Good and Hard

267 down, 13,300 to go

San Francisco providing alfresco camping for 300 of its homeless friends, at $61,000 per tent.

Including food, police, and sanitation services. No word whether, like Seattle, they conduct booty bumping meth injection classes; if not, surely that’ll come soon.

In the six "Safe Sleeping Villages" set up by the city of San Francisco during the pandemic, the cost of maintaining a single tent-camping spot is $5,000 per month, or $61,000 per year — more than it would cost to put each of these people in a market-rate apartment.

The insane costs of running these sleeping "villages," which only have space for a total of 262 tents spread across the six sites, makes one immediately think of the criticisms that are leveled against the Homeless Industrial Complex, as conservative commentators are eager to call it. The revelation of the pricetag for the tent program — $16.1 million for the year — came at a budget committee meeting on Wednesday, as the Chronicle reports, via Abigail Stewart-Kahn, the interim director of the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing.

Apparently, supervisors have been operating under the assumption that this program, like the hotel program for the homeless, would get covered by FEMA reimbursement. It turns out, it will not, though Stewart-Kahn said it does qualify as a group shelter.