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Comment by twblalock | Hacker News Reader

The mayor finally snapped and realized that things need to change, but every attempt to improve the situation is opposed by some interest group or group of residents who still hold on to the same bad set of policies that let the problem get so bad in the first place.

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When you have more than a billion dollar spent every year on homelessness, do they really want homelessness to end? Think about it. They call it “homeless industrial complex” for a reason.

Would be interested what that number is just for SF. (Assuming $1B is national expenditure.)

Heh, no, the $1B is for SF: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/S-F-has-an-unpre...

I once heard the city spends around $50k/year per homeless person.

The latest estimate for 2022 is 7,754 people experiencing homelessness in San Francisco – https://sfgov.org/scorecards/safety-net/homeless-population

That gives an estimate of $390,000,000/year spent on homelessness in San Francisco alone.

Mind you the official definition of “homeless” is a lot stricter than people assume. Living in a car makes you not-homeless. Here’s a good podcast episode about that: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/according-to-need-cha...

My first question whenever thinking about these numbers is: If we just give them that money, will they stay homeless? I bet many would be more than able to get their life in order, if you gave them 50k … that’s more than minimum wage for SF.

And yet somehow SF manages to spend $1.1B on homelessness: https://www.hoover.org/research/despite-spending-11-billion-...

Many wallets are being filled here, and there is no oversight on where the money is going and if it's working.

I bet almost all of them be be homeless again within a year. The problems that made them homeless in the first place are not just money problems.

I think that’s where social workers (I think?) draw the distinction between chronically homeless and someone experiencing homelessness.

The average person who experiences homelessness stays homeless for 237 days[1]. That’s the highest estimate I could find on google. Some were as low as 90 day average.

I bet a lot of those people could fix the problem a lot faster, if you gave them minimum wage money for a year.

[1] https://embed.clearimpact.com/Measure/Embed?id=100076098

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