Hacker News Reader

Comment by jessriedel | Hacker News Reader

> To get to this number, I averaged the number of annual homeless in San Francisco since 2013, which is 6,864, and averaged the city’s homeless budgets from 2016 through 2023 (I could not find prior budgets), which is $486 million per year. That’s $632,000 per homeless person per year

No, that's $486M/6864 = $70,800 per homeless person per year. It's only after multiplying by the 9 years she lived in SF do you get $630k. It's a lot, and probably poorly spent, but probably only 10x what is reasonable.

View on HN

70k per year is less than we spend keeping someone in prison, which is where many people believe we should put drug addicts. The truth is it’s not about the money, people just don’t want to see other people suffering where they live.

As a society, even spending all this money, we are failing to help some of our most vulnerable citizens. It’s quite telling that conversations about social safety nets always become about money rather than reducing harm effectively.

I think that opiate addict should be freely provided with a stable quality supply as long they want, something like that https://mysafe.org/ .

No where in the article does the author bring up taxes or the cost per tax payer. The entire focus of the article is on the effect on the homeless person.

Sorry, that was a typo on my end. I'll push a fix momentarily. (Do note that the math for $630k over 9y was right.)

A point in time count isn’t a good denominator to understand cost per person given an annual budget.

This article sheds some light: https://missionlocal.org/2019/07/in-san-francisco-we-obsess-...

> the Department of Homelessness itself applies a multiplier of 2.89 to the PIT count to estimate how many individuals are homeless not just on one day but throughout the entire year.

The PIT number seems like the best single number to use. Unlike the one you quote, PIT is not influenced by the somewhate arbitrary choice of a year as a unit of measure. And even if you include people who are homeless for a single day over the entire year (who are, as the article mentions, also spending time in jail or the hospital, which get their own budget), the difference is less than 3x.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com