1. https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/2019HIRDRep...
If you use the estimate here (https://sf.curbed.com/2019/11/20/20973811/sf-homeless-count-...) that 18,000 people are homeless at some time in a given year then the figure goes down to 20,000 per homeless.
Also consider that an additional estimated 9,500 each year would be homeless if not for SF's existing supportive housing services (https://sf.curbed.com/2020/3/4/21152501/san-francisco-homele...)
Plus people being evicted. In 2019 there were 1600 eviction notices (https://sfrb.org/sites/default/files/Document/Statistics/18-...). If we assume that even just 25% of those are 4-person families, that's bringing us to around 10k a year per homeless/at-risk resident (and that's not even counting those who are at-risk of eviction but did not get evicted thanks to SF's existing eviction prevention resources.
Say you had a $100k homeless budget, and 100 homeless folks. You’re spending $1k per resident.
But say your program REALLY works, and now you only have 10 homeless folks. Then, your program is spending $10k per resident!
the program didn’t get worse. As your program gets better, you should be spending MORE per resident, not less.
2012: 7.3 billion for 829,027 people = 8805/resident 2020: 13.7 billion for 896,047 people = 15289/resident
Why did the budget increase 51% in 8 years when the population increased by 8% (1.13% inflation)?
SF's spending in 2019 was 12b dollars (roughly $12,000 per resident).
Of that, 1.6b went to MTA ($1600 per resident, or 13% of total spending) and 360m went to addressing homelessness ($360 per resident, or 3% of total spending)
Comparatively, SF's GDP was 500b (500,000 per resident).
To conclude that we're spending all our money on this and getting no results seems wrong when we're spending so little of our budget, and our budget is so little comparatively to the economic activity.
*(these numbers are from http://openbook.sfgov.org/portalpagehelp.html#sfopenbook 2019 spending)