on the field after a football upset. It was more of a structural failure than a local.

If the majority of them weren't addicted to hardcore drugs and could make intelligent, rational decisions, I might agree that giving them money directly could be a good thing. Drug addicts tend to not make good monetary choices.

See this recent documentary by KOMO News in Seattle about their problems, which are pretty similar to Portland's, SF's, LA's and a lot of other major cities with larger homeless populations. Crime is soaring. Most are homeless due to drug addiction. Until that part is solved and they can think clearly and rationalize normally again, giving them cash will likely only fuel the problem and keep them right where they're at. And with everyone walking around with $50k cash in their pocket, because they don't have bank accounts, crime would be even more rampant as they steal it from each other.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WijoL3Hy_Bw

Homelessness is a mental health problem and judges won't allow forced stays in mental institutions.