It's driven by ML using Meetup, Eventbrite, and a bunch of other data sources. And always open to feedback. Feel free to drop me a note. :)

Don't forget NIMBY residents. Just down the street from me is a building that used to be a church. The church wanted to start providing services and shelter for homeless LGBTQ teens. The neighbors threw a shitfit, the shelter never happened, the church closed and moved, and now the building is a dentist's office.

That's fine, I'm not interested in #notalldevelopment reasoning because my point was not to ascribe all of the behavior to NIMBYs. I was only countering the idea that "politicians, amirite?" is the problem.

i guess i don't have any more hard evidence at hand than what you present here, but my gut feeling is totally the opposite on this. i think there are a lot of people in SF (in the SF bay area in general or the city in particular) who would get behind this sort of program in principle, but who would be scared to be close to the implementation of such a program.

i think this particular flavor of NIMBYism (overblown fears about e.g. safety and/or property values) is more prevalent in the burbs, and especially the more affluent suburbs, but i'm sure you get some of it in the more affluent neighborhoods and gentrified pockets of other neighborhoods in SF and oakland too.

You don't know anybody in city government, then.

  > Over the past decade, the bay area has gotten so much worse. The cost of living has skyrocketed.

I'm not saying that the housing costs aren't crazy (I paid 2900 for a 600sqft studio in SOMA in 2013), but 10 years a go was an extremely low point.

Why does San Francisco have more homeless than Houston despite Houston being far bigger? We could argue housing costs, however many homeless in San Francisco aren’t even from the area, they gravitate there, in my opinion, because of permissive policies. San Francisco’s homeless problem is among the worst in the country, with Portland and Seattle quickly closing the gap. Less “progressive” places seem to have a much lower level of homelessness. Camping on sidewalks, shooting up, and shitting in doorways is rarely tolerated in most other places in the country, yet at least we’re working to stop plastic straws!

It might seem that San Francisco is more apt to arrest smugglers of plastic straws long before they arrest those shooting up in public and tossing their needles on the sidewalk. You are more likely to get fined for a polluting car than you would for smashing the windows of that same car.

One factor is weather.

Is it strange to anyone else that the more you spend on the homeless, the more homeless you seem to get?

The Shirky Principle:

"Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution"

And a few thoughts on that and homelessness in specific.

https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-shirky-...

Good public administration isn't cheap, and excellent public administration is expensive. The benefits are enormous, of course.

There's another key element: government officials are also required to open their personal finances to public inspection. This goes a long way to rein in corruption and graft.

Compensation does matter, but it's not the be-all-end-all.

The net result is the same as if the government paid mechanics or doctors substandard wages: Some good talent would join out of civic duty, but the overall effect would be to lower the quality of workers relative to the private sector.

I think it's more likely that a series of cultural, historical, systemic and environmental issues have lead to the current situation, and that our politicians are generally average in competence and intelligence compared to other similarly sized cities, but are dealing with some particularly challenging issues.

Some possible factors:

Cultural: Other cities, such as NYC, house many people in large shelters, on cots, outside of the city center. SF wants to put people in a higher standard of living than a room full of cots, so we can only afford to house about half the people who need it. (Much of that $250M/year we spend goes to housing people) It's hard for the BART police to kick people out of the stations because homeless advocacy organizations complain about abuse. So the problem stays visibile. Places like Salt Lake City also see the Mormon church active in improving these problems. I don't think there is any such non-govermental organization working at such scale in SF. Generally we think it's the goverments problem to solve, other places think it's a community problem, and take action. We seem to tolerate people visibily using drugs, leaving needles around. More conservative cities would not let that happen a block from city hall.

Historical: Most of SF's services, such as shelters, needle exchange, healthcare, etc, are downtown, this makes the problem very visible. NYC pushes this out of Manhattan and has for years. Neighborhood groups in SF usually protest adding a navigation center to their neghborhood. Imagine if we started putting shelters and navigation centers in the richmond?

Systemic: This could be an essay alone. Rising housing costs, due to downzoning, prop13, discrtionary review, etc etc, and then a job loss, and you can't make rent, you lose your apartment. Now you're out on the street. The city doesn't have enough shelters. And see previous mention of neghorhoods not wanting navigation centers or shelters near them. The city actually has to go in front of the planning comission, just like a private developer, to argue for a new navigation center. Not only do we have a system that makes it hard to build new high end housing, it's hard to build navgation centers, because of all the process involved.

Environmental: California cities have a much higher rate of unsheltered homelessness. NYC has a legal right to shelter. I do wonder if part of this has to do with climate. If NYC had the same number of people living unsheltered through the winter, they would have thousands of people freezing to death. NYC has 75K people experiencing homelessness at any given time. This creates the political will to house people.

So you're elected to the board of supervisors, or as the mayor, you have all this history, all these factors that are making your job of reducing homeless, very hard. What do you do? We've had many many bonds to increase funding to provide housing for people experiencing homelessness, but the electorate consistently votes them down. So your hands are also fairly tied with regards to money. You're left with small incremental imrovements over many years.

I can see why you'd be fed up with San Francisco for these reasons. I just don't think it's fair to blame it entirly on stupid politicians. All that said, I do agree with you that I'd rather see the time spent on more pressing issues than tech company cafeteria bans, and plastic bag bans. Part of this is because we elect people like Aaron Peskin who seem very interested in 1. having the ear of local small business groups, and passing protectionist laws. 2. Putting forward sensational laws that get a lot of media attention. Peskin and his ilk operate on the emotional appeal side of politics. Things that sound good as long as you don't think too hard about them. We'll find those types of politicans everywhere. We have to work to expose them for what they are.

There's the boondoggle that has been the Central Subway, which has gone overbudget by 3x (over $1 billion) and taken a decade longer than planned. Muni's own projections put the increase in ridership at less than 1%, since the area is already served by busses.

There's the ineffective school system, which puts students of all levels in the same classes and prevents bright students from taking algebra before high school.[1] Anyone who can afford it sends their kids to private school.

The city budget has increased from $6.4 billion in 2010 to over $11 billion this year.[2] In that same time, the population of SF has gone from 805,000 to 864,000. That's a 72% increase in budget for a 7% increase in population.

$11 billion, and at least once a week I'm stepping around used needles or human feces. Could it be any more obvious that the city government is utterly dysfunctional?

1. https://www.kqed.org/news/10610214/san-francisco-middle-scho...

2. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/SF-s-budget-soar...

Read this sentence a few times and then tell me again how your politicians aren’t stupid or evil.

"The Navigation Center, which opened in March 2015, is a successful program designed to shelter San Francisco’s highly vulnerable and long-term homeless residents who are often fearful of accessing traditional shelter and services. Navigation Centers provide these otherwise unsheltered San Franciscans room and board while case managers work to connect them to income, public benefits, health services, shelter, and housing. Navigation Centers are different from traditional shelters in that they have few barriers to entry and intensive case management. Unlike traditional shelters, people with partners, pets and possessions are welcome at Navigation Centers. The purpose of a Navigation Center is to offer a respite from life on the street and to support people in changing their lives by making lasting social service and housing connections."

[0]: http://hsh.sfgov.org/services/emergencyshelter/navigation-ce...

Labels in politics are used to demonise - but nothing is ever that simple.

I'm not disagreeing with your comment, just adding on to it. You are 100% right that homelessness is a complex issue with lots of causes. But I think it's also fair to say at the end of the day that SF is completely failing at fixing the problem - both for the safety of the homeless people and for the safety of other citizens. It's a public health crisis in my opinion when you look at the basic numbers.

Here's some numbers:

San Francisco population: 884,363 (2017/Wikipedia)

San Francisco unsheltered population (conservative): 6,600 (7,499 SF self-reported homeless count * 88.2% HUD estimated unsheltered rate)

Unsheltered population rate (conservative): ~0.75% of residents (my calculation) - nearly 1 in 100!

Compare that with London, another city also experiencing a homelessness epidemic due to explosively rising housing costs:

London population: 8,825,000 (2017/Wikipedia)

London unsheltered population: 1,137 (homeless.org.uk)

Unsheltered rate: ~0.01% of residents (my calculation)

So obviously homelessness rates in SF are absurdly high. In fact, there are more unsheltered homeless people in SF than the entire country of England:

San Francisco unsheltered population: 6,600 (2017)

England unsheltered population: 4,751 (2017)

I'm not saying they are equivalent situations, but somehow a country with a population greater than the state of California manages to have fewer homeless people than one relatively tiny city in California.

And people say things like NYC has a much higher homeless population of 76,501, but according to HUD, only 5.1% of NYC homeless are unsheltered. In SF, the unsheltered rate according to HUD is almost 90% - nearly the worst in the country. That means NYC actually has fewer unshelted people than SF on the streets despite a much larger population.

I'm not saying these numbers are perfect, but it gives us an idea of the scale of the problem. Politicians may or may not be smart, but at the end of the day they are doing a terrible job of fixing this issue in a meaningful way. Someone needs to step up and treat this like the public health crisis that it is, even if that means bringing in more federal resources or changing the strategy significantly.

On a related note, I feel the same thing holds true for LA and Southern California's car traffic problem.

This will be true after you move too.

This is a disingenuous way to represent spending. Much of the spending goes to keeping people off the streets, to shelters, and to medical care.

If you spent a money and everybody but 1 person got off the street, would you say that they spent a quarter billion dollars on 1 homeless person? No.