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Comment by ellard | Hacker News Reader

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/27/us/san-francisco-firefigh...

You're not wrong, but it's more that they are in a position to help and the city doesn't seem to want to have another organization deal with the homeless. They're not exactly gunning for the role of taking care of the homeless.

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That's kind of a silly thing to say given that the government of SF spends hundreds of millions of dollars on the homeless a year.

My immediate reaction is incredulity at the notion a city could spend hundreds of millions on its homeless population and still have a homeless population...

Are there further details/good articles you would be able to provide?

The common trope in LA and SF is that more and more homeless migrate to the west coast every day due to the services and weather.

According to [1], the city gets 40-50 people off the streets every week, but there are 100-150 new homeless people each week. So at that simple numbers game, the homelessness problem is not yet being solved.

You can see the budget at [2]. Most of the budget goes to Supportive Housing, ie, paying for housing for people to keep them off the street.

1: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/29-million-incre...

2: http://hsh.sfgov.org/overview/budget/

I feel like you could house and feed all the homeless in America with that much money.

Now I kind of wonder how many homeless they have in SF. Because if it's 10,000 homeless people (that would be over 1% of its 800k population), they get to spend $10,000(s) on each one ..

So either: they got a ridiculous amount of homeless people, or they got a ridiculous hole in their wallet, or the city doesn't actually spend 100s of millions on the homeless.

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