Homelessness surges in San Francisco while tech's richest grow richer

[turbinetree]

San Francisco saw a 17% increase in its homeless population since its last homeless count, with numbers rising to levels that haven’t been recorded on these streets in 17 years.

The increase comes amid an IPO boom in a tech industry that has the city’s rich growing richer, the wealth disparities starker and the cost of living more unaffordable than ever.

“The cost of housing hasn’t gone down, so why does anyone expect that the amount of people experiencing homelessness would go down?” said Kelley Cutler, the human rights organizer for the Coalition on Homelessness.

The city released a preliminary summary of its one-night street count on Thursday, tallying the number of homeless people at 8,011. The uptick, according to the mayor’s office, came primarily from people living in their cars, who totaled 68% of those counted.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/16/san-francisco-homeless-increase-tech-ipo

-snip-

In November, the city passed a measure that will implement an average 0.5% gross receipts tax for companies with revenues over $50m. The measure was hotly contested within the tech industry, with tech billionaires publicly clashing over the industry’s role in creating the economic disparities driving the homeless crisis.

Proposition C is expected to raise an estimated $250m-$300m in additional revenue for homeless services, but is currently tied up in the courts.

The city has promised to increase the number of shelter beds by 1,000, but one proposed homeless shelter, approved by authorities in the city’s waterfront neighborhood, will also be tied up in legal disputes by the neighborhood residents who raised more than $101,000 in a crowdfunding campaign to pay for an attorney to fight the construction of the Navigation Center.


Hey tech industry some of your organizations paid zilch, nada, zero in taxes, like Amazon............................and to have 0.5% gross sales receipt added to pay for your Bullshit of the have's against the have not's is justified.............................I think you should be taxed at 2% like Warren says...........................and as for the assholes that crowdfunded to pay for fight over the center.................you really can go fuck yourselves....................you really think the center will drive your property prices down........................your built on a earthquake zone.....................I know I use to live there.........................ever think of why your land is so expensive..........................you live on a earthquake zone, no matter how much you harden the buildings.....................

[real Cannabis calm]

1. good O.P. title; but why are all the............. there?

[VarryOn]

2. I've always loved visiting SF...

But news about their problems over the last few years would make me hesitate going anytime soon. It would seem to me that adding more beds and servicea for the homeless will incent more homeless to go there to be taken care of. Ultimately, the cost of living has to be addressed so more people are better able to afford housing.

Certainly, the tech companies, who've created much of the demand for housing and infrastructure, need to be paying taxes. And if it causes them to pack up and leave, that helps free up housing.

Local govts could help too by being more accommodating to those wanting to build more housing.

[DFW]

3. San Francisco has a geography problem that makes the situation worse.

San Francisco is located on an asparagus tip of a peninsula of land, surrounded by ocean on three sides. There is no place to expand. In Dallas, we just go half a mile farther out into the prairie to relieve pressure. In San Francisco, there is ever more money bidding for a never-increasing amount of living space. It's a problem I would not want to be saddled with solving.

[TexasBlueDog]

4. Hey Tex

I'm a long time proponent of taking the massive amount of land owned by the feds, the city and state and building affordable housing well as permanent facilities for the homeless. Can you imagine what they could do with the Presidio?

In the meantime, whoever proposed 'poo buses' to take the homeless to the campus' of google, facebook, twitter and the rest of the tech giants so hey can do their business in their parking lots has my vote for mayor. lol

Let the uber wealthy learn the joys of turd dodging.

[DFW]

5. Whether money or land (or family members, for that matter)

I have never been a big fan of "I'm taking this away from you because I know better what to do with it than you do." Remember, I live in Germany now, and they had a bunch of people running this country about 80 years ago that did just that to people they didn't like. It left rather a bitter aftertaste. The devil is always in the details. "Take" the land owned by the city and state and Feds? OK, but then what? WHO does the taking? WHO builds the "affordable" housing? WHO decides what's affordable? And WHO suffers the financial loss when the reasonable rents don't cover the costs of building and maintaining these residences? California already has the highest state taxes in the country. The nasty aspect of this otherwise noble concept is that the financial burden risks being greater than the "uber-wealthy" people's capacity to pay for it, even if you institute NSDAP-style "Enteignung." There is always the idea of ceasing the transfer of wealth from giver states (like California) to taker states. But that would just encourage an influx of impoverished crackers from Mississippi to join the indigenous homeless already sleeping in their cars in the Presidio.

The trouble with the poo busses, is that all these HQs of the tech giants are all way outside the city in the Valley. Housing there doesn't seem to be much more affordable than it is in the city, of course. I have a nephew who went to Stanford, and liked the area so much that he wanted to stay there. He met a girl, got married, has a 5 year old son, but can't afford anything bigger in Palo Alto than the tiny apartment he rented many years ago, and it's barely big enough to have half the grandparents over for coffee. I don't know how normal mortals handle the cost of living out there. Commuting from Fresno doesn't seem very practical. It makes my elder daughter scraping by to make ends meet in Manhattan seem like a life of luxury by comparison (it helps to be a pretty European blonde that gets invited out a lot).

What I wonder about is where all the normal mortals live whose work is necessarily in the city? Cops, sanitation workers, salespeople in Ghirardelli, even the street performers at Fisherman's Wharf. With the cost of housing, they can't be making enough to live anywhere near the city of San Francisco, but they can't ALL be commuting 90 minutes to work and back every day. Or can they? They do in Tokyo, after all.

[TexasBlueDog]

6. SF is pretty happy with itself. :)

I have never been a big fan of "I'm taking this away from you because I know better what to do with it than you do. Isn't that pretty much the definition of the high tax solution?

My post was nothing more than a public shaming of the 'Progressives' who control SF who have no intention of solving either the homeless or housing problems. The very idea of turning over public land for housing developments would never happen. A strong case could be made they simply don't want poor people living in the city. Cops, maids, waiters can go live 'over there' whoever that may be. There's several YT vids of developers efforts to create more housing in SF (

).

The homeless problem will be solved the day it no longer serves a political purpose. I think it's useful for increasing taxes and dimming he outcry for more inner city development, who wants to seriously consider restructuring the city with people crapping and shooting up everywhere?

SF has it's problems because it allows them to exist and they serve long con aims,

[DFW]

7. I see the high tax solution as the opposite

I see the ADDITIOJNAL tax solution as the worm in the cake. California has high taxes already, and where some people leave because of it, plenty of gazillionaires are cool with it, because they like living there more than they want to whine about the tax rate. It's the "wait, we left you with too much, we're taking more" attitudes that I think risk making some important ones balk. France has high taxes, too, but the only one that causes people to cheat or leave is when the state imposes a wealth tax (which they do) on top of money already taxed. That's what causes uber-wealthy French people to move to Monaco or Geneva (I've met both types). The German Supreme Court axed a supplemental wealth tax because the German constitution forbids double taxation (seems the Nazis were good at it). They in essence said the government could up the tax rate to their hearts' delight, but once that was set, that was it. Actually, when East Germany joined, they put on an income tax "solidarity supplement" which was to disappear when East Germany was fully integrated. Well, they now are, but the supplement is still there. Government heroin, just like the VAT. Once addicted, they can't kick the habit, but at least it's for everyone in each bracket. Low brackets hardly notice it, upper brackets get whacked for an extra 5%.

Germany is still the only major country running a budget surplus here, and they don't even have any oil. France, Italy, Belgium, Spain, Greece, all of them have higher taxes and massive deficits. They just have impossibly bloated bureaucracies that cost the people more than they are worth. Again--government heroin. They award their ex-politicians huge tax-free pensions and perks, and for some reason, they rarely pass up the opportunity. Big exception--German ex Social Democratic Chancellor Gerhard Schröder took a job with Russia's Gazprom at such an astronomic salary that the government pension he would have gotten tax free would have been peanuts compared with his Gazprom earnings after taxes.

I don't see San Francisco as getting any advantages out having homeless or increasing their numbers. What ANY city needs is an incentive to help them, be it economic (street crime and/or aggressive panhandlers inducing people to move away) or social (shame/harm to the reputation and thus tourist trade) or. Here in Germany, almost any town has its own Obdachlosensiedlung, which is basically "homeless shelter." My wife was a social worker here before she retired. She worked with difficult long-term unemployed of all ages. She said one of the best incentives to get lazy youth to train for a job (many Russian immigrants were indoctrinated at home to think life was for free in the Golden West) was to bring them on a tour of one of these shelters.

I can't imagine any right wing aims, long term or short, that include having large numbers of homeless roaming their streets. Indeed, I can better imagine the radical right wanting far away detention centers for them (for profit, run by their friends, and paid for at ridiculous rates by tax money, of course) so they wouldn't be seen at all.

[Tipperary]

8. "It helps to be a pretty European blonde that (who)

gets invited out a lot.”

WTH does that even mean?

[DFW]

9. It means, quite simply:

My daughter, born and raised here in Germany, and lucky enough to have inherited much my wife's genetic make-up, has worked on the lower rungs of the fashion business in Manhattan for ten years. She has had the good fortune to get invited out to dinner receptions and events put on by her business. Some local bars also comped her to food and drink. They were blatantly out for some attractive window dressing, and it meant a lot of food expenses she did not have to contend with out of her own pocket. No one asked for anything more than that, and so she was cool with it, as her salary didn't permit both the rent for a decent place and a generous food budget.