SF spends 240 million dollars every year to help the homeless. That's more than most city's entire budget. The reason that money doesn't help anyone is because it won't go very far in a city where housing costs 2000$ per square foot. And it really doesn't need to be like this at all. It's an entirely man made disaster of colossal proportions.

There's plenty of blame to go around. You can thank all the NIMBYs and countless housing regulations that prevent cost effective shelter from being created.

It's within our technological power to create housing for a tiny fraction of what it costs today in SF: just look at the tiny house movement. Just imagine how much cheaper it would be if something like that was built but stackable. Housing, A potentially multi-trillion dollar industry, completely unassailable, very few companies or investors are investing in this, all thanks to: Regulation.

Regulations and land use policy hamstring developers, increasing costs endlessly. Instead of working against them, we should be working with them to streamline and reduce their costs and finding ways to create more competition between them, to ensure that people get the very lowest prices. It can be done. Places like Dallas are growing every bit as quickly as SF/bay area and can still create housing for 100$/sq foot. I suspect even lower prices are possible with the removal of regulation: which would finally allow humanity to innovate in this area, rather than creating yet more cat video apps.

This harmful idea that real estate is something that should go up and up forever is wrong: morally and economically. In a world that is progressing, things should be getting cheaper, even real-estate.

Right now, your options in SF are a 200$ tent under a bridge or a 2 million dollar condo. There, really ought to be more options between those two extremes.