Unless things changed since I last looked, that number is obtained by taking the budget and dividing by the number of people still homeless.

So, for instance, if you had 100 potholes and paid $1 million to fix 99 of them, leaving a single pothole, this statistic would read: you spent $1 million per pothole.

You can use other metrics (eg the NHIP count[0]), but they point to the same thing. Under the NHIP count metric, SF is doing better than most metropolitan areas in the US, but even with huge spending on the problem, the number of homeless people continues to rise year after year. The per-capita count of number of successfully sheltered homeless people in SF (per city resident) is the highest in the country, but even still, I see dozens of completely unsheltered people walking to Bart from my apartment.

Eg Chicago winters are very hard to live through if you don't have stable access to warm housing, and the West coast offers a reprieve from that.

[0] https://sf.curbed.com/2020/3/4/21152501/san-francisco-homele...

I wonder if any of the factor is that affordable housing in SF is extremely difficult to find? Especially if you don't have access to a vehicle for commutes and have to find housing in an area well served by public transit?

Lots of reasons. A short list includes:

* Shelters not allowing pets - many would rather remain homeless than give up their dog * Shelters not allowing drugs * Social services officers looking too much like cops (many homeless have had bad enough experiences with cops to keep them away from anyone cop-like) * Spending on 'discomfort' measures (eg deliberately-hostile architecture to discourage people from being homeless) * Effective mitigations being politically unpopular.

For instance: cold-calling people who have just separated from their spouse to offer counseling substantially reduces the number of people you have to lift out of homelessness at very little cost. However, "free therapy" is a wildly unpopular suggestion in the USA.

99 Percent Invisible had a great episode on hostile urban architecture: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/unpleasant-design-hos...

> However, "free therapy" is a wildly unpopular suggestion in the USA.

This is strange. I'd guess that free therapy, or at least government-subsidized mental health initiatives, would be pretty popular on the left. That leaves me with the right. But therapy doesn't really seem like something that's easy to get jealous about. Are people going to get mad at articles about "therapy queens" that see a dozen therapists per week?

I wouldn't resent destitute/at-risk people from receiving free therapy, especially if it lessened the tax bill that I will eventually pay anyway, but it's not hard to see why better off people might be irritated by this. therapy usually costs somewhere in the range of $60-120/hr, and it can be quite difficult to find a good fit that is in-network. I get paid decently, but if I went to therapy four times a month, that would already be my largest budget category after rent.