For a bit of background, here's a link to an sfgate column: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/S-F-spending-on-homeless-exceeds-many-5416839.php

For a bit of background, here's a link to an sfgate column: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/S-F-spending-on-homeless-exceeds-many-5416839.php http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/S-F-spendi... "The annual $167 million price tag is $20 million more than the operations budget for the Children, Youth and Family Services department, $6.3 million more than for Public Works and $3.8 million more than for Recreation and Park." My guess is that in such a politically charged issue, people play games with the numbers, which you can always do with budgets (how do you allocate the fixed cost of maintaining a fleet of ambulances, does an ambulance trip to the ER count as a "homelessness" cost in the first place simply because the person is homeless, should it only show up as a cost if it is related to the condition of being homeless, how would you measure this…). But however you measure it, SF does spend a tremendous amount of money on homelessness. My personal feeling is that this problem is unsolvable at a local level, because homeless people come from all over the US (and beyond). SF has a large budget for such a small city, but SF just can't solve this problem for the nation at large. People who are frustrated with these efforts argue that our services will never make things better because we simply attract more homeless people by offering them. I've read that overwhelming majority of the homeless population in SF did not grow up in SF, but then again, you could say the same for the non-homeless residents. I do see this as a national scale problem. Maybe a state of emergency, qualifying for federal funds, will be a good strategy...