cardinal2007

Admittedly the poster's complaint was about Silicon Valley, not SF.

I have looked at the homelessness statistics in Silicon Valley and the vast majority here actually lived here before becoming homeless. You don't usually see homeless people in most of the valley because they tend to stay out of sight by the creeks or other out of the way areas, but you do see them in downtown San Jose and to a lesser extent downtown Palo Alto.

I don't know the budget for homeless spending down here in Silicon Valley, but I doubt it is that high.

The thing you don't mention is prop 13. Since prop 13 passed cities that have more residential and less commercial than average have had to either cut services or in some other way deal with budget issues. Cities like Palo Alto manage to have good budget on having way more jobs than housing, San Jose the city that builds the most housing in Silicon Valley has continuous budget issues. San Jose did a study and found only high end condo high rises generate more in taxes than they cost the city in services, so now even they are being strict on what new housing gets built, under this atmosphere they may soon only allow downtown high rises as the only new residential. Since San Jose can't carry as high rents developers aren't getting financing that easily, with the threat of a recession and bubble talk all the time, the rumors are that they think rents will drop like the dotcom bust, so the pipeline will likely slow down.

The rest of Silicon Valley, except for maybe Milpitas doesn't really build all that much housing. I think the situation will get worse before it gets better.