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Do you have any sources about those numbers or other information about where this money is going? That works out to $40,000 per homeless person, or almost doubl

• epistasis 7y ago
  It's an extremely dishonest look at the numbers. I'm having trouble finding the article from sfchronicle.com now, but the idea that each person is getting an average of $40,000 is comically wrong. The homeless population is always in flux: new people become homeless, some people get housed, and some people migrate. Treating a year time span as having a static population of X is just an unrealistic way to look at it. There are something like 20,000 different homeless individuals in the city throughout the course of the year. Something like 15,000 end up getting some sort of services. However, that's not really much of the story, because the bulk of that $300M budget from prior years goes directly to the easiest and cheapest intervention to stop homelessness: paying people's rent. For families and individuals living paycheck to paycheck, a single unexpected expense can get them kicked out. Without that $300M, the problem would be immensely worse, on a huge scale.