> In my opinion, I lack evidence, the money should be targeting preventing people from ever getting homeless in the first place. The intervention needs to happens earlier because once a person is homeless the problems that contributed to their situation become insurmountable.

The city of SF does this already. There are nav centers and they triage cases for people that are on the brink of becoming homeless. The first step is prevention, but in an area that has booming rents, booming homelessness is never far behind. If you grew up in SF and you become homeless you're likely going to return to the place you know even if you don't have a place to live. The complete inability of SF to build housing at any income level is the biggest driver.