JustADad

San Francisco’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH) has seen a sharp uptick in funding since 2020. Much of the revenue came from 2018's Prop C, a tax targeting SF tech companies. Voters were assured the measure would reduce homelessness with a minimal impact on jobs. For example: • SF city economist Ted Egan told Curbed SF in Sept 2018 that Prop C would reduce homelessness and result in a 0.1 percent decline in employment growth • In an Oct 2018 NYTimes op-ed, Marc Benioff wrote that "[Prop C] funding will address the [homeless] crisis from every angle.” But since the tax went into effect, a larger budget for HSH hasn’t translated into fewer homeless in SF. Instead, according to newly released data, the city’s overall homeless population has increased by 7% since 2022. And an audit of the HSH from earlier this month found HSH continues to fail to adequately track how it's spending money. At the same time, a number of tech companies have left the city, significantly reduced their SF headcounts, or vacated their SF offices. These include Stripe, Block, Paypal, Coinbase, Credit Karma, Meta, Snap, and ironically, Salesforce. Between Feb 2023 and Feb 2024 alone, San Francisco and San Mateo counties lost 14,300 information sector jobs. “Tech is actually much worse than [projected] before,” Egan told The Standard in March. “There’s no sign of it recovering at this point.” Read @metaversehell's postmortem on Prop C's massive failure on the site today ⬇️