You may be thinking “who would steal stuff from homeless people?” Other homeless people, so in a camp where they’re concentrated it’s a real concern.
There’s also the concerns that drug dealers will hang out at the camp/shelter since many of the homeless are addicted, and the ones that aren’t are vulnerable. Same with petty crime rings like shoplifters/fences.
6 years ago, I lived there quite comfortably making only $70k BEFORE taxes, and was able to save a decent bit per year on top of that.
Even now, I /only/ spend $90k per year - and my lifestyle is quite extravagant.
It's just out of control if it costs almost twice as much money to have almost nothing.
My guess is around 300 - 400 million through other depts (SF DPH etc). Behavioral health services alone run $500M and DPH is at $2.4 billion in their budget.
I'm excluding Fire / Police / MOCD / other services (there are a ton).
Rough numbers maybe $1B/year? for 8-12,000 folks?
This is both very large, but SF probably only spends around 8-10% of budget on this - the SF budget is very large.
Despite your doubts - homeless folks are not idiots. I live near a similar site. It has a no visitor policy, 24/7 security etc. I would call it a huge success relative to the surrounding homeless impacts.
The issue for the homeless and many govt run programs is that it's often easier for govt to do nothing. Ie, your stuff is stolen, visitors etc cause problems etc. A huge amount of public housing really suffered from this - despite being govt run it was worse, not better.
If you can carve a (small) space, no zoning issues, tent on pallet, secuirty for your stuff and yourself, no visitors causing trouble - you can give people some basic stability in sleeping etc.
As to the $60K - you need to be comparing to costs in SF generally for services for a homeless person - I'd estimate $110 - $150K (higher end is if you include the excess ambulance runs etc). So this is relatively competitive.