City may adopt tax to combat 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.” 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 downtown area, the frail and sick shuffle along in wheelchairs or stumble around, sometimes half-clothed.

The situation has become so dire that a coalition of activists collected enough signatures to put a measure on the city’s Nov. 6 ballot that 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. Proposition C would raise $300 million a year, nearly doubling what the city already spends to combat homelessness.

“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 $10 million 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.”

“We have to do it. We have to try something,” said Sunshine Powers, who owns a tie-dye boutique, Love on Haight, in the city’s historic Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. “If my community is bad, nobody is going to want to come here.”