San Francisco to vote on tax to tackle homelessness
San Francisco has come to be known around the world as a place for aggressive panhandling, open-air drug use and sprawling tent camps, the dirt and despair all the more remarkable for the city’s immense wealth.
Some streets are so filthy that officials launched a special “poop patrol”, and a young tech worker created “Snapcrap” — an app to report the filth. Morning commuters walk briskly past homeless people huddled against subway walls. In the city’s squalid down-town sector, the frail and sick shuffle along in wheelchairs or stumble around, sometimes halfclothed.
The situation has become so dire that a coalition of activists has collected enough signatures to put a measure on the city’s November 7 midterm election ballot. Proposition C would tax hundreds of San Francisco’s wealthiest companies to help thousands of homeless and mentally ill residents, an effort that failed earlier this year in Seattle.
San Francisco’s measure is expected to raise US$300 million ($461.4m) a year, nearly doubling what the city already spends.
Up to 400 businesses would be affected, with internet and financial services sectors bearing nearly half the cost.
“This is the worst it’s ever been,” says Marc Benioff, founder of cloudcomputing giant Salesforce and a fourth-generation San Franciscan, who is supporting the measure even though his company would pay an additional US$10m a year if it passes. “Nobody should have to live like this. They don’t need to live like this. We can get this under control.”
The proposition is the latest battle between big business and social services advocates who demand that corporate America pay to solve inequities exacerbated by its success. In San Francisco, it’s also become an intriguing fight between recently elected Mayor London Breed, who is siding with the city’s Chamber of Commerce in urging a no vote, and philanthropist Benioff, whose company is San Francisco’s largest private employer with 8400 workers.
Breed came out hard against the measure, saying it lacked collaboration, could attract homeless people from neighbouring counties,
and could cost middle-class jobs in retail and service. The city has already dramatically increased spending on homelessness, she said, with no noticeable improvement.
San Francisco spent US$380m of its US$10 billion budget last year on services related to homelessness.
“I have to make decisions with my head, not just my heart,” Breed said.
Cities along the West Coast are grappling with rampant homelessness, driven in part by growing numbers of well-paying tech jobs that price lowerincome residents out of tight housing markets.
Business prevailed in Seattle, when leaders in June repealed a peremployee tax that would have raised US$50m, after Amazon and Starbucks pushed back. In July, the city council of Cupertino in Silicon Valley scuttled a similar head tax after opposition from its largest employer, Apple Inc.
Mountain View residents will vote on a per-employee tax expected to raise US$6m a year, largely from Google, for transit projects.
The San Francisco measure is different in that it would levy the tax mostly by revenue rather than by number of employees — an average half-per cent tax increase on companies’ revenue above US$50m each year. It was also put on the ballot by citizens, not elected officials.
At least half of the new revenue would go toward permanent housing, and at least a quarter to services for people with severe behavioural issues. A 2017 one-night count found an estimated 7500 people without permanent shelter in San Francisco.
More than half had lived in the city for at least a decade.
Tracey Mixon and her daughter, Maliya, 8, are among the hidden homeless.
Mixon, 47, a San Francisco native, lives and works in the notoriously dangerous and drug-infested Tenderloin neighbourhood. They were forced out of their rental this summer, partly because the company that managed her property lost its federal accreditation, she said on a recent afternoon while working a crossing guard shift.
One of the hardest parts was finding a place to go for the day when mother and daughter were kicked out of an overnight-only emergency shelter.
“I have to shield her from people that are using drugs,” she said of her daughter. “I have to shield her from people who might be fighting.”