Those damn tech workers. Stop working from home so much! How am I supposed to pay for all these pesky public services for all these pesky homeless when I can’t collect your gas tax?

SF spends about 650mm/yr on homelessness in its budget.

I very much doubt that nearly rounding figure expense has anything to do with this.

SF's budget is around $14B (or at least was last year); I don't think 5% is small enough to qualify as a rounding error.

(Regardless, presumably the GP comment was sarcastic.)

Wow that's crazy. Canada's capital, Ottawa, is similarly sized (about 800K-1M depending on how you slice it) and has a budget of just 5.5B CAD or 4.14B USD. [1]

What in the fresh hell are they spending 3.5X Ottawa's budget on? Surely not street cleaning.

[1] https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/2023-city-of-ottawa-budget-passes-...

[This article](https://www.city-journal.org/article/where-has-the-money-gon...) paints a picture of gross mismanagement and largesse.

Funny thats nearly the budget shortfall described in the article. (albeit for a 2 year period instead of 1)

Even if you work from home in SF your employer still owes the SF Prop C gross receipts tax. Wild eh? City already lost Stripe, Square and PayPal to it.

I think SF suffers from its own type of 'resource curse' [1] where like Venezuela and its oil, city leadership takes incredibly for granted the continued presence of tech in the city and just runs it into the dirt.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

I just don’t see this getting better. I know my company is currently in the process of getting out of a lease in a nice office on market and no one wants it.

It'll get better eventually, but a whole lot worse in the near term. Prices need to drop to meet demand and the homelessness and brazen criminal behavior are rapidly pushing demand down even further.

Recovery?

This won’t get any better. [It’s getting worse.](https://www.businessinsider.com/san-franciscos-union-square-...) Locals have been complaining about crime and homelessness for decades, but leaders just doubled down on failed policies. [So locals started leaving.](https://wolfstreet.com/2023/03/30/population-drops-even-more...) Their most popular destination [is Austin.](https://www.movebuddha.com/blog/moving-to-san-francisco-migr...) To compound this, San Francisco has the lowest rate of returning to office work.

San Fran’s budget is/was so large thanks to sky high property taxes on property values decoupled from reality. They’re coming right back down to earth, and with occupancy rates so low, SF is going to need to tighten its budgetary belt significantly.

> San Fran’s budget is/was so large thanks to sky high property taxes on property values decoupled from reality.

You are mostly right with your post, but when analyzing SF’s budget you have to remember that San Francisco isn’t just a city it’s a consolidated city and county. The way that this affects the budget is that in addition to you know, municipal services that cities are expected by their residents to deliver, San Francisco is also the unit of government that implements the local services mandates that California uses the counties as a vehicle to deliver.

That’s not to say it isn’t needlessly large even given all of that, but there’s another important variable in play that would already set the floor of the budget for a city in California given its population sky high before taking into account the local political environment.

Thanks for the additional info!

Maybe if the place didn’t look 95% the same as it did in 1945 it’d be doing better.

Crack the amber shell off the city and let it move. The entire Bay Area is a preposterous, absurd exercise in trying to have your cake and eat it too. So much value and opportunity has been squandered by making it such a hard place to live in if you didn’t have the foresight of moving in there 30 years ago, or can afford to live in a $5M 1000sqft ranch home from 1956.