Proposition C

https://stripe.com/press/prop-c

by dsr12 • 8 years ago

133 158 8 years ago

stripe.com

inetknght2• 8 years ago

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

edwinwee• 8 years ago

We're trying: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/03/us/california-today-strip...

untog• 8 years 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• 8 years 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?)

asah3• 8 years 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)

inetknght2• 8 years 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• 8 years 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.

dtech2• 8 years ago

Correct, but housing is a very important requirement.

olliej4• 8 years 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• 8 years ago

note: the evil gentrifying landlords are the ones fighting apartments.

olliej4• 8 years ago

not in my experience

dtech2• 8 years 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.

olliej4• 8 years ago

oh, yeah I know - I was giving a lower bound.

Although the people who fight housing seem to not grasp this.

1024core2• 8 years 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.

olliej4• 8 years ago

Same here.

A lot are also alcoholics and/or addicts - this is one of those things where saving money is the short term (not managing the homelessness problem before it got to this point) results in a higher cost in the long term - now you not only have to manage homelessness, you also hav to help the existing homeless recover from long term homelessness.

You also have the long term costs of assisting those with mental illness (as a result of "saving money" by closing down all state level support for mental illness in the 80s - I'm not saying that was a panacea, but having the support helped a lot of people that currently get no help).

Politicians love "saving tax payer money" through short term things like this, because they know that by the time someone has to fix their mess they've moved on/retired and they don't have to deal with it.

abalone16• 8 years ago

That is a misrepresentation of a lot of pro Prop C people (probably most) who advocate for more affordable housing. What they fight for is higher affordable housing requirements, as they don’t see market rate development in tech boomtowns as a realistic way to solve affordability for the working class.[1]

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/in-expensive...

simonebrunozzi• 8 years 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.

asah3• 8 years ago

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+repor...

manfredo5• 8 years ago

Note that "at the time they most recently became homeless" is often a potentially misleading statistic. Commenters in the past have pointed out that metrics like this often count people being released from prison or jail and ending up on the streets as becoming homeless after being housed in the State. So if a homeless person gets bussed in from out of state, gets imprisoned, and subsequently gets released they're counted as having been living in California at the time they became homeless.

1024core2• 8 years ago

Sixty-nine percent (69%) of respondents reported they were living in San Francisco at the time they most recently became homeless.

I am so tired of reading this bullshit "statistic". It is a self-reported number. If a homeless person thinks it benefits him to say so, he will. And homeless people will say anything to survive, as they are barely surviving.

If you came where from Podunk, MN and crashed on your buddy's couch last year before he kicked you out? Congratulations, you were "living in SF before you became homeless".

If you came here from somewhere else and stayed in a shelter for a day before you got evicted? Congratulations, you were "living in SF before you became homeless".

If the question was, "were you a rent-paying resident of SF before you became homeless", the answer would be totally different.

There are 76 non-profits that feed from the trough of homelessness[1]. Don't they have admin overhead? How much money is wasted on this overhead?

[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/S-F-spends-recor...

rdtsc• 8 years ago

Excellent report, thanks for the link. It is quite readable and easy to understand. Can also see recent 3-year trends on most graphs.

I found the section on primary cause of homelessness interesting:

---

22% of respondents reported job loss as the primary cause of their homelessness.

15% reported drugs or alcohol.

13% reported an argument with a friend or family member who asked them to leave

12% reported eviction

10% reported divorce or separation

7% reported an illness or medical problem.

---

I suspect mental health is something that is very pertinent. I used to volunteer with the homeless and drug addiction seemed like was used for self-medication. Quite a few people were suffering from anxiety, schizophrenia and other issues that prevented them to forming meaningful relationships, holding a job, staying in touch with their family (who often have disowned them).

Further under the section of "Health" I found:

---

41% drug or alcohol abuse

39% psychiatric or emotional condition

31% chronic health problem

Then

29% reported Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

23% a physical disability

12% a traumatic brain injury

11% reported having an AIDS or HIV related illness

---

thrmsforbfast3• 8 years ago

But "we", who? Patrick Collison, Sam Altman, Marc Benioff, etc,

The recommended statement by Wiener addresses this: "A broad-based stakeholder group — including Mayor Ed Lee, then-Supervisor David Chiu, the Controller, the business community, labor, and social service nonprofits..."

Watching Bill Gates try to solve problems in education [1] was a real wake-up call for me. I had a rather involved conversation when the initiative was first announced with an education leader who was deeply suspicious and expected failure (and, what's more, for exactly the reasons that the RAND report identified).

It turns out that, sometimes, leaders who have dedicated their lives to problem X really do know better than people who have succeeded in the business world.

And perhaps more importantly, that more money isn't always a "no downsides" proposition. Big spends on the wrong ideas can suck the air out of the room and divert other resources away from more promising ideas.

But I suspect that the people whose names you mentioned already know that the most effective ideas are probably going to come, in part, from people who have put in their 10,000 hours working on actually solving homelessness.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-melinda-gates-foundatio...

structural• 8 years ago

This link posted on HN just yesterday seems to be extremely apropos: https://80000hours.org/articles/accidental-harm/

In short, you have to be very careful when you work on hard problems not to divert resources away from other approaches... that might be even more valuable.

TarpitCarnivore2• 8 years ago

It turns out that, sometimes, leaders who have dedicated their lives to problem X really do know better than people who have succeeded in the business world.

I often cringe when I see non-education folks trying to tackle the problem of education in classroms by "automating" or pushing video courses. Solving the issue of education is far more than what's IN the classroom (Here in Jersey we had Abbot districts which gave more to low income schools, it's failed). While supplies are a big problem, more is to do with environment. Having done teaching in a low income district (every single prospective teacher should do this) and an upper middle-class district the difference was stark. I had kids in 1st grade who could not even tie shoes or zipper jackets, let alone have a pencil.

0x8BADF00D• 8 years 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.

This is all you need to know. We should starve the beast, and then the city will actually do something about the homeless problem.

pj_mukh2• 8 years 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• 8 years ago

San Francisco has a tiny population (because California likes to start a new ‘city’ every two blocks) and nice weather.

HuShifang• 8 years 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_mukh2• 8 years 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?

aeternus4• 8 years ago

This does seem excessive, but I'd like to see a more detailed breakdown of spending.

SF vs. Manhattan is a better comparison as New York city as a whole has more/cheaper space available than SF.

abalone16• 8 years ago

Because it's a disingenuous compare. Stripe is leading you to believe that spending per city resident is a fair measure of the effectiveness of how we spend money. But it's actually spending per homeless city resident that's the correct measure of that!

SF has a much higher rate of homelessness than the national average, so that explodes the per-resident cost. But we actually spend less per homeless resident than NYC. Surprised?

Stripe knows all this. They have this veneer of plain spoken honesty, but take note of the trick they're trying to pull here.

glibgil2• 8 years ago

So it's about the money

daxorid• 8 years ago

When a business with a fiduciary duty to its shareholders takes a political stance, it always is.

glibgil2• 8 years ago

I'm confused. Why aren't Salesforce shareholders making that company oppose Prop C?

minimaxir• 8 years ago

More context: Jack Dorsey (on behalf of Square) explicitly called out Stripe this morning over the issue: https://twitter.com/jack/status/1053312141657178112

EDIT: I misinterpreted the thread: see comments below. Although Stripe's response was likely correlated to it.

peacetreefrog• 8 years 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• 8 years 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.

LiterallyDoge3• 8 years 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• 8 years ago

The problem is that you are treating homeless people like rational actors.

LiterallyDoge3• 8 years 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• 8 years ago

Doreen Michele's comment answers this quite well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17915009

joey-bob• 8 years 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.

cco2• 8 years 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.

LiterallyDoge3• 8 years ago

Yeah I'm leaving this alone, looks like a straw man, also I don't think she makes a convincing point.

manfredo5• 8 years 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.

aeternus4• 8 years 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.

manfredo5• 8 years 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.

tomjen32• 8 years ago

Wouldn't it be much cheaper to bus them to a place that doesn't cost much to live?

You probably could make a real nice camp on some dirt cheap woodland for 200 million.

Stack shipping containers 3 high, have one person live in each and have a shower block for every 15-30 residents. Cook cheap in large badges, get some teach for america out there to help them learn to read and write, require each person to spend a certain amount of hours working in exchange for food and housing...

dragonwriter2• 8 years ago

If the city wants to house all it's residents

The city wants to enable all of its homeless to escape homelessness.

It probably doesn't particularly want to house all of them, either directly (that is, the city itself) provides housing, or even have them housed within the geographic boundaries of the city. Having them acheive stable housing outside of the city would be just as much of a win.

malandrew• 8 years 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.

lacker2• 8 years 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.

SllX5• 8 years 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.

ajcodez• 8 years ago

Support systems for economic relocation feels like the right answer in theory. Living in SF proper is like filet mignon. Yes everyone needs shelter but not in expensive zip code. In order to actually reduce homelessness you probably need relocation opportunities + friction to stay. I can’t imagine working on either front so here we are.

asah3• 8 years ago

IMHO mandatory reading before posting on this issue: 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• 8 years 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).

deathanatos2• 8 years 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.

User234• 8 years ago

If other locales aren't shipping SF vagrants, where is the increase coming from? Is SF especially good at producing new vagrants?

deathanatos2• 8 years 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.

njarboe• 8 years ago

This is a very in depth report but unfortunately it is on data that is from Jan 2017, before when we started seeing the huge homeless encampments forming all over the place (I have lived in Oakland for 25 years, so only really know about changes there). It shows that the number of homeless people in SF has been about the same since 2013, so I'm not sure it is worth reading the 80 pages to try understand what has changed to make homelessness a much bigger problem recently.

2013=7,350 2015=7,539 2017=7,449

Too bad they don't do it every year. Another survey is due in Jan 2019, and maybe it can help us understand this new level of homelessness going on.

jack_jennings• 8 years 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• 8 years ago

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

joshuawright11• 8 years 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• 8 years 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.

aeternus4• 8 years 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.

gumby2• 8 years 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.

js2• 8 years ago

I found this via Google and it seems to cover the highlights:

https://www.thebalance.com/deinstitutionalization-3306067

zapita• 8 years ago

I still don't really understand why this happened

Reagan and his failed economic policy.

or how the resulting issues haven't been addressed.

The ongoing personality cult around Reagan and his failed economic policy.

kareemsabri• 8 years ago

Couldn't the money be used for mental health facilities? Toronto has https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre_for_Addiction_and_Menta... - which I believe is publicly funded

core-questions• 8 years ago

One problem is that we don't really "commit" people the same way as we did decades ago. It's a lot harder to just declare someone unfit and lock them in an institution - and for good reason, but the unfortunate result is that mental institutions no longer serve the same function of cloistering these people away from the rest of society.

The reaction to unacceptable conditions was correct and justifiable, but we've thrown the baby with the bathwater in the sense that now, mentally handicapped people are homeless all over the place...

snowmaker• 8 years ago

There is actually a severe shortage of shelter beds in San Francisco.

You are right that mental health is a consideration, but the bigger problem is both simpler and easier to fix: the number of shelter beds (and other forms of supportive housing - including long-term housing) has decreased since 2004 and is woefully inadequate for the number of current homeless.

For more reading on this topic I recommend this detailed analysis: https://medium.com/@josefow/the-one-stat-that-explains-sfs-s... Also Mayor London Breed's analysis and approach: https://medium.com/@LondonBreed/a-bold-approach-to-homelessn...

abalone16• 8 years ago

the much larger problem is SF's... failure to provide institutionalized care for people with severe mental disabilities

You can debunk this with a simple observation: Homelessness has grown significantly in the past 20 years. Has severe mental illness grown significantly during that time?

The bigger problem here is Stripe's argument is misleading. They're comparing cost-per-resident instead of cost-per-homeless-resident, when SF actually has a higher rate of homelessness than other cities. We actually spend less per homeless resident than NYC. Totally invalidates their argument that "if it's just a question of money this issue would already be solved."

orf• 8 years ago

Has severe mental illness grown significantly during that time?

Maybe? Who's to say it has not?

smsm425• 8 years ago

Has severe mental illness grown significantly during that time?

No, but protocols for involuntary commitment of people with borderline states may have.

They're comparing cost-per-resident instead of cost-per-homeless-resident

It is pretty easy to derive one from the other, given homelessness levels, and given as SF is has one of the highest ones (slightly lower only than NYC) the conclusion seems to stay - expense level is very high.

We actually spend less per homeless resident than NYC

Source?

TarpitCarnivore2• 8 years ago

Things like SRO's are vanishing in the city and they were at one point a way for lower income people to live off the streets: https://thebolditalic.com/life-inside-sf-s-vanishing-single-...

lisper2• 8 years 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

danans• 8 years 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"?

User234• 8 years ago

Let me Google that for you: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/carey-fuller/the-homeless-ind... http://www.povertyinsights.org/2013/08/05/is-there-a-homeles... https://projects.sfchronicle.com/sf-homeless/civic-disgrace/

lisper2• 8 years 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• 8 years 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

PopeDotNinja• 8 years ago

I asked a friend who works for a government agency what that agency does. He replied by saying that like any good bureaucracy, it's first just was to perpetuate itself. I found that both sad and amusing.

tvanantwerp• 8 years 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-fran...

antoineMoPa• 8 years 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• 8 years 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• 8 years 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• 8 years ago

Misleading bill titles are the norm in Congress. See "right-to-work" laws and the Defense of Marriage Act for examples.

ErockSteady• 8 years 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• 8 years 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-incre...

LegendZ3• 8 years ago

Break down of money spent on Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing

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

erentz• 8 years 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?

lacker2• 8 years 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• 8 years 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

orangecat2• 8 years ago

While I'm certain SF could be doing a much better job with their existing budget, that's not a very meaningful statistic. You'd need to know how many more people would be homeless in the counterfactual scenario where they weren't spending that money.

abalone16• 8 years ago

Yes, you’re missing something: Much of the funding goes into prevention. SF only directly spends about $3K per homeless person. There are a lot more people staying housed because of those funds.

dawhizkid4• 8 years 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). 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• 8 years ago

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

gumby2• 8 years ago

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

thrownaway1234• 8 years 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/yaku...)

rayiner• 8 years 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.

fillskills2• 8 years 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!

fillskills2• 8 years 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.

User234• 8 years 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• 8 years 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• 8 years ago

It seems like there was a financial aspect to it after all:

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• 8 years 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

abalone16• 8 years 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• 8 years ago

This is a tax bill, using cost-per-resident is not disingenuous.

abalone16• 8 years 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• 8 years 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.

abalone16• 8 years 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!)

istjohn2• 8 years 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• 8 years 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?

Empact2• 8 years ago

Yeah, if only there were some way to tackle that ratio by adding more residents. More housing means more places to house the homeless, and a broader tax base to support them by, thus making this an easier problem to solve. https://yimbyaction.org/voterguide/

abalone16• 8 years ago

That’s not answering my question though. Collison claims money won’t solve the problem but uses a comparison that shows nothing of the sort.

How does this make sense to anyone? Did he just whiff on logic here, or is he misleading us because he’s deep into a bare knuckle political fight, or am I missing something?

smsm425• 8 years ago

This: https://abc7news.com/news/data-shows-sf-has-2nd-highest-home... says NYC has 887 homeless per 100K, while SF has 795. SF seems to spend about 54K per homeless person, while NYC about 29K, or 54% of SF number.

abalone16• 8 years ago

First of all this is a common error. SF spends only about $3.8K per homeless person.[1] You can't just divide by the homeless population because a huge portion of the budget goes towards homeless prevention. Things like subsidies to keep people housed. So there are many more people supported by that budget.

Moreover, you're misunderstanding my question. That's how much SF spends per homeless resident. Great, in theory that's what we should be comparing with other cities (calculated correctly of course). But that's not what Collison did. He just compared how much cities spend per resident.. i.e. he took the homeless budget and divided it by the population of SF, not just the homeless. You see how that misled and confused you?

It makes no sense to me, except as a trick? Please, somebody explain how this makes any kind of sense.

[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Bu...

istjohn2• 8 years 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.

orangecat2• 8 years 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.

dawhizkid4• 8 years 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.

abalone16• 8 years 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.

dawhizkid4• 8 years ago

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.

smsm425• 8 years 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• 8 years 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

Related Stories