> Last year Stripe funded an anti-homeless campaign just $1 shy of the reporting threshold
I don’t get the sense that San Francisco’s homeless problem can be solved by throwing dollars at it. San Francisco chooses high housing prices by restricting construction. Its NIMBYs block tackling its homelessness problem.
Money won’t change those choices by San Francisco’s voters. It will just swell another city bureaucracy.
Both things can be true: NIMBYs are contributing to skyrocketing housing prices (and thus a growth in homelessness), AND essential city/county/state services require tax dollars.
I can think of plenty of things that SF locals complain about when I talk to them that would be mitigated by more tax dollars spent by the appropriate agencies. If your argument is that SF local government is a black hole that spends 0% of its tax income on important programs, then that's another matter but requires a bit more support...
> NIMBYs are contributing to skyrocketing housing prices (and thus a growth in homelessness), AND essential city/county/state services require tax dollars
Until the NIMBYs are confronted, throwing money at the homeless problem, best case, randomly burns cash. (More likely, it enriches the politically connected i.e. those same NIMBYs.)
You can’t build enough shelters, nor build them or staff them economically, without solving that problem. You can dance around the permanent population, but you run into the same issue with mental-health and drug clinics. The NIMBYism makes the whole enterprise less effective to the NIMBYs’ benefit.
TL; DR This tax looks like another way for San Francisco to dodge confronting its landowning elite.
(Note: this isn’t a broadside against local taxation. It’s a complaint about this specific tax. San Francisco’s root problem is it refuses to build.)
The article [1] posits reasonable hypotheses for why the number might be lower, but doesn’t attempt to calculate it, ending with “math...always making things confusing.”
San Francisco spends a lot on its homeless problem. (Using the article’s numbers, stripping out eviction prevention, about $200 million a year.) It has little to show for it.
> San Francisco spends a lot on its homeless problem with little to show for it.
$241 million from a budget of over $12 billion from a city that with businesses that collectively make hundreds of billions every year. Doesn't seem like that much. Same as 1 SoftBank funded startup that inevitably wastes it.
Little to show for it? The money is going to help people in a awful situation. Just because they haven't disappeared from the streets doesn't mean it's wasted.
The number is more like $3800 per person per year.
I don’t get the sense that San Francisco’s homeless problem can be solved by throwing dollars at it. San Francisco chooses high housing prices by restricting construction. Its NIMBYs block tackling its homelessness problem.
Money won’t change those choices by San Francisco’s voters. It will just swell another city bureaucracy.