14 ms·

Proposition C

133 points by dsr12 8y ago

inetknght 8y ago
Solve homelessness in SF by solving the outrageous price of housing.
- edwinwee 8y ago
  We're trying: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/03/us/california-today-stripe-yimby-housing.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/03/us/california-today-strip...
- untog 8y ago
  While that's a fine aim, in reality it just means "do nothing". There are much more achievable short-term things that can be done to ease homelessness in SF than solving the decades-long problem of affordable housing.
  - btilly 8y ago
    There is a subtle but important difference between solving the problem of "outrageous housing" and "affordable housing". The difference can be illustrated by looking at how a measure meant to solve the latter, creates the former. Suppose that we mandate that all housing created needs to be reviewed and a certain fraction of that housing needs to be set aside for affordable housing. You will indeed increase the amount of housing available at the price point that you have deemed affordable. However the same action is a disincentive to build new housing, and also artificially reduces the supply of housing being sold at what would otherwise be a fair market price. This measure restricts supply, and in accord with economics 101 will increase average prices. The result? More affordable housing AND a higher average price of housing. The net cost of housing goes up. (Which ironically will tend to cause more people who were on the edge of being able to afford housing to become homeless, making it likely that they lose their jobs, and thereby creating more need for affordable housing. Aren't you glad that we're doing something about the affordable housing problem to help them?)
- asah 8y ago
  um, many of these people are mentally ill, physically ill and/or addicted to drugs: they need a lot more than just housing. (I live a few blocks from the worst areas and see people dealing drugs and shooting up every day)
  - inetknght 8y ago
    Yeah because people who have homes aren't mentally ill. /s Being physically ill isn't a correlation of having neither money nor a home. /s Being addicted to drugs isn't a symptom of mentally checking out to avoid the problems you're literally unable to address. /s Edit: yes, you're right, it's a lot more complicated than just housing. But housing, I think, is a big cause.
  - J5892 8y ago
    Correlation does not imply causation. Physical illness and drug addiction (and even mental illness in some cases) are more likely a symptom of homelessness than a cause. From accounts I've heard from homeless people, one of the biggest problems homeless people have is boredom. This leads to both depression and drug use, both of which can lead to both physical and mental illness.
    - cgriswald 8y ago
      In fairness to all in this thread, I think the failure to define "solving homelessness" is causing some miscommunication. The OP seems to be discussing the problem of solving it in a global sense, so that people do not become homeless. IMO, more housing is the solution to that problem. The GP seems to be discussing the problem of solving it in terms of the existing homeless population, which, regardless of causation or the directionality of any causation, does require dealing with the mental illness and drug abuse issues.
      - dragonwriter 8y ago
        > The OP seems to be discussing the problem of solving it in a global sense, so that people do not become homeless. IMO, more housing is the solution to that problem. IMO, it's not, because people don't become homeless (for the most part) because there are no existing vacant housing units, they become homeless because of joblessness, poor credit, drug addiction, mental illness, and criminal issues (often involving drugs), or a combination thereof, which make them unable (financially or otherwise) to either rent housing in the open market or take advantage of publicly operated or subsidized housing.
olliej 8y ago
Part of the problem for SF is that a critical part of “solving” homelessness is actually having homes. But a very large group of people (that I cynically suspect overlaps a lot of the pro-prop C people) also fight the addition of apartment buildings. I saw numbers along the lines of 5400 homeless people in SF a long time ago, but even if that number were the same now, that means you need to add enough buildings to support 5400 bed rooms. Basically there’s no way you can “fight homelessness” and “fight apartments/evil gentrifying landlords”, and actually expect to do anything about homelessness.
- keerthiko 8y ago
  note: the evil gentrifying landlords are the ones fighting apartments.
  - olliej 8y ago
    not in my experience
- dtech 8y ago
  Even if you build 5400 bedrooms tomorrow, they will lower rent and thus attract more people. So you need way more than 5400 bedrooms.
  - olliej 8y ago
    oh, yeah I know - I was giving a lower bound. Although the people who fight housing seem to not grasp this.
- 1024core 8y ago
  I live in SF, have for over a decade. I know several homeless people quite well. All of them keep getting kicked out of housing because of bad behavior that they just cannot help themselves from doing. They do not have the ability to live by themselves. They need supportive housing, and a path to get out of homelessness. None of the options today focuses on post-housing issues.
simonebrunozzi 8y ago
Context for non-SF or non-SV people: Prop C is a proposal to increase the budget dedicated to help homeless people, by taxing gross receipts taxes for companies with more than $50 million in annual revenue. Patrick's view is essentially that instead of adding taxes for such companies, which could potentially impact middle class workers, we should let the current SF mayor take care of this issue, being in favor of additional taxes to fund whatever initiative is considered valid. Now, here's my view. I've been living in SF for six years, I know exactly one homeless (Charlie), I'm not an expert on poverty or homelessness, but let's say I've seen my fair share of bad things in the world to at least have an opinion. We don't have exact data on how and why people become homeless. We know that (mostly) they're not born homeless, they become homeless. I think we should work on the causes. But "we", who? Patrick Collison, Sam Altman, Marc Benioff, etc, you can pick a trusted, smart serial entrepreneur, give him a big budget ($100M), and ask him to discover the causes and try to solve it by measuring how far these $100M go.
- asah 8y ago
  http://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017-SF-Point-in-Time-Count-General-FINAL-6.21.17.pdf http://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017-SF-Poin... For example, there's a longstanding rumor that the homeless are being "shipped from out of state" from places like Texas giving free bus tickets. Here's the messier statistics: "Sixty-nine percent (69%) of respondents reported they were living in San Francisco at the time they most recently became homeless. Of those, over half (55%) had lived in San Francisco for 10 or more years. Eight percent (8%) had lived in San Francisco for less than one year. This is similar to the survey findings in 2015. Ten percent (10%) of respondents reported that they were living out of state at the time they became homeless. Twenty-one percent (21%) reported they were living in another county in California. California counties that respondents reported living in at the time they most recently became homeless include Alameda County (5%), San Mateo (4%), Contra Costa (3%), Marin (3%), Santa Clara County (1%), and some other California county (5%)." learn more: https://www.google.com/search?q=sf+homeless+population+report https://www.google.com/search?q=sf+homeless+population+repor...
  - manfredo 8y ago
pj_mukh 8y ago
"San Francisco currently spends around $430 per city resident per year on services and programs for the homeless, compared to $260 in New York and $110 in Los Angeles" Anyone know why this discrepancy exists? I know this includes rental assistance for those "at risk" of becoming homeless (but not necessarily homeless), so the value, when calculated "per homeless" resident, is meaningless. However, this calculation "per city resident" in general seems to point at some deep infrastructural issues. I'm trying to find an analysis as to why and coming up empty.
- kps 8y ago
  San Francisco has a tiny population (because California likes to start a new ‘city’ every two blocks) and nice weather.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- HuShifang 8y ago
  Prima facie this strikes me as an apples-to-oranges comparison. New York and Los Angeles are large cities with millions of residents and dominate their geographical areas (LA perhaps less than New York, but still). San Francisco has something like 884,000 residents, which makes it the second largest city in the Bay Area (after San Jose, with 1,035,000 or so), which has something like 8.7 million residents if you go by Combined Statistical Area (CSA) definition, which makes intuitive sense to me having lived here. By comparison New York has 8.6 million out of 24 million for its CSA; LA has 4 million out of 18.7 million for its CSA. So really, a more meaningful comparison (if one is resigned to handwaving about tax bases, without delving into details of city finances) for SF would be Boston, with 865,000 people out of 8.2 million for its CSA.
  - pj_mukh 8y ago
    AFAIK, homeless problem scales with population size. So if you divide by population size (which those values do), the value should stay roughly the same. What are the factors that make this untrue?
glibgil 8y ago
So it's about the money
- daxorid 8y ago
  When a business with a fiduciary duty to its shareholders takes a political stance, it always is.
  - glibgil 8y ago
    I'm confused. Why aren't Salesforce shareholders making that company oppose Prop C?
minimaxir 8y ago
More context: Jack Dorsey (on behalf of Square) explicitly called out Stripe this morning over the issue: https://twitter.com/jack/status/1053312141657178112 https://twitter.com/jack/status/1053312141657178112 EDIT: I misinterpreted the thread: see comments below. Although Stripe's response was likely correlated to it.
- peacetreefrog 8y ago
  To me, it looks like he's doing the exact opposite and is agreeing with Stripe. "Companies like Square and Stripe would be taxed at a significantly larger total contribution than much larger companies like Salesforce."
- tedivm 8y ago
  Your context is inaccurate. Square and Stripe are both opposed to the tax, and Jack was continuing making comments against it just as this blog does. It's Marc Benioff, from Salesforce, that has been calling both of them out.
LiterallyDoge 8y ago
What about the argument that some places are more expensive than others, and sometimes, for a few years, it makes more sense to live in a cheap place while you set up your finances, and then make decisions about where to live for the long term?
- oh_sigh 8y ago
  The problem is that you are treating homeless people like rational actors.
  - LiterallyDoge 8y ago
    Fair - I think the solution then also would not be more money directly to them, but a better support system for the mentally challenged. If they can't make rational decisions as you say, then (assuming we can agree that compassion is good) we should provide better systems to help.
- pcwalton 8y ago
  Doreen Michele's comment answers this quite well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17915009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17915009
  - joey-bob 8y ago
    Things sound very difficult out west. Rent can be had for under $500 in many southeastern cities. That being said, most of the newish industrial jobs are out in rural areas. Although Doreen Michele seems to be referencing online jobs, so I may be missing the context.
  - cco 8y ago
    We need to first make sure we're all talking about the same problem. When people complain about the homeless of San Francisco it is not the people Doreen is taking about. The people in question are severely mentally ill, addicts, likely both. They are the people that shoot heroin at the bus stop you are trying to wait at, they're the guy with no shoes, covered in his own waste screaming at passers-by. These are the people that are causing the frustration, not people who could make it if they could level up their skillset and get a better job. We really need to agree on the issue at hand because so often I see people talk straight past each other. The man covered in his waste needs help, desperately, he will not be someone who with a little help starts paying rent and holding down a job. He needs the community to pay for housing, medical treatment, and psychiatric care for a long time, likely forever to some degree. But we can't keep talking about different problems.
manfredo 8y ago
No amount of money can circumvent the pidgeonhole principle. If the city wants to house all it's residents, then it needs to start by building more housing. Sure, some homeless need extra services, but if there aren't enough units the whole effort is moot.
- aeternus 8y ago
  This solution doesn't take into account basic supply & demand though. There is a significant demand for housing in SF & the bay area. If housing is provided for free or even below market, demand will come from far & wide. Barrier-to-entry is basically a bus ticket. Any real solution needs to at least attempt to balance supply & demand.
  - manfredo 8y ago
    The solution isn't too just give away housing for free, it's too remove government obstruction of housing construction and let the market correct itself.
    - SllX 8y ago
      Every single time someone says this, I want to ask them which obstructions they would like to see removed, because everyone answers differently. So let me ask you, which government obstructions would you like to see removed?
      - UncleEntity 8y ago
        Earthquake restrictions for one. Seriously though, I was reading just yesterday about how they're developing Treasure Island and it has a high chance of liquefaction (not to mention radioactive waste) because demand for land is that high.
        SllX 8y ago
        The reports I remember from years ago (circa 2010 or 2012, forget the exact year) were that the city wants to build Treasure Island up to support about 30K people, give or take. The renderings were pretty cool, till you consider the stability of the ground in an earthquake, the radioactive waste and rising sea levels. This was shortly after the plans for what would become the Transbay Transit Center[1], the Salesforce Tower and the Millennium Tower were approved. Make your case though, why ditch earthquake restrictions? [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/17/us/san-francisco-earthquake-seismic-gamble.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/17/us/san-franci...
malandrew 8y ago
It's honestly insane to try and solve homelessness in San Francisco because practically none of the people that are homeless in San Francisco have any chance of realistically living in San Francisco long term when even young college-educated people who have their lives together struggle to eke out a living here. The best thing that could be done with all this money is to spend it on providing support in other towns and cities where the cost of living is much better and the homeless people being helped have an actual chance to get back on their own two feet and support themselves. Trying to support homeless people in the city with the most expensive cost of living in the world is counterproductive and condemns any homeless people supported here to a lifetime of support. Furthermore, the money would go a lot further in other places since the cost of living would be lower and you could pay to have more social workers per homeless person.
- lacker 8y ago
  I agree - it seems like nobody is really thinking through how to solve homelessness and is instead arguing about how much money should be allocated to the same strategy that cannot work. For currently homeless people with no “special deal” like winning the affordable housing lottery, it’s just going to be implausible for them to find housing in San Francisco, as long as someone earning $30,000 a year can’t afford to live in San Francisco. That means any solution must get people into housing that is not located in San Francisco.
- SllX 8y ago
  Problem is, anywhere you go, you'll run into the local NIMBYs. Or let's say San Francisco actually subsidizes some town out in Central Valley, I dunno, Hughson for the sake of argument, buys up loads of farm land adjacent to the town and turns it into a much nicer place to live because those dollars will go further, puts in some groceries, parks, a whole community basically. You've now turned Hughson into a much nicer town, and it will attract more people wanting to live there, and you're still subsidizing a whole other city in the process increasing the cost of living. Not to mention moving our entire homeless population there would effectively double the size of Hughson straining local resources and utilities, so probably a lawsuit and more money to subsidize it further. So now you've done all of that, but since this is Hughson, there's no jobs except farm work, and the locals probably have that covered so now they need good transportation to the nearest decently large city (Modesto and Turlock) to find some jobs. Now that you've got this satellite city, how does it sustain itself? Because at some point, San Francisco taxpayers are going to start asking themselves, why are we subsidizing Hughson? Assuming you got them to agree to it in the first place (which you won't). City charter amendment hits the ballot, it probably passes, but the wording is so poor it has negative knock-on effects for all the other land the city owns outside of the county line (the Airport and Hetch Hetchy mainly), Hughson and Stanislaus County are left holding the bag on a largely unproductive neighborhood that is a drain on the local coffers and almost completely dependent on subsidies from people richer than them. I'm sure by this point they'll be real excited about bulldozing some houses to make way for some bullet trains they were previously gung-ho about stopping at all costs, and depending on the legal status of the property left behind, they can either seize them because nobody is paying property taxes, or seize them with eminent domain and put them towards some new productive purpose that once again, leaves these formerly homeless people homeless. This is still better than the alternatives: hoping the State of California steps in to do something about it (they won't because nobody in California likes San Francisco except people who live in San Francisco), or hoping the Feds step in (they won't because hating San Francisco and hoping it falls into the ocean is a national past time, as American as liking Baseball). tl;dr we spend money trying to "solve" the "problem" locally despite the high cost of living because San Francisco only has San Francisco to depend on. Anybody in power that claims to like San Francisco doesn't actually like San Francisco, they just love our money.
asah 8y ago
IMHO mandatory reading before posting on this issue: http://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017-SF-Point-in-Time-Count-General-FINAL-6.21.17.pdf http://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017-SF-Poin... The data is incredibly detailed, absolutely fascinating and messy as you'd expect, dispelling a lot of the overly simplistic rumors like other states "shipping" SF homeless people, homeless people all being one type of person or another etc etc etc
- feross 8y ago
  Glad to see this report being referenced. A friend and I volunteered to gather this data at the beginning of 2017 along with hundreds of other volunteers. It's an interesting process. You show up, they assign you specific streets to walk and you just count up homeless people, noting their sex, rough age, and dwelling type (improvised structure, vehicle, etc.). I encourage anyone who is interested to volunteer for the next SF homelessness count, likely in January 2019 (They do one every 2 years).
  - deathanatos 8y ago
    Thank you for taking the time to do this. I have found the referenced document quite valuable towards driving more rational debate around the subject.
- User23 8y ago
  If other locales aren't shipping SF vagrants, where is the increase coming from? Is SF especially good at producing new vagrants?
  - deathanatos 8y ago
    The survey includes a "primary cause of homelessness" section, of which loss of job forms a very weak plurality. The increase since 2013 is reported to be only ~2%, (which I find slightly surprising¹) so it may be a bit loaded to ask where the "increase" is coming from. Since the last survey, the population even appears to have declined, slightly. ¹It feels like it has gotten worse, but that's only my impression, and I only frequent a subset of SF, so I may not be seeing areas that have gotten better. The survey is much more comprehensive than my anecdotes, of course.
jack_jennings 8y ago
Glad to hear something will happen in collaboration with the Mayor's office, at some point in the future. Until that point, pass Prop C and propose a repeal whenever you all come up with the plan that's so much better.
mdgrech23 8y ago
In the future prop C may be viewed as a step towards basic income.
joshuawright11 8y ago
Is homelessness in SF really about affordable housing? Obviously San Francisco has insane housing prices but there are dozens and dozens of shelters & programs (I volunteer at a couple) for homeless people to take refuge and get their life back together. As I understand it (and as my friend who is an SF police officer where 90% of his job is dealing with the homeless), the much larger problem is SF's (& perhaps society in general's) failure to provide institutionalized care for people with severe mental disabilities. No amount of money, support systems, or opportunity for getting off the street is going to help people with severe schizophrenia or dementia who have no family or safety net. A lot of these people the only solution is for them to be institutionalized. Unfortunately, there isn't much of a way for someone to be institutionalized against their will (unless they are causing danger of harm to themselves or others) so they continue to live on the streets. I think what this city really needs is a place to send people deemed in need of institutionalizing, and the ability for that to be determined. Of course that would never fly in a place like SF, but I think it would be a happier life for those people than life on the streets.
- adamrezich 8y ago
  Being born in 1991 I didn't realize this until recently but apparently we used to be better about this before these institutions shut down in the 80s-90s. I still don't really understand why this happened or how the resulting issues haven't been addressed.
  - aeternus 8y ago
    Simply shutting them down probably wasn't the best solution, but those institutions were generally more geared towards locking people away than recover & treatment.
  - gumby 8y ago
    > apparently we used to be better about this before these institutions shut down in the 80s-90s. I still don't really understand why this happened or how the resulting issues haven't been addressed. There are two explanations, idealistic and cynical; I'll let you decide what percentage of accuracy applies to each (neither were 0% or 100%). The idealistic justification was that the institutional option was pretty grim (think "one flew over the cuckoo's nest") and that many of those patients would do better at home or in halfway houses. The cynical explanation was that this was at the beginning of the huge anti-tax / anti-government wave that began with Reagan's election and continues today: closing the institutions cut government expenditure.
lisper 8y ago
Between 2006 and 2008 I spent a lot of time on the streets interviewing homeless people for a documentary film I was making [1]. One of the things they often mentioned was the "homeless-industrial complex" (a phrase coined by one of my subjects, not me). There are a lot of organizations that make a lot of money "helping" homeless people, and their continued existence depends on there not being an effective solution to the problem. Homeless people are literally their bread-and-butter, so they have a perverse incentive to ensure a steady supply of "product". Similar perverse incentives play themselves out in other areas of our society, like privately run prisons. [1] http://graceofgodmovie.com http://graceofgodmovie.com
- danans 8y ago
  Providing your own documentary with its editorial biases as a citation to back your own statements is not credible, especially when it makes such strong claims of bad faith among organizations working to alleviate homelessness. Can you provide independent citations that back your claims about the existence of a "homeless-industrial complex"?
  - User23 8y ago
    Let me Google that for you: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/carey-fuller/the-homeless-industrial-c_b_9092426.html https://www.huffingtonpost.com/carey-fuller/the-homeless-ind... http://www.povertyinsights.org/2013/08/05/is-there-a-homeless-industrial-complex-that-perpetuates-homelessness/ http://www.povertyinsights.org/2013/08/05/is-there-a-homeles... https://projects.sfchronicle.com/sf-homeless/civic-disgrace/ https://projects.sfchronicle.com/sf-homeless/civic-disgrace/
  - lisper 8y ago
    User23 very kindly provided a heap of references in a sibling comment, but just for the record: I did not intend to claim that the HIC exists, only that my subjects talked about it, and it seems like a plausible hypothesis to me.
- dguo 8y ago
  The Shirky Principle: "Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_Shirky#Shirky_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_Shirky#Shirky_principle
tvanantwerp 8y ago
Gross receipts taxes are poorly structured taxes. Because they tax all business transactions throughout the supply chain, they create a pyramiding effect that penalizes more complex industries, e.g., an aircraft manufacturer probably gets taxed more than a local dairy. I don't know whether the things the SF government wants to spend the money on will help with the homelessness problem or not; but I do think there are better types of taxes to raise that money. https://taxfoundation.org/gross-receipts-tax-impact-san-francisco/ https://taxfoundation.org/gross-receipts-tax-impact-san-fran...
antoineMoPa 8y ago
My distant observation is that the high risk mindset that allows companies like Stripe and many others in your area to succeed is the same that brings people to the streets. I imagine many successful founders are homeless in many parallel universes.
- muhneesh 8y ago
  I don't think educated software engineers that decide to take a calculated risk are the ones becoming homeless. It's a drug and mental health issue, unless you are speaking to a broader philosophical point on what "high risk" means.
ljm 8y ago
> Anyone who claims that Prop C is a matter of being “for the homeless or against them” is selling a facile falsehood Swap 'Prop C' for any other cause, and 'the homeless' for any other intended benefactor of it, and you get a good formula for how to strip all the nuance out of a debate and turn it into a battle between opposing sides. I don't have an opinion on Stripe's position here but that sentence itself is a pretty eloquent summary for how dumb modern discussion has become in many circles.
- PascLeRasc 8y ago
  Misleading bill titles are the norm in Congress. See "right-to-work" laws and the Defense of Marriage Act for examples.
  - ErockSteady 8y ago
    > Misleading bill titles are the norm in Congress. That's how they roll. > See "right-to-work" laws I'm guessing you've confused right-to-work with at-will employment. Right-to-work laws mean that a union can't force you to join and pay dues. "At-will employment" means you can be fired for any reason or no reason (except if the reason is they're a member of a "protected class")
rajeshpant 8y ago
I completely agree with Stripe here. The homeless problem will not be solved by increasing taxes. The problem is whether the money is being used correctly. I see huge issues with that. The department of homelessness currently has an annual budget of $250Million[1] for providing shelter to homeless. I wonder if govt. is spending $250 Million every year on providing them shelter why are they still living in streets? Where is all that money going? [1] - https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/29-million-increase-for-San-Francisco-12902707.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/29-million-incre...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- LegendZ3 8y ago
  Break down of money spent on Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing http://hsh.sfgov.org/overview/budget/ http://hsh.sfgov.org/overview/budget/
- erentz 8y ago
  So google tells me there’s around 7,000 homeless in SF. Let’s up that to 10,000. That’s $25,000 per homeless person per year. Am I missing something or is something very seriously wrong here?
  - lacker 8y ago
    At a single moment in time there are about 7500 homeless people in SF, but about 20,000 are homeless at some point during the last year.
  - tomjakubowski 8y ago
    For what it's worth, that's way less than (less than half) the amortized yearly cost of a California prison inmate: about $70,000. https://lao.ca.gov/policyareas/cj/6_cj_inmatecost https://lao.ca.gov/policyareas/cj/6_cj_inmatecost
    - 8y ago
dawhizkid 8y ago
I read a tweet from Jack Dorsey that said Square would end up paying a significantly more than Salesforce (Link: https://twitter.com/jack/status/1053312149815091200 https://twitter.com/jack/status/1053312149815091200). Why is that? Is it because financial services/payment transaction type businesses are taxed more or because this is a tax on "gross receipts" which potentially impacts these payment companies more because it includes income from interest, which they presumably have relatively more of? Or something else?
jwalstrom 8y ago
If anyone wants some domains for this cause I am more than happy to donate: http://www.ballotdomains.com http://www.ballotdomains.com
gumby 8y ago
BTW most shelters are pretty scary and many people feel safer on the street than in them.
thrownaway1234 8y ago
On a flip side, in developing countries, there aren't that many homelesses because, sadly, we don't think about them as equal. They wouldn't be allowed to hang out along the streets like what happens in US. They will get picked up and will be forced to move and etc. We usually have a place called Slum for extremely poor people. They will need to make a living themselves. If they don't, I'm not sure where they end up (death, maybe). Japan also doesn't think much about homeless people (https://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2013/12/30/yakuza-gangsters-recruit-homeless-men-for-fukushima-nuclear-clean-up/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2013/12/30/yaku...)
rayiner 8y ago
> Anyone who claims that Prop C is a matter of being “for the homeless or against them” is selling a facile falsehood. While well-intentioned, it is San Francisco’s largest-ever tax increase, and comes with no systemic changes or effective accountability. In San Francisco, you must be numb to that kind of logical fallacy by now. This sounds like 95% of all entreaties to spend more government money.
iosDrone 8y ago
I hope it passes AND makes homelessness worse. SF residents deserve to suffer the consequences of their spineless liberal idiocy.
fillskills 8y ago
"Today, the world is pulling us towards polarized discourse and emotionally-charged, soundbite analysis. We’re all familiar with the forces at play. We think this is important to resist." - PC for President!
- fillskills 8y ago
  On a serious note there seems to be many sub issues like PC mentioned. On the top of my head: 1 - lack of homes 2 - speed of population migration is higher than planned 3 - increase in price of property is higher than planned 4 - increase in labor cost 5 - fund mismatch between different localities etc 6 - funding changes from Fed and from the Mayor's article there seem to be a lot more. The issue needs a Product like approach of finding all the requirements and fighting it from different directions. Adding funding would certainly help temporarily but not a good long term solution.
User23 8y ago
Spending more on something is a good way to get more of it when exporters are ready and willing to meet the demand. Municipalities buying their local homeless bus tickets is just one example. If we want to reduce homelessness, we need a smarter approach than giving people goods and services for being homeless. I don't have all the answers here, but I do know that this requires both positive and negative incentives. A carrot and stick approach if you will. Sad to say, most vagrants are not capable of acting in their own rational self-interest, so simply extolling the virtues of becoming a productive member of society just isn't going to cut it.
zjaffee 8y ago
The issue of homelessness in SF is absolutely related to affordable housing and a lack of beds, the comparison NYC and LA are absolutely abysmal in that NYC has huge amounts of permanently affordable housing that it can use to house homeless people in that has a relatively low cost to maintain compared to having to acquire new land and build new buildings, and LA, which has an incredibly high street homeless population in the same way SF does. Additionally, the total cost of homeless services is helping more people than the 7,500 that are let mentioned as it's really closer to 20,000 where many are in permanent supportive housing and aren't considered homeless but would be without the same type of support. If you look at the cost per person when using the 20,000 number, the cost is still far lower than what it costs to keep a person in prison each year, where with the passing of Prop C, that number would get closer to said amount. Add on the fact that SF is one of the most expensive real estate markets in the would (where there isn't cheaper housing anywhere nearby), with a related high cost of labor, and the spending makes far more sense.
tareqak 8y ago
It seems like there was a financial aspect to it after all: https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Dorsey-tweetstorm-bashes-Prop-C-SF-measure-to-13321053.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Dorsey-tweetsto... From SFChronicle article: Dorsey estimated that Square could pay an additional $20 million in taxes under Prop. C next year, while Benioff has said Salesforce would pay an additional $10 million, despite its larger size. “Taxes would grow at rates multiple times our (adjusted) revenue, which no company can sustain,” Dorsey said in a tweet. “Not an issue for Salesforce/Twitter, but unfair to (Square) and (financial) startups.”
coolboy93290 8y ago
tl;dr; "Look. We are just trying to exit with a billion dollars like everyone else in SF. We don't want to walk over the homeless either, but, it is super expensive to help them. So we propose just ignoring it until we get paid. Vote no on prop C!" -Stripe
abalone 8y ago
Hold on... This strikes me as disingenuous and here's why. Stripe is using spend-per-resident to compare SF to other cities, to lead us to the conclusion that we already spend more than anyone and so more wouldn't help. But SF has one of the highest homeless rates in the nation. It's spend per homeless resident that is the relevant comparison. So how do we do on that? As others have noted, we actually spend less per homeless resident than NYC. You would never get that from reading this! All you see is NYC: $260, SF: $770. Totally misleading! It comes across as disingenuous to me because, clearly, Stripe must know this.
- mmanfrin 8y ago
  This is a tax bill, using cost-per-resident is not disingenuous.
  - abalone 8y ago
    It is is you're trying to compare the effectiveness of spending money ("If homelessness was just a question of money, this issue would already be solved.") The relevant compare is cost-per-homeless-resident. We actually trail cited cities on that. How is Stripe's argument not misleading?
claydavisss 8y ago
If I was his PR man I would have advised against writing this at all. No one expects Stripe to solve a major social ill and frankly beyond one blip attention post on HN, no one cares what PC thinks of Prop C... there is nothing to be gained from this no matter what side of the issue you are on. This post will be red meat for critics and damage Stripe's good cred for no gain.
abalone 8y ago
> If homelessness was just a question of money, this issue would already be solved. While cities report inconsistently, San Francisco currently spends around $430 per city resident per year on services and programs for the homeless, compared to $260 in New York and $110 in Los Angeles. Yet the problem in our city is worse, and despite increases in spending, has continued to worsen. Can somebody please explain how spending per resident is a fair measure of this? Isn't spending per homeless resident the relevant measure? (SF has a much higher homeless rate and we actually spend less per homeless resident than NYC!)
- istjohn 8y ago
  Great point. And it's no mystery why Seattle and San Francisco are seeing homelessness become more and more of a problem. It's a direct result of the rise of a wildly profitable tech industry in those cities. It's maddening to see companies like Amazon and Stripe oppose initiatives to address these issues in their hometowns.
  - xibalba 8y ago
    > It's a direct result of the rise of a wildly profitable tech industry in those cities. Connect the dots for me. How is the increase of the homeless population the direct result of the rise of tech cos like Amazon and Stripe?
    - abalone 8y ago
      I’ll bite.. increased housing demand raises rents, the “main culprit” in the recent homelessness increase.[1] [1] https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/11/06/west-coast-homeless-crisis-california-oregon-washington/ https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/11/06/west-coast-home...
      - niij 8y ago
        Why is supply not keeping up? I think it's because of an artificial cap on housing.
istjohn 8y ago
What a bunch of double-speak. You have a city with conditions on the streets compared to those of the world's poorest slums. Clearly, a dramatic increase in resources needs to be brought to bear on the problem. Any plan Mayor Breed might have will only be aided by additional funding. Patrick Collision's plea for subtlety is a thin disguise for his apathy. Tech companies like his--btw Stripe benefited from San Francisco tax breaks and the change from an income tax to a gross receipt tax in the mid-aughts--need to step up and give back to the cities that enabled them to become what they are today. And they should be more willing to take responsibility for the consequences good and bad of the tech boom.
- orangecat 8y ago
  Clearly, a dramatic increase in resources needs to be brought to bear on the problem. Something must be done. This is something. Any plan Mayor Breed might have will only be aided by additional funding. Drug abuse is a serious problem. Giving the DEA more money will only help to solve it.
dawhizkid 8y ago
My biggest criticism with Stripe and Square's response is that Jack Dorsey admitted over Twitter today that a major reason both companies officially oppose Prop C is because it disproportionately impacts payment companies since they would be effectively "double taxed" since by definition a tax on "gross receipts" would be a tax on the entire transaction amount once and on the ~2.9% transaction fee again. Jack Dorsey's tweet on this "unfairness" today was the very first time I heard that as part of their argument against this tax. Why not explicitly say that up front long ago instead of hiding behind the singular argument that "we just support the mayor's judgement on the issue?" Seems disingenuous.
- abalone 8y ago
  > they would be effectively "double taxed" since by definition a tax on "gross receipts" would be a tax on the entire transaction amount once and on the ~2.9% transaction fee again. Citation please? Dorsey said they’d be taxed more than Salesforce but I assumed that’s because of where geographically they book their revenue.
  - dawhizkid 8y ago
    https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Dorsey-tweetstorm-bashes-Prop-C-SF-measure-to-13321053.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Dorsey-tweetsto... Square has said that a quirk of the proposed tax could harm it and other San Francisco payments companies like Stripe. Gross receipts taxes are applied to a company’s total revenue generated from business activities in the city. In Square’s case, those include fees it splits with banks and Visa and MasterCard when it processes credit-card transactions. Square, which is publicly traded, reports both net revenue, which includes those fees, and adjusted revenue, which excludes them. In the second quarter, those figures were $815 million and $385 million respectively. In Square’s view, imposing a tax on the higher revenue measure hurts it disproportionately. If I'm reading this correctly, basically payment companies like Square and Stripe are disproportionately hurt because they would pay the tax on the ~2.9% + 10 cent fee they collect even though in reality both companies only keep a small fraction of that fee since most of that fee goes to the networks like Visa/MC/Amex.
smsm42 8y ago
Something I am missing here. At the beginning they say spending and the luck of money is not a problem (and with 54K per year per homeless person it sounds plausible) and then at the end they claim the solution would necessarily mean higher taxes. That makes no sense - if money is not the issue, why you'd need higher taxes?
thrownawayacct 8y ago
In my early teens I was homeless for roughly 6 years and I think this article is largely junk. The mental illness reasoning for homelessness isn't really true, its that being homeless and having no one there and nothing to help you makes mental issues, its a slide that keeps you down with horrible sadness and despair. What needs to happen is having safety nets before people hit the slide. Of course there are many different reasons for homelessness but preventing people from becoming homeless in the first place is the issue that needs to addressed, no one deserves the lifelong scars. If stripe really wanted to help then it could have created some safety nets with money it used to lobby.

Proposition C

133 points by dsr12 8y ago

inetknght 8y ago

Solve homelessness in SF by solving the outrageous price of housing.

edwinwee 8y ago
We're trying: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/03/us/california-today-stripe-yimby-housing.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/03/us/california-today-strip...
untog 8y ago
While that's a fine aim, in reality it just means "do nothing". There are much more achievable short-term things that can be done to ease homelessness in SF than solving the decades-long problem of affordable housing.
- btilly 8y ago
  There is a subtle but important difference between solving the problem of "outrageous housing" and "affordable housing". The difference can be illustrated by looking at how a measure meant to solve the latter, creates the former. Suppose that we mandate that all housing created needs to be reviewed and a certain fraction of that housing needs to be set aside for affordable housing. You will indeed increase the amount of housing available at the price point that you have deemed affordable. However the same action is a disincentive to build new housing, and also artificially reduces the supply of housing being sold at what would otherwise be a fair market price. This measure restricts supply, and in accord with economics 101 will increase average prices. The result? More affordable housing AND a higher average price of housing. The net cost of housing goes up. (Which ironically will tend to cause more people who were on the edge of being able to afford housing to become homeless, making it likely that they lose their jobs, and thereby creating more need for affordable housing. Aren't you glad that we're doing something about the affordable housing problem to help them?)
asah 8y ago
um, many of these people are mentally ill, physically ill and/or addicted to drugs: they need a lot more than just housing. (I live a few blocks from the worst areas and see people dealing drugs and shooting up every day)
- inetknght 8y ago
  Yeah because people who have homes aren't mentally ill. /s Being physically ill isn't a correlation of having neither money nor a home. /s Being addicted to drugs isn't a symptom of mentally checking out to avoid the problems you're literally unable to address. /s Edit: yes, you're right, it's a lot more complicated than just housing. But housing, I think, is a big cause.
- J5892 8y ago
  Correlation does not imply causation. Physical illness and drug addiction (and even mental illness in some cases) are more likely a symptom of homelessness than a cause. From accounts I've heard from homeless people, one of the biggest problems homeless people have is boredom. This leads to both depression and drug use, both of which can lead to both physical and mental illness.
  - cgriswald 8y ago
    In fairness to all in this thread, I think the failure to define "solving homelessness" is causing some miscommunication. The OP seems to be discussing the problem of solving it in a global sense, so that people do not become homeless. IMO, more housing is the solution to that problem. The GP seems to be discussing the problem of solving it in terms of the existing homeless population, which, regardless of causation or the directionality of any causation, does require dealing with the mental illness and drug abuse issues.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > The OP seems to be discussing the problem of solving it in a global sense, so that people do not become homeless. IMO, more housing is the solution to that problem. IMO, it's not, because people don't become homeless (for the most part) because there are no existing vacant housing units, they become homeless because of joblessness, poor credit, drug addiction, mental illness, and criminal issues (often involving drugs), or a combination thereof, which make them unable (financially or otherwise) to either rent housing in the open market or take advantage of publicly operated or subsidized housing.

olliej 8y ago

Part of the problem for SF is that a critical part of “solving” homelessness is actually having homes. But a very large group of people (that I cynically suspect overlaps a lot of the pro-prop C people) also fight the addition of apartment buildings. I saw numbers along the lines of 5400 homeless people in SF a long time ago, but even if that number were the same now, that means you need to add enough buildings to support 5400 bed rooms. Basically there’s no way you can “fight homelessness” and “fight apartments/evil gentrifying landlords”, and actually expect to do anything about homelessness.

keerthiko 8y ago
note: the evil gentrifying landlords are the ones fighting apartments.
- olliej 8y ago
  not in my experience
dtech 8y ago
Even if you build 5400 bedrooms tomorrow, they will lower rent and thus attract more people. So you need way more than 5400 bedrooms.
- olliej 8y ago
  oh, yeah I know - I was giving a lower bound. Although the people who fight housing seem to not grasp this.
1024core 8y ago
I live in SF, have for over a decade. I know several homeless people quite well. All of them keep getting kicked out of housing because of bad behavior that they just cannot help themselves from doing. They do not have the ability to live by themselves. They need supportive housing, and a path to get out of homelessness. None of the options today focuses on post-housing issues.

simonebrunozzi 8y ago

Context for non-SF or non-SV people: Prop C is a proposal to increase the budget dedicated to help homeless people, by taxing gross receipts taxes for companies with more than $50 million in annual revenue. Patrick's view is essentially that instead of adding taxes for such companies, which could potentially impact middle class workers, we should let the current SF mayor take care of this issue, being in favor of additional taxes to fund whatever initiative is considered valid. Now, here's my view. I've been living in SF for six years, I know exactly one homeless (Charlie), I'm not an expert on poverty or homelessness, but let's say I've seen my fair share of bad things in the world to at least have an opinion. We don't have exact data on how and why people become homeless. We know that (mostly) they're not born homeless, they become homeless. I think we should work on the causes. But "we", who? Patrick Collison, Sam Altman, Marc Benioff, etc, you can pick a trusted, smart serial entrepreneur, give him a big budget ($100M), and ask him to discover the causes and try to solve it by measuring how far these $100M go.

asah 8y ago
http://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017-SF-Point-in-Time-Count-General-FINAL-6.21.17.pdf http://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017-SF-Poin... For example, there's a longstanding rumor that the homeless are being "shipped from out of state" from places like Texas giving free bus tickets. Here's the messier statistics: "Sixty-nine percent (69%) of respondents reported they were living in San Francisco at the time they most recently became homeless. Of those, over half (55%) had lived in San Francisco for 10 or more years. Eight percent (8%) had lived in San Francisco for less than one year. This is similar to the survey findings in 2015. Ten percent (10%) of respondents reported that they were living out of state at the time they became homeless. Twenty-one percent (21%) reported they were living in another county in California. California counties that respondents reported living in at the time they most recently became homeless include Alameda County (5%), San Mateo (4%), Contra Costa (3%), Marin (3%), Santa Clara County (1%), and some other California county (5%)." learn more: https://www.google.com/search?q=sf+homeless+population+report https://www.google.com/search?q=sf+homeless+population+repor...
- manfredo 8y ago

pj_mukh 8y ago

"San Francisco currently spends around $430 per city resident per year on services and programs for the homeless, compared to $260 in New York and $110 in Los Angeles" Anyone know why this discrepancy exists? I know this includes rental assistance for those "at risk" of becoming homeless (but not necessarily homeless), so the value, when calculated "per homeless" resident, is meaningless. However, this calculation "per city resident" in general seems to point at some deep infrastructural issues. I'm trying to find an analysis as to why and coming up empty.

kps 8y ago
San Francisco has a tiny population (because California likes to start a new ‘city’ every two blocks) and nice weather.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
HuShifang 8y ago
Prima facie this strikes me as an apples-to-oranges comparison. New York and Los Angeles are large cities with millions of residents and dominate their geographical areas (LA perhaps less than New York, but still). San Francisco has something like 884,000 residents, which makes it the second largest city in the Bay Area (after San Jose, with 1,035,000 or so), which has something like 8.7 million residents if you go by Combined Statistical Area (CSA) definition, which makes intuitive sense to me having lived here. By comparison New York has 8.6 million out of 24 million for its CSA; LA has 4 million out of 18.7 million for its CSA. So really, a more meaningful comparison (if one is resigned to handwaving about tax bases, without delving into details of city finances) for SF would be Boston, with 865,000 people out of 8.2 million for its CSA.
- pj_mukh 8y ago
  AFAIK, homeless problem scales with population size. So if you divide by population size (which those values do), the value should stay roughly the same. What are the factors that make this untrue?

glibgil 8y ago

So it's about the money

daxorid 8y ago
When a business with a fiduciary duty to its shareholders takes a political stance, it always is.
- glibgil 8y ago
  I'm confused. Why aren't Salesforce shareholders making that company oppose Prop C?

minimaxir 8y ago

More context: Jack Dorsey (on behalf of Square) explicitly called out Stripe this morning over the issue: https://twitter.com/jack/status/1053312141657178112 https://twitter.com/jack/status/1053312141657178112 EDIT: I misinterpreted the thread: see comments below. Although Stripe's response was likely correlated to it.

peacetreefrog 8y ago
To me, it looks like he's doing the exact opposite and is agreeing with Stripe. "Companies like Square and Stripe would be taxed at a significantly larger total contribution than much larger companies like Salesforce."
tedivm 8y ago
Your context is inaccurate. Square and Stripe are both opposed to the tax, and Jack was continuing making comments against it just as this blog does. It's Marc Benioff, from Salesforce, that has been calling both of them out.

LiterallyDoge 8y ago

What about the argument that some places are more expensive than others, and sometimes, for a few years, it makes more sense to live in a cheap place while you set up your finances, and then make decisions about where to live for the long term?

oh_sigh 8y ago
The problem is that you are treating homeless people like rational actors.
- LiterallyDoge 8y ago
  Fair - I think the solution then also would not be more money directly to them, but a better support system for the mentally challenged. If they can't make rational decisions as you say, then (assuming we can agree that compassion is good) we should provide better systems to help.
pcwalton 8y ago
Doreen Michele's comment answers this quite well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17915009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17915009
- joey-bob 8y ago
  Things sound very difficult out west. Rent can be had for under $500 in many southeastern cities. That being said, most of the newish industrial jobs are out in rural areas. Although Doreen Michele seems to be referencing online jobs, so I may be missing the context.
- cco 8y ago
  We need to first make sure we're all talking about the same problem. When people complain about the homeless of San Francisco it is not the people Doreen is taking about. The people in question are severely mentally ill, addicts, likely both. They are the people that shoot heroin at the bus stop you are trying to wait at, they're the guy with no shoes, covered in his own waste screaming at passers-by. These are the people that are causing the frustration, not people who could make it if they could level up their skillset and get a better job. We really need to agree on the issue at hand because so often I see people talk straight past each other. The man covered in his waste needs help, desperately, he will not be someone who with a little help starts paying rent and holding down a job. He needs the community to pay for housing, medical treatment, and psychiatric care for a long time, likely forever to some degree. But we can't keep talking about different problems.

manfredo 8y ago

No amount of money can circumvent the pidgeonhole principle. If the city wants to house all it's residents, then it needs to start by building more housing. Sure, some homeless need extra services, but if there aren't enough units the whole effort is moot.

aeternus 8y ago
This solution doesn't take into account basic supply & demand though. There is a significant demand for housing in SF & the bay area. If housing is provided for free or even below market, demand will come from far & wide. Barrier-to-entry is basically a bus ticket. Any real solution needs to at least attempt to balance supply & demand.
- manfredo 8y ago
  The solution isn't too just give away housing for free, it's too remove government obstruction of housing construction and let the market correct itself.
  - SllX 8y ago
    Every single time someone says this, I want to ask them which obstructions they would like to see removed, because everyone answers differently. So let me ask you, which government obstructions would you like to see removed?
    - UncleEntity 8y ago
      Earthquake restrictions for one. Seriously though, I was reading just yesterday about how they're developing Treasure Island and it has a high chance of liquefaction (not to mention radioactive waste) because demand for land is that high.
      - SllX 8y ago
        The reports I remember from years ago (circa 2010 or 2012, forget the exact year) were that the city wants to build Treasure Island up to support about 30K people, give or take. The renderings were pretty cool, till you consider the stability of the ground in an earthquake, the radioactive waste and rising sea levels. This was shortly after the plans for what would become the Transbay Transit Center[1], the Salesforce Tower and the Millennium Tower were approved. Make your case though, why ditch earthquake restrictions? [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/17/us/san-francisco-earthquake-seismic-gamble.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/17/us/san-franci...

malandrew 8y ago

It's honestly insane to try and solve homelessness in San Francisco because practically none of the people that are homeless in San Francisco have any chance of realistically living in San Francisco long term when even young college-educated people who have their lives together struggle to eke out a living here. The best thing that could be done with all this money is to spend it on providing support in other towns and cities where the cost of living is much better and the homeless people being helped have an actual chance to get back on their own two feet and support themselves. Trying to support homeless people in the city with the most expensive cost of living in the world is counterproductive and condemns any homeless people supported here to a lifetime of support. Furthermore, the money would go a lot further in other places since the cost of living would be lower and you could pay to have more social workers per homeless person.

lacker 8y ago
I agree - it seems like nobody is really thinking through how to solve homelessness and is instead arguing about how much money should be allocated to the same strategy that cannot work. For currently homeless people with no “special deal” like winning the affordable housing lottery, it’s just going to be implausible for them to find housing in San Francisco, as long as someone earning $30,000 a year can’t afford to live in San Francisco. That means any solution must get people into housing that is not located in San Francisco.
SllX 8y ago
Problem is, anywhere you go, you'll run into the local NIMBYs. Or let's say San Francisco actually subsidizes some town out in Central Valley, I dunno, Hughson for the sake of argument, buys up loads of farm land adjacent to the town and turns it into a much nicer place to live because those dollars will go further, puts in some groceries, parks, a whole community basically. You've now turned Hughson into a much nicer town, and it will attract more people wanting to live there, and you're still subsidizing a whole other city in the process increasing the cost of living. Not to mention moving our entire homeless population there would effectively double the size of Hughson straining local resources and utilities, so probably a lawsuit and more money to subsidize it further. So now you've done all of that, but since this is Hughson, there's no jobs except farm work, and the locals probably have that covered so now they need good transportation to the nearest decently large city (Modesto and Turlock) to find some jobs. Now that you've got this satellite city, how does it sustain itself? Because at some point, San Francisco taxpayers are going to start asking themselves, why are we subsidizing Hughson? Assuming you got them to agree to it in the first place (which you won't). City charter amendment hits the ballot, it probably passes, but the wording is so poor it has negative knock-on effects for all the other land the city owns outside of the county line (the Airport and Hetch Hetchy mainly), Hughson and Stanislaus County are left holding the bag on a largely unproductive neighborhood that is a drain on the local coffers and almost completely dependent on subsidies from people richer than them. I'm sure by this point they'll be real excited about bulldozing some houses to make way for some bullet trains they were previously gung-ho about stopping at all costs, and depending on the legal status of the property left behind, they can either seize them because nobody is paying property taxes, or seize them with eminent domain and put them towards some new productive purpose that once again, leaves these formerly homeless people homeless. This is still better than the alternatives: hoping the State of California steps in to do something about it (they won't because nobody in California likes San Francisco except people who live in San Francisco), or hoping the Feds step in (they won't because hating San Francisco and hoping it falls into the ocean is a national past time, as American as liking Baseball). tl;dr we spend money trying to "solve" the "problem" locally despite the high cost of living because San Francisco only has San Francisco to depend on. Anybody in power that claims to like San Francisco doesn't actually like San Francisco, they just love our money.

asah 8y ago

IMHO mandatory reading before posting on this issue: http://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017-SF-Point-in-Time-Count-General-FINAL-6.21.17.pdf http://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017-SF-Poin... The data is incredibly detailed, absolutely fascinating and messy as you'd expect, dispelling a lot of the overly simplistic rumors like other states "shipping" SF homeless people, homeless people all being one type of person or another etc etc etc

feross 8y ago
Glad to see this report being referenced. A friend and I volunteered to gather this data at the beginning of 2017 along with hundreds of other volunteers. It's an interesting process. You show up, they assign you specific streets to walk and you just count up homeless people, noting their sex, rough age, and dwelling type (improvised structure, vehicle, etc.). I encourage anyone who is interested to volunteer for the next SF homelessness count, likely in January 2019 (They do one every 2 years).
- deathanatos 8y ago
  Thank you for taking the time to do this. I have found the referenced document quite valuable towards driving more rational debate around the subject.
User23 8y ago
If other locales aren't shipping SF vagrants, where is the increase coming from? Is SF especially good at producing new vagrants?
- deathanatos 8y ago
  The survey includes a "primary cause of homelessness" section, of which loss of job forms a very weak plurality. The increase since 2013 is reported to be only ~2%, (which I find slightly surprising¹) so it may be a bit loaded to ask where the "increase" is coming from. Since the last survey, the population even appears to have declined, slightly. ¹It feels like it has gotten worse, but that's only my impression, and I only frequent a subset of SF, so I may not be seeing areas that have gotten better. The survey is much more comprehensive than my anecdotes, of course.

jack_jennings 8y ago

Glad to hear something will happen in collaboration with the Mayor's office, at some point in the future. Until that point, pass Prop C and propose a repeal whenever you all come up with the plan that's so much better.

mdgrech23 8y ago

In the future prop C may be viewed as a step towards basic income.

joshuawright11 8y ago

Is homelessness in SF really about affordable housing? Obviously San Francisco has insane housing prices but there are dozens and dozens of shelters & programs (I volunteer at a couple) for homeless people to take refuge and get their life back together. As I understand it (and as my friend who is an SF police officer where 90% of his job is dealing with the homeless), the much larger problem is SF's (& perhaps society in general's) failure to provide institutionalized care for people with severe mental disabilities. No amount of money, support systems, or opportunity for getting off the street is going to help people with severe schizophrenia or dementia who have no family or safety net. A lot of these people the only solution is for them to be institutionalized. Unfortunately, there isn't much of a way for someone to be institutionalized against their will (unless they are causing danger of harm to themselves or others) so they continue to live on the streets. I think what this city really needs is a place to send people deemed in need of institutionalizing, and the ability for that to be determined. Of course that would never fly in a place like SF, but I think it would be a happier life for those people than life on the streets.

adamrezich 8y ago
Being born in 1991 I didn't realize this until recently but apparently we used to be better about this before these institutions shut down in the 80s-90s. I still don't really understand why this happened or how the resulting issues haven't been addressed.
- aeternus 8y ago
  Simply shutting them down probably wasn't the best solution, but those institutions were generally more geared towards locking people away than recover & treatment.
- gumby 8y ago
  > apparently we used to be better about this before these institutions shut down in the 80s-90s. I still don't really understand why this happened or how the resulting issues haven't been addressed. There are two explanations, idealistic and cynical; I'll let you decide what percentage of accuracy applies to each (neither were 0% or 100%). The idealistic justification was that the institutional option was pretty grim (think "one flew over the cuckoo's nest") and that many of those patients would do better at home or in halfway houses. The cynical explanation was that this was at the beginning of the huge anti-tax / anti-government wave that began with Reagan's election and continues today: closing the institutions cut government expenditure.

lisper 8y ago

Between 2006 and 2008 I spent a lot of time on the streets interviewing homeless people for a documentary film I was making [1]. One of the things they often mentioned was the "homeless-industrial complex" (a phrase coined by one of my subjects, not me). There are a lot of organizations that make a lot of money "helping" homeless people, and their continued existence depends on there not being an effective solution to the problem. Homeless people are literally their bread-and-butter, so they have a perverse incentive to ensure a steady supply of "product". Similar perverse incentives play themselves out in other areas of our society, like privately run prisons. [1] http://graceofgodmovie.com http://graceofgodmovie.com

danans 8y ago
Providing your own documentary with its editorial biases as a citation to back your own statements is not credible, especially when it makes such strong claims of bad faith among organizations working to alleviate homelessness. Can you provide independent citations that back your claims about the existence of a "homeless-industrial complex"?
- User23 8y ago
  Let me Google that for you: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/carey-fuller/the-homeless-industrial-c_b_9092426.html https://www.huffingtonpost.com/carey-fuller/the-homeless-ind... http://www.povertyinsights.org/2013/08/05/is-there-a-homeless-industrial-complex-that-perpetuates-homelessness/ http://www.povertyinsights.org/2013/08/05/is-there-a-homeles... https://projects.sfchronicle.com/sf-homeless/civic-disgrace/ https://projects.sfchronicle.com/sf-homeless/civic-disgrace/
- lisper 8y ago
  User23 very kindly provided a heap of references in a sibling comment, but just for the record: I did not intend to claim that the HIC exists, only that my subjects talked about it, and it seems like a plausible hypothesis to me.
dguo 8y ago
The Shirky Principle: "Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_Shirky#Shirky_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_Shirky#Shirky_principle

tvanantwerp 8y ago

Gross receipts taxes are poorly structured taxes. Because they tax all business transactions throughout the supply chain, they create a pyramiding effect that penalizes more complex industries, e.g., an aircraft manufacturer probably gets taxed more than a local dairy. I don't know whether the things the SF government wants to spend the money on will help with the homelessness problem or not; but I do think there are better types of taxes to raise that money. https://taxfoundation.org/gross-receipts-tax-impact-san-francisco/ https://taxfoundation.org/gross-receipts-tax-impact-san-fran...

antoineMoPa 8y ago

My distant observation is that the high risk mindset that allows companies like Stripe and many others in your area to succeed is the same that brings people to the streets. I imagine many successful founders are homeless in many parallel universes.

muhneesh 8y ago
I don't think educated software engineers that decide to take a calculated risk are the ones becoming homeless. It's a drug and mental health issue, unless you are speaking to a broader philosophical point on what "high risk" means.

ljm 8y ago

> Anyone who claims that Prop C is a matter of being “for the homeless or against them” is selling a facile falsehood Swap 'Prop C' for any other cause, and 'the homeless' for any other intended benefactor of it, and you get a good formula for how to strip all the nuance out of a debate and turn it into a battle between opposing sides. I don't have an opinion on Stripe's position here but that sentence itself is a pretty eloquent summary for how dumb modern discussion has become in many circles.

PascLeRasc 8y ago
Misleading bill titles are the norm in Congress. See "right-to-work" laws and the Defense of Marriage Act for examples.
- ErockSteady 8y ago
  > Misleading bill titles are the norm in Congress. That's how they roll. > See "right-to-work" laws I'm guessing you've confused right-to-work with at-will employment. Right-to-work laws mean that a union can't force you to join and pay dues. "At-will employment" means you can be fired for any reason or no reason (except if the reason is they're a member of a "protected class")

rajeshpant 8y ago

I completely agree with Stripe here. The homeless problem will not be solved by increasing taxes. The problem is whether the money is being used correctly. I see huge issues with that. The department of homelessness currently has an annual budget of $250Million[1] for providing shelter to homeless. I wonder if govt. is spending $250 Million every year on providing them shelter why are they still living in streets? Where is all that money going? [1] - https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/29-million-increase-for-San-Francisco-12902707.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/29-million-incre...

deleted 8y ago
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LegendZ3 8y ago
Break down of money spent on Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing http://hsh.sfgov.org/overview/budget/ http://hsh.sfgov.org/overview/budget/
erentz 8y ago
So google tells me there’s around 7,000 homeless in SF. Let’s up that to 10,000. That’s $25,000 per homeless person per year. Am I missing something or is something very seriously wrong here?
- lacker 8y ago
  At a single moment in time there are about 7500 homeless people in SF, but about 20,000 are homeless at some point during the last year.
- tomjakubowski 8y ago
  For what it's worth, that's way less than (less than half) the amortized yearly cost of a California prison inmate: about $70,000. https://lao.ca.gov/policyareas/cj/6_cj_inmatecost https://lao.ca.gov/policyareas/cj/6_cj_inmatecost
  - 8y ago

dawhizkid 8y ago

I read a tweet from Jack Dorsey that said Square would end up paying a significantly more than Salesforce (Link: https://twitter.com/jack/status/1053312149815091200 https://twitter.com/jack/status/1053312149815091200). Why is that? Is it because financial services/payment transaction type businesses are taxed more or because this is a tax on "gross receipts" which potentially impacts these payment companies more because it includes income from interest, which they presumably have relatively more of? Or something else?

jwalstrom 8y ago

If anyone wants some domains for this cause I am more than happy to donate: http://www.ballotdomains.com http://www.ballotdomains.com

gumby 8y ago

BTW most shelters are pretty scary and many people feel safer on the street than in them.

thrownaway1234 8y ago

On a flip side, in developing countries, there aren't that many homelesses because, sadly, we don't think about them as equal. They wouldn't be allowed to hang out along the streets like what happens in US. They will get picked up and will be forced to move and etc. We usually have a place called Slum for extremely poor people. They will need to make a living themselves. If they don't, I'm not sure where they end up (death, maybe). Japan also doesn't think much about homeless people (https://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2013/12/30/yakuza-gangsters-recruit-homeless-men-for-fukushima-nuclear-clean-up/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2013/12/30/yaku...)

rayiner 8y ago

> Anyone who claims that Prop C is a matter of being “for the homeless or against them” is selling a facile falsehood. While well-intentioned, it is San Francisco’s largest-ever tax increase, and comes with no systemic changes or effective accountability. In San Francisco, you must be numb to that kind of logical fallacy by now. This sounds like 95% of all entreaties to spend more government money.

iosDrone 8y ago

I hope it passes AND makes homelessness worse. SF residents deserve to suffer the consequences of their spineless liberal idiocy.

fillskills 8y ago

"Today, the world is pulling us towards polarized discourse and emotionally-charged, soundbite analysis. We’re all familiar with the forces at play. We think this is important to resist." - PC for President!

fillskills 8y ago
On a serious note there seems to be many sub issues like PC mentioned. On the top of my head: 1 - lack of homes 2 - speed of population migration is higher than planned 3 - increase in price of property is higher than planned 4 - increase in labor cost 5 - fund mismatch between different localities etc 6 - funding changes from Fed and from the Mayor's article there seem to be a lot more. The issue needs a Product like approach of finding all the requirements and fighting it from different directions. Adding funding would certainly help temporarily but not a good long term solution.

User23 8y ago

Spending more on something is a good way to get more of it when exporters are ready and willing to meet the demand. Municipalities buying their local homeless bus tickets is just one example. If we want to reduce homelessness, we need a smarter approach than giving people goods and services for being homeless. I don't have all the answers here, but I do know that this requires both positive and negative incentives. A carrot and stick approach if you will. Sad to say, most vagrants are not capable of acting in their own rational self-interest, so simply extolling the virtues of becoming a productive member of society just isn't going to cut it.

zjaffee 8y ago

The issue of homelessness in SF is absolutely related to affordable housing and a lack of beds, the comparison NYC and LA are absolutely abysmal in that NYC has huge amounts of permanently affordable housing that it can use to house homeless people in that has a relatively low cost to maintain compared to having to acquire new land and build new buildings, and LA, which has an incredibly high street homeless population in the same way SF does. Additionally, the total cost of homeless services is helping more people than the 7,500 that are let mentioned as it's really closer to 20,000 where many are in permanent supportive housing and aren't considered homeless but would be without the same type of support. If you look at the cost per person when using the 20,000 number, the cost is still far lower than what it costs to keep a person in prison each year, where with the passing of Prop C, that number would get closer to said amount. Add on the fact that SF is one of the most expensive real estate markets in the would (where there isn't cheaper housing anywhere nearby), with a related high cost of labor, and the spending makes far more sense.

tareqak 8y ago

It seems like there was a financial aspect to it after all: https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Dorsey-tweetstorm-bashes-Prop-C-SF-measure-to-13321053.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Dorsey-tweetsto... From SFChronicle article: Dorsey estimated that Square could pay an additional $20 million in taxes under Prop. C next year, while Benioff has said Salesforce would pay an additional $10 million, despite its larger size. “Taxes would grow at rates multiple times our (adjusted) revenue, which no company can sustain,” Dorsey said in a tweet. “Not an issue for Salesforce/Twitter, but unfair to (Square) and (financial) startups.”

coolboy93290 8y ago

tl;dr; "Look. We are just trying to exit with a billion dollars like everyone else in SF. We don't want to walk over the homeless either, but, it is super expensive to help them. So we propose just ignoring it until we get paid. Vote no on prop C!" -Stripe

abalone 8y ago

Hold on... This strikes me as disingenuous and here's why. Stripe is using spend-per-resident to compare SF to other cities, to lead us to the conclusion that we already spend more than anyone and so more wouldn't help. But SF has one of the highest homeless rates in the nation. It's spend per homeless resident that is the relevant comparison. So how do we do on that? As others have noted, we actually spend less per homeless resident than NYC. You would never get that from reading this! All you see is NYC: $260, SF: $770. Totally misleading! It comes across as disingenuous to me because, clearly, Stripe must know this.

mmanfrin 8y ago
This is a tax bill, using cost-per-resident is not disingenuous.
- abalone 8y ago
  It is is you're trying to compare the effectiveness of spending money ("If homelessness was just a question of money, this issue would already be solved.") The relevant compare is cost-per-homeless-resident. We actually trail cited cities on that. How is Stripe's argument not misleading?

claydavisss 8y ago

If I was his PR man I would have advised against writing this at all. No one expects Stripe to solve a major social ill and frankly beyond one blip attention post on HN, no one cares what PC thinks of Prop C... there is nothing to be gained from this no matter what side of the issue you are on. This post will be red meat for critics and damage Stripe's good cred for no gain.

abalone 8y ago

> If homelessness was just a question of money, this issue would already be solved. While cities report inconsistently, San Francisco currently spends around $430 per city resident per year on services and programs for the homeless, compared to $260 in New York and $110 in Los Angeles. Yet the problem in our city is worse, and despite increases in spending, has continued to worsen. Can somebody please explain how spending per resident is a fair measure of this? Isn't spending per homeless resident the relevant measure? (SF has a much higher homeless rate and we actually spend less per homeless resident than NYC!)

istjohn 8y ago
Great point. And it's no mystery why Seattle and San Francisco are seeing homelessness become more and more of a problem. It's a direct result of the rise of a wildly profitable tech industry in those cities. It's maddening to see companies like Amazon and Stripe oppose initiatives to address these issues in their hometowns.
- xibalba 8y ago
  > It's a direct result of the rise of a wildly profitable tech industry in those cities. Connect the dots for me. How is the increase of the homeless population the direct result of the rise of tech cos like Amazon and Stripe?
  - abalone 8y ago
    I’ll bite.. increased housing demand raises rents, the “main culprit” in the recent homelessness increase.[1] [1] https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/11/06/west-coast-homeless-crisis-california-oregon-washington/ https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/11/06/west-coast-home...
    - niij 8y ago
      Why is supply not keeping up? I think it's because of an artificial cap on housing.

istjohn 8y ago

What a bunch of double-speak. You have a city with conditions on the streets compared to those of the world's poorest slums. Clearly, a dramatic increase in resources needs to be brought to bear on the problem. Any plan Mayor Breed might have will only be aided by additional funding. Patrick Collision's plea for subtlety is a thin disguise for his apathy. Tech companies like his--btw Stripe benefited from San Francisco tax breaks and the change from an income tax to a gross receipt tax in the mid-aughts--need to step up and give back to the cities that enabled them to become what they are today. And they should be more willing to take responsibility for the consequences good and bad of the tech boom.

orangecat 8y ago
Clearly, a dramatic increase in resources needs to be brought to bear on the problem. Something must be done. This is something. Any plan Mayor Breed might have will only be aided by additional funding. Drug abuse is a serious problem. Giving the DEA more money will only help to solve it.

dawhizkid 8y ago

My biggest criticism with Stripe and Square's response is that Jack Dorsey admitted over Twitter today that a major reason both companies officially oppose Prop C is because it disproportionately impacts payment companies since they would be effectively "double taxed" since by definition a tax on "gross receipts" would be a tax on the entire transaction amount once and on the ~2.9% transaction fee again. Jack Dorsey's tweet on this "unfairness" today was the very first time I heard that as part of their argument against this tax. Why not explicitly say that up front long ago instead of hiding behind the singular argument that "we just support the mayor's judgement on the issue?" Seems disingenuous.

abalone 8y ago
> they would be effectively "double taxed" since by definition a tax on "gross receipts" would be a tax on the entire transaction amount once and on the ~2.9% transaction fee again. Citation please? Dorsey said they’d be taxed more than Salesforce but I assumed that’s because of where geographically they book their revenue.
- dawhizkid 8y ago
  https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Dorsey-tweetstorm-bashes-Prop-C-SF-measure-to-13321053.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Dorsey-tweetsto... Square has said that a quirk of the proposed tax could harm it and other San Francisco payments companies like Stripe. Gross receipts taxes are applied to a company’s total revenue generated from business activities in the city. In Square’s case, those include fees it splits with banks and Visa and MasterCard when it processes credit-card transactions. Square, which is publicly traded, reports both net revenue, which includes those fees, and adjusted revenue, which excludes them. In the second quarter, those figures were $815 million and $385 million respectively. In Square’s view, imposing a tax on the higher revenue measure hurts it disproportionately. If I'm reading this correctly, basically payment companies like Square and Stripe are disproportionately hurt because they would pay the tax on the ~2.9% + 10 cent fee they collect even though in reality both companies only keep a small fraction of that fee since most of that fee goes to the networks like Visa/MC/Amex.

smsm42 8y ago

Something I am missing here. At the beginning they say spending and the luck of money is not a problem (and with 54K per year per homeless person it sounds plausible) and then at the end they claim the solution would necessarily mean higher taxes. That makes no sense - if money is not the issue, why you'd need higher taxes?

thrownawayacct 8y ago

In my early teens I was homeless for roughly 6 years and I think this article is largely junk. The mental illness reasoning for homelessness isn't really true, its that being homeless and having no one there and nothing to help you makes mental issues, its a slide that keeps you down with horrible sadness and despair. What needs to happen is having safety nets before people hit the slide. Of course there are many different reasons for homelessness but preventing people from becoming homeless in the first place is the issue that needs to addressed, no one deserves the lifelong scars. If stripe really wanted to help then it could have created some safety nets with money it used to lobby.