Latest Progressive Policy Disaster: Homelessness In San Francisco

Three and a half years ago, in November 2018, the good people of San Francisco enacted by a referendum called Proposition C a new special corporate payroll tax which would raise multiple hundred million dollars per year for the specific purpose of finally and once and for all solving the problem of homelessness. During the run-up to that referendum, in October 2018, I had two posts discussing Proposition C, the nature of the progressive thinking behind it, and its prospects for success. On October 26 it was “The Morality Of Our Progressive Elite”; and on October 30 it was “More On The Morality Of Our Progressive Elite.”

Toward the end of that second post, I posed this question: “[What are] the prospects that San Francisco’s new $300 million might actually reduce the population deemed ‘homeless’?” My answer was: “Right around zero.”

In the intervening three plus years, I have from time to time checked back to see how it was going with San Francisco’s great project to end homelessness. But up until now I haven’t been able to find good information. Among other issues, the implementation of the new tax was delayed for two years by litigation. However, the information drought on this subject has now ended. On April 26 the San Francisco Chronicle ran a big feature article on the subject, with the headline “Broken Homes” (behind paywall). On April 28, that article was then reviewed and commented on by Steven Hayward at PowerLine (“California’s Ongoing Suicide Attempt”), and by Erica Sandberg at the City Journal (“San Francisco’s Housing First Nightmare”).

And the answer is: The results are far, far worse than mere failure to reduce the population deemed homeless. Since 2018 San Francisco’s spending on the homeless has soared by approximately a factor of four. But meanwhile the number of people deemed homeless has increased by somewhere between 47% and more than 250% (depending on what data you believe for the number of homeless in SF back in 2017). And, at least if you accept the Chronicle’s current reporting, the conditions under which the homeless live have seriously deteriorated. It is an epic disaster of progressive public policy.

How could everything have gone so terribly wrong?

Let’s begin by reviewing where we were back in 2018. The occasion for my October 26, 2018 post was that an op-ed had appeared in the New York Times on October 24 advocating for the passage of Proposition C, and raising some $300 million annually of incremental tax money, as a matter of basic morality. The headline was “The Social Responsibility of Business,” and the author was Marc Benioff. (In case you don’t recognize the name, Mr. Benioff is the founder of salesforce.com, and at the time in 2018 his net worth was estimated as around $6 billion (today it’s more like $8 billion)). Although his personal wealth would have been more than sufficient to fund the $300 million annually should he have chosen to do so, Mr. Benioff argued in his op-ed that the funding should be imposed as a matter of tax obligation on all of the City’s larger businesses:

The business of business is no longer merely business. . . . It’s time for the wealthiest businesses and business owners to step up and give back to the most vulnerable among us.

In the op-ed, Mr. Benioff used a figure for the then homeless population of San Francisco as 7500. For that number Benioff cited to this official San Francisco government report titled “San Francisco 2017 Homeless Count & Survey.” (Go to page 12 of that Report and you will find that they give the very precise figure of 7,499.)

And to those objecting that these kinds of government spending programs never work and always make the problem at hand worse, Mr. Benioff was ready with the answer:

Under a comprehensive plan developed by experts in the field, this new funding would address this crisis from every angle. It would provide more bathrooms, so that people wouldn’t have to relieve themselves on city streets. More than 1,000 new shelter beds. Up to $75 million to treat the severely mentally ill. Up to $150 million for 4,000 additional units of housing, including for youth and families with children. And assistance or subsidies to help thousands of residents stay in their homes — to help prevent San Franciscans from becoming homeless in the first place.

We have a “comprehensive plan.” It has been “developed by experts.” It addresses the problem of homelessness “from every angle.” Obviously, it will work. How could it not?

With that, let’s move to the latest data as reported in the Chronicle (via Hayward at PowerLine). Here is the chart:

The number of homeless is now given as 19,086 for 2020, the latest year available. If the number of 7,499 provided in that very official-looking Report for 2017 were accurate, the 19,086 in 2020 would represent an increase of some 254%. Oh, but they now give a figure for 2017 of 13,014. And how did the number of homeless in San Francisco five years ago suddenly nearly double? I can’t find any explanation for that. It would not be the first instance of bureaucrats changing the data of the past in order to make themselves look better in the present. (See, e.g., my series on The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time.). And even if you believe the new figure of 13,014 homeless for 2017, there would still have been an increase of some 47% to get to the most recent count of 19,086.

And meanwhile the spending has gone completely wild. The $300 million of Prop C funds added to 2018 spending of $285 million would have brought total spending to around $585 million; but the chart says that the Department of Homelessness budget actually soared all the way to $1.1 billion by 2021. And according to the note, they apparently didn’t even use the Prop C funds, but instead those funds were “put on reserve” while a gusher of federal “Covid-19” money flooded in. If the number of homeless in 2021 remained at the 2020 figure of 19,086, the $1.1 billion of spending in 2021 would represent almost $58,000 per homeless person, or $232,000 for a family of four. Even if the number of homeless experienced another significant increase in 2021 (highly likely), the spending would still likely represent well over $50,000 per homeless person.

For that kind of money, at least San Francisco should surely be able to buy decent housing accommodations for the homeless people. And indeed, the principal idea behind Prop C and the massive increase in spending was a so-called “housing first” policy, where the problem of homelessness was to be instantly solved by the simple device of providing the housing that the homeless people lacked.

But in fact, it turns out that the conditions under which San Francisco’s homeless live are more squalid than ever. Indeed, the terrible conditions of the housing are the chief focus of the Chronicle piece, as well as of the reviews by Hayward at PowerLine and Sandberg at the City Journal. From the Chronicle:

But because San Francisco leaders have for years neglected the hotels and failed to meaningfully regulate the nonprofits that operate them, many of the buildings — which house roughly 6,000 people — have descended into a pattern of chaos, crime and death, the investigation found. Critically, the homelessness crisis in San Francisco has worsened. . . At least 166 people fatally overdosed in city-funded hotels in 2020 and 2021 — 14% of all confirmed overdose deaths in San Francisco, though the buildings housed less than 1% of the city’s population. The Chronicle compiled its own database of fatal overdoses, cross-referencing records from the medical examiner’s office with supportive housing SRO addresses, because HSH said it did not comprehensively track overdoses in its buildings. Residents have threatened to kill staff members, chased them with metal pipes and lit fires inside rooms, incident reports show.

From Sandberg at the City Journal:

A long-term SRO resident who wishes to remain anonymous notes the lack of oversight and accountability. “The Departments of Homelessness and Supportive Housing and Public Health are in violation of housing rights and human rights,” she says. “Supportive housing? There is no support. DPH could give a rat’s ass about health. If you’re a woman, your life will be a living hell. No one cares. High functioning people regress. Some want to stay sober, but they can’t. Eventually they pick up a pipe again because almost everyone around them is using.”

There was never any real question about where this was headed. The fact is and always will be that a government bureaucracy tasked with solving a social problem will never solve the problem, and instead will manipulate the problem to increase so as to justify ever increasing amounts of staff and funding for the bureaucracy. Sorry, Mr. Benioff. You may be a very smart guy, and you may be very good at starting and growing a tech company and making a billionaire of yourself. But you don’t understand the first thing about how government spending on social programs works. In that, you have plenty of company from the whole world of progressives and leftists.