San Francisco's budget is $12B/year.

And that won’t go very far if they started to offer free mental health care and housing because they will start to get people shipped in from everywhere else.

Providing housing need not cost the city anything. They just have to stop banning construction.

I'm on team "build more housing", but providing housing (as in, the city pays for housing for the poor who can't afford to pay for their own housing) directly costs the city money, if the city is paying rent to the landlord; costs the city money if the city buys the building/pays for construction; and indirectly costs the city money in lost property tax for units that the city designates as BMR units.

Allowing construction will alleviate pressure on the system as a whole, but, perhaps due to a failure of my imagination, I'm not seeing ways in which it won't cost something. I think it's worth it, mind you, I'm just not seeing how to make it $0.

Yeah, I guess "providing" was a poor choice of words.

In 2020 SF, even the upper middle class struggle to pay for housing. If you, as a first step, allow the housing stock to double, twice as many people can afford to live in the city, and life in SF becomes much more accessible.

Sure, there will always be people out of luck needing some assistance. But it should dwindle down to a smaller core when there are places to live.

Personally, I don't believe in government run housing. It's better to help people with rent money etc. But of course, none of this will ever happen in SF, so my opinions don't matter.