SF cos could face homelessness tax

‘Situation dire’

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct 15, (AP): 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 cloud-computing 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.”

Breed

Proposition

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 8,400 workers.

Breed came out hard against the measure, saying it lacked collaboration, could attract homeless people from neighboring counties to the city, and could cost middle-class jobs in retail and service. San Francisco has already dramatically increased spending on homelessness, she said, with no noticeable improvement.

San Francisco spent $380 million of its $10 billion budget last year on services related to homelessness.

“I have to make decisions with my head, not just my heart,” Breed said. “I do not believe doubling what we spend on homelessness without new accountability, when we don’t even spend what we have now efficiently, is good government.”

Cities along the West Coast are grappling with rampant homelessness, driven in part by growing numbers of well-paying tech jobs that price lower-income residents out of tight housing markets. A family of four in San Francisco earning $117,000 is considered low-income.

Business prevailed in Seattle, when leaders in June repealed a peremployee tax that would have raised $50 million a year, 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, however, will vote this fall on a peremployee tax expected to raise $6 million 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-percent tax increase on companies’ revenue above $50 million each year. It was also put on the ballot by citizens, not elected officials.

Online payment processing company Stripe has voiced opposition and contributed $120,000 to the campaign against Proposition C, but other companies have stayed quiet. The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, whose board includes representatives of Microsoft, LinkedIn and Oracle, is leading the fight.

Up to 400 businesses would be affected, with internet and financial services sectors bearing nearly half the cost.

The city says confidentiality precludes revealing tax information, but some of the companies expected to pay the most are big names across major industries.