Mayor, Salesforce to help homeless

$30 million program would help get families off the streets in S.F.

San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee is working with technology-industry leaders to raise $30 million for a program aimed at getting homeless families off the streets, seeking to alleviate a problem made worse by soaring housing costs as the city’s economy booms.

Marc Benioff, chief executive officer of Salesforce.com Inc. and a prominent philanthropist in the city, plans to match $10 million in donations for the campaign. The venture already has secured about $10 million from donors including Salesforce and Google’s philanthropic arms; Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife, Cari Tuna; Zendesk CEO Mikkel Svane; angel investor Ron Conway; and the Hellman Foundation, a charity founded by the family of the late financier Warren Hellman.

The mayor is working with private philanthropy to try to eradicate family homelessness, which grew in the last recession and has been slow to recover as real estate prices jumped and widened an income equality gap. The program, called the Heading Home Campaign, seeks to assist as many as 800 families in the city’s school district with immediate housing and subsidies.

“This is the private-sector community engaging in a problem they see every day — homelessness — and they want to try and solve it,” Lee said in a statement. “They want to be leaders in a city that stands by its values.”

Lee is credited with creating a tax break that led a young Twitter Inc. to remain in San Francisco and drew in other companies, revitalizing an impoverished city corridor yet also fueling backlash against the tech community. The ensuing boom has drawn protests over evictions, housing costs and techcompany commuter buses that ferry their workers between San Francisco and Silicon Valley.