Yeah, that is kinda the dirty little secret of the homelessness "industry". Take Shelter, by far the most well known homelessness charity in the UK. Do they actually run hostels and soup kitchens? Well, actually, and this comes as a surprise to most people, they don't. They just transfer money from their donors to "think-tanks" and well-paid consultants. It's a huge racket, but since they have glommed onto a "worthy cause" they're untouchable.
http://england.shelter.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/29...
Money out £45.9 million; Housing and legal services: £27,809,000.
There is a line item for "housing services" which cost 21M and employs 441 people. But I can't find where they explain what all that money went to. It can't be housing aid because that's a separate line item. It's odd that they detail exactly where the 355K went to, but not the 21M.
It's reasonable to assume the 21M is salaries for 441 people. So to a first approximation, this organization doesn't actually give out anything except advice. Their second key goal is "To make monies available to housing associations", but I only see some token grants, dwarfed by their advertising budget.
That may all be well and good and necessary and proper for the situation in the UK, eg they lobby for govt funds that go direct to housing assocs. I don't know enough about it. But if their public image is of an organization that runs soup kitchens and provides housing, it's not supported by this report.
However the UK Government's 2009/10 social housing budget was £3.3bn. £50m is a drop in the ocean in this sector.
I'm not too concerned about their size relative to the whole "homeless budget", but how much of their income is spent on direct benefit to the people they are chartered to help. I'm also concerned about their "implied accomplishments" versus their actual accomplishments,ie image vs reality.
From what I can tell, about 60% of their income goes to the salaries of front-line people (legal and housing advice). 28% went to operational expenses (fundraising and "shelter shops"). The rest is advertising and paperwork.
For people struggling to get by, getting legal aid to prevent them losing their house is priceless. They cannot afford to pay a lawyer, so that kind of donation to pay for one is incredibly important to them.
It is outrageous indeed. Every time I walk by a homeless person sleeping in the cold on the sidewalk, I am reminded of this figure.
Thats $87 per citizen in SF.
That accounts for 0.39% of my taxes in a given year, and I don't even make that much money because I just graduated college.
I'm saying, $87 a year out of my taxes is a tiny amount when you consider what you pay for other things. How much do you spend a year on defense? Since the effective tax rate is around 30% (roughly) and the defense budget is around 20% of the federal budget (roughly), I pay around 52x more for defense than for helping homeless people in a given year. Is defense 52x more important than social services? And I say this being a defense contractor who entire livelyhood depends on taxes and the military industrial complex.
Otherwise, what would the state be doing? If the state spends a bunch of money on roads, it spends it on roads in towns. You might be driving down the street in your town seeing construction, but that money came from state taxes not town taxes.
The same goes for programs big and samll. Medicaid is money collected on the federal level, but paid out on the state level.
For example: the City of San Francisco spends $70M per year (about $10K per homeless person, given that the population of the homeless is just under 7K). On top of that you have churches and other charities helping out. And yet I see homeless people all around, sleeping in doorways, on sidewalks, etc. Heck, in the shadow of City Hall you'll see dozens of homeless people.
But the department of homelessness (I don't recall the name of the department) was filled with people from (ex-mayor) Gavin Newsom's campaign staff (from his unsuccessful run for Governor). There is no accountability. There are no metrics on how many homeless people are in the City. All we have is a massive bureaucracy that is making a living off of claiming to help homeless people.