surprise, surprise, surprise......
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Shocking no one, a grim new
report from San Francisco's civil grand jury concludes that insanely expensive local spending on homelessness is being wasted on failed programs and ineffective nonprofit groups.
"San Francisco spends roughly $700 million annually on homelessness, and its Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing ('HSH') administers nearly $500 million on nonprofit contracts to deliver services each year, yet this system has gaps that jeopardize safety, accountability, and results," the report says.
The most recent count from the city puts San Francisco's homeless population in the neighborhood of 8,000 people on a typical night, though that number is much lower than the estimate of people who are homeless at some point during the year and eligible for city homeless services. A 2025 city report draws the distinction between numbers like this:

You can do the math either way: $700 million to support about 8,000 people who are homeless on any given night, or $700 million to support a varying population that slips in and out of homelessness and adds up to about 27,000 people. It's a lot of money either way, but it's a little over $87,000 per person if you take the point-in-time count of around 8,000. (Recent news reports on the city's claims that its homeless count just hit the lowest level in fifteen years are mostly a word game about "unsheltered" homelessness.)
Taking the higher number, the grand jury finds the heart of the problem by identifying the service model: "HSH was created in 2016 to bring unity and simplified accountability to the City's homelessness programs, and it now serves roughly 27,000 people per year with a nearly 100% outsourced model through a network of nonprofit service providers."
The money is public, but the service providers are private non-profit corporations.
A local government spends hundreds of millions of dollars on the homeless through a giant network of NGOs, and no one is really watching them. As the grand jury describes the city's homelessness agency, underselling the point, "its functional oversight is weak."
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