This tax is supposed to generate $250-300 million per year. This is a crazy amount of money for a 47 sq mile city with 885k people. Say you hand out this $300

This tax is supposed to generate $250-300 million per year. This is a crazy amount of money for a 47 sq mile city with 885k people. Say you hand out this $300 million to people. Without building any more housing, this would clearly just raise rental prices with almost no change in homelessness. Say you try to build 1000 new units of housing and pay out $300 million to the jobs created in that process. The people with these new jobs being given this $300m would drive up rental prices and shift a different group of people onto the street who can't afford the higher costs anymore. Suppose you have rent control to try to avoid that shift. Then where will the people doing these newly created jobs live? There's a housing shortage throughout the entire bay area. They will probably have to commute huge distances. You can't just build housing for homeless. You need to build more housing for everything else in the chain too.