On Tuesday, dozens of people gathered on the steps of City Hall to call attention to the Lurie Administration’s moves to criminalize homelessness. The administration is closing shelters, cutting down on Permanent Supportive Housing, and redirecting resources to law-enforcement.
“He could take the money he’s spending on criminalization and spend it on housing,” Kema Straker, a harm-reduction specialist at the Coalition on Homelessness, said.
Speaker after speaker talked about the brutality of life on the streets and the lasting harm of the sweeps. “This city in not trying to solve homelessness,” said Apple Cronk, who lived on the streets for eight years. “They just want to erase visible poverty from rich neighborhoods and business corridors.”
The reality, Cronk said, is that police are expensive, and using teams of cops to roust the unhoused is both cruel and a waste of money.
It was just one of what will be a series of demonstrations over the next few weeks as activists from a wide range of organizations protest Lurie’s budget proposal, which diverts massive resources from social services and health care to law enforcement.
Lurie was booed when he arrived in the Castro for Pride Month kickoff, as activists noted that his budget makes deep cuts in HIV prevention services.
The People’s Budget Coalition has compiled a detailed list of all the pending cuts—and it’s alarming. Some 300 city employees have already lost their jobs, and hundreds more vacant positions won’t be filled. That’s just the start: Since nonprofits provide many city services, and those contracts are facing deep cuts, somewhere between 500 and 1,000 nonprofit workers will likely lose their jobs, Anya Worley-Ziegmann, coalition coordinator, told me.
The mayor’s budget will cost more jobs than the city economist said would be lost if the Overpaid CEO tax, which the mayor opposed, had passed.
Here’s a detailed list, but let’s just look at a few of the most glaring examples:
The Department of Public Health will lose a total of $62 million. Overall, homelessness prevention and solutions will lose $14.7 million. HIV services will lose $4.5 million.
The little things will make a huge difference:
Glide Foundation loses its Workforce Navigator program:
GLIDE’s Workforce Navigator provides one-on-one and group support to clients engaging in workforce readiness, job placement, and career development services. Based in the Tenderloin/SOMA; 105 community members will lose services and 1 worker will lose their job.
Senior and Disability Action will lose its Homecare Advocacy Contract: Homecare Advocacy Contract: This program covers our Healthcare Action Team and our In-Home Care Stakeholder Workgroup, both of which involve leadership development and organizing for the protection and expansion of homecare programs so seniors and disabled people can live independently in the community. 2 workers will lose their jobs.
The Department of the Environment is, for all practical purposes, gone: SF Environment’s General Fund Support has been cut by 80% since FY 22-23. SFE’s GFS supports Climate Action Plan implementation, the Climate Equity Hub, EV charging installation, and biodiversity and habitat restoration. Launched in April 2024 by SFE, health professionals, contractors, and industry and community partners, the Climate Equity Hub provides technical assistance, education, and workforce development services that support citywide electrification.
This is a 40% cut to the entire department – of which only a small part is dedicated to achieving all CAP goals. That small part will be almost 100% wiped out and all progress, benefitting frontline communities in particular, will stop.
HOMEY loses $281,000 that went for Case management, life skills and job readiness development, food support, outreach, and job training to support families and Transitional Aged Youth, as well as formerly incarcerated individuals. This program has served 92 low-income, immigrant, Latinx families and youth will be impacted. 2 FTE potential layoffs.
The Southeast Geriatric Clinic will close:
Southeast Mission Geriatric Clinic w/UCSF: This clinic serves approximately 200 seniors per year with 8.75 FTE (11 staff) providing specialized geriatric and behavioral health services in the Mission. Closure will require seniors to transition to other clinics, risking disruption in care for a medically vulnerable population.
The SF AIDS Foundation loses a key harm-reduction program: Mobile Safe Supplies Access: This partnership between SF AIDS Foundation and Harm Reduction Therapy Center provides outdoor health supplies that reduce HIV transmission and support San Francisco’s Getting to Zero commitments. The cut would eliminate this service entirely, limiting access to sterile syringes and other health supplies for people who use drugs.
The list goes on and on.
So does the misinformation.
My social media feeds are filled with posts that say San Francisco’s budget is “bloated,” that the city spends more per-capita than most other city, and that there must be terrible mismanagement here.
There is, indeed, mismanagement and waste in San Francisco. There is no such thing as a $16 billion budget, in the public sector or the private sector, that doesn’t have some waste. (A friend who worked for a prominent US business for many years, including in management, told me once that he was proud he never fired anyone: “This is a big corporation, and we can always find something for someone to do to keep their job, even if they aren’t really good at anything.” His reviews always cited his exceptional management skills.)
But that’s not the point. Let’s look at some comments:
San Francisco’s government is bringing in a staggering $20,000 to $24,000 per capita, with an annual budget of roughly $16 billion spread across a population of around 750,000 to 830,000 residents. This per-capita government revenue and spending is among the highest in the country, dwarfing the figures of other major municipalities. Yet despite that we have a close to a billion deficit. How is that possible? Perhaps we have an issue of mismanagement?
I have heard this argument many times before. Joe Eskenazi, who now works for Mission Local, did a long piece in 2010 saying the SF was the worst run city in the US, citing the per-capita costs of public services.
I worked with an intern who had extensive background in economics, and we proved him largely wrong. I have reprinted my Bay Guardian story below. Then we all went on Forum and debated it.
Good times.
Some important points on the cost of local government: SF is a city and county, the only one in CA, so handles two types of government expenses. We have both a sheriff and a police department; no other city in California pays for both. You get arrested in the city of LA, the LA County sheriff holds you in jail; the LA County district attorney prosecutes you. The LA County public defender takes your case. None of that is in the LA City budget.
People who live in Berkeley and Oakland take AC Transit to get around. AC Transit is a distinct agency, with its own board and budget. That doesn’t show up in the budget of Alameda County’s cities. In SF, Muni is entirely a city and county agency, and every penny it costs is in the city budget.
We run a massive public hospital and a skilled nursing facility; both bring in much of their budget from Medicare and insurance, but the full cost—not adjusted for revenue, that’s another line—is still in the city “budget.”
We run an airport, that costs the taxpayers nothing; the full $1.5 billion budget is paid for by the airlines. But it’s still in the city “budget.”
Philadelphia is also a city and county, with an airport (run by a separate authority—not in the city budget) and a robust transit system (run by the Southeast Pennsylvania Transit Authority, so full cost is not in the Philly city budget).
New York has two airports, under the budget of the Port Authority of New York—not in the city budget.
You get the point: For a lot of technical reasons, San Francisco counts as part of its budget a lot of things that other cities provide, but that aren’t in the municipal fund.
We have to pay city workers well, or we wouldn’t have any: Three tech booms embraced by two generations of mayors have driven up the cost of living so high that teachers, cops, firefighters and other crucial workers can’t live here on “ordinary” civil service pay. Meanwhile, 60 billionaires live here and pay the city very little in taxes (thanks to Prop. 13, many pay only a tiny fraction of the worth of their homes in property taxes.)
If you actually do the math, and I have done this, when you remove SFO, the Port, SF General’s Medicare funding, etc., SF’s budget per capita is about the same as most large cities.
Meanwhile, San Francisco has, with about the same money as other large cities, taken on a lot of things that the federal government used to fund, like affordable housing, HIV services, public health for indigent people, and public education. (The SF Public Schools are not in the city budget, nor is City College, but the city’s General Fund gives money to both.)
You want to look at “waste?” The most overpaid city employees are not providing social services. They are cops and deputy sheriffs, making so much money on overtime that it’s hard to believe they could possibly work that money hours.
So the budget is not about waste and bloat; it’s about priorities. Lurie wants cops and “clean” streets to serve the technorati, not the working people who live here.
A final note: The city’s budget deficit, including Muni’s deficit, could easily be eliminated with a simple city income tax on the top 5,000 richest residents.
Here, since the web links went down when the former owners closed the Bay Guardian, is the text of our story from 2010:
The truth about San Francisco’s budget
Guess what? SF actually spends about what other big cities do
By Melanie Ruiz and Tim Redmond
“San Francisco,” SF Weekly recently proclaimed, “is arguably the worst-run big city in America.” That’s a hell of a claim — the levels of corruption and mismanagement in urban America are legendary. But the Weekly‘s Benjamin Wachs and Joe Eskenazi set out to prove their case — with a series of mostly anecdotal points that looked at the usual targets: Nonprofits. Unions. And one senior Newsom administration staffer who pretty much everyone agrees was a horrible manager.
We were tempted to just let it go. Sure, there’s plenty of incompetence and waste in the Newsom administration. There’s a need for more accountability in some of the nonprofits that get city money. The police union got too big a raise in 2007.
That pattern also exists in a lot of other big cities. You wanna make a big headline by claiming SF is the very worst? Whatever.
But the heart of the Weekly‘s factual analysis was a chart that purports to show that San Francisco spends vastly more per capita than other “comparable” cities. That’s a claim we hear all the time, one that the more conservative political forces constantly use to argue against higher taxes (and in favor of big spending cuts). So it’s worth exploring a little further. Because when you look at all the facts, the Weekly analysis is just wrong.
Comparing cities is a complex task — urban areas in America are governed in very different ways. You can’t, for example, compare San Francisco to any other city in California because San Francisco is the only combined city and county. Get arrested in Berkeley, and the Alameda County sheriff locks you up, the Alameda County district attorney prosecutes you, the Alameda County public defender takes your case, and the Alameda County courts adjudicate it. And if you win, you ride home on AC Transit — a separate system that isn’t in the budget of either the city or the county.
In San Francisco, all those things are in the same city budget.
But Wachs and Eskenazi decided to get beyond that. “Any time someone tries to point out that San Francisco has serious systemic problems, the response (from the Mayor’s Office, from city bureaucrats, and sometimes even from city activists) is that ‘San Francisco is both a city and a county,’ as if that explained everything,” Wachs told us in an e-mail. ”So the comparison was already being made as part of the city’s defense: San Francisco is a city-county, and what appear to be systemic problems are actually just features of being a city-county.
“We proved that isn’t the case: San Francisco’s per capita spending is significantly out of line even when compared to other large city-counties.”
Actually, it’s more than just the city-county distinction. The large cities-counties SF Weekly chose are so dramatically different in the services they do — and don’t — provide that the comparison comes close to being meaningless. Ken Bruce, a partner in the Harvey Rose Accountancy Firm, which serves as San Francisco’s budget analyst and does similar work in other cities, is no fan of wasteful spending. But he told us he wasn’t impressed with the Weekly chart: “I have yet to see a rigorous analysis done comparing San Francisco to other cities,” he said.
And the way the Weekly added up the numbers was, at best, misleading.
For starters, San Francisco runs (and includes in its city budget) an airport, port, public transit system, county hospital, and skilled nursing facility (Laguna Honda), for a total of more than $2 billion. None of the comparison cities do all those things. Or rather, some do those same things — but they aren’t in the local budget.
In Philadelphia, for example, the public transit system is a regional agency. Philly chips in $63 million from its general fund to help the Southeast Pennsylvania Transit Authority (SEPTA). SF pays almost three times that much to run its own Muni, because the overhead costs are included in the local budget. Philly taxpayers spend much more than $63 million on SEPTA — it just comes out of a different budget and funding stream, so it isn’t in the figures the Weekly used. Denver’s transit system is regional too, and thus not in the city-county budget.
In Indianapolis, the city transit system, Indygo, is far less complicated than ours. Jenny Brown, a spokesperson for Indygo, told us she was amazed her city was being compared to San Francisco: “Our transit system is not in the same league as yours,” she said.
Philadelphia also does not pay for a county hospital or include its port or airport in its budget. Neither does Denver.
There’s also a difference in most municipalities between the general fund (locally allocated spending) and the total budget, which includes federal and state money, self-sustaining departments, etc. In Philadelphia that’s a big distinction — more than $3 billion a year — but the Weekly compared Philly’s general fund to SF’s total budget (something Wachs admitted to us was his mistake).
So we took this a step further. First, in Chart A, we compare apples to apples — general funds to general funds. It turns out SF and Philly are relatively close in per capita spending. Then we adjusted the budgets to account for the fact that SF includes in its budget a lot of services other cities and counties budget somewhere else. That makes all the comparison cities a lot closer.
But can you really compare San Francisco — with its diverse and complex population and urban problems — to Indianapolis or Nashville? Even Denver? If even the folks in Indianapolis think that’s kind of bogus, we figured we could do better. So we set out to find some cities that make a more fair comparison. We included Philadelphia, but added Los Angeles and Chicago (New York, by the way, is so big, so complex, and has so many counties, boroughs, and budget items, that it’s not fair to compare that city to any other — even though is would help our case). To account for the city-county issue, we added to the L.A. and Chicago city budgets a percentage of the L.A. County and Cook County, Ill. spending equal to each city’s percentage of the county population. (Not a perfect yardstick, but pretty close).
As Chart C shows, all four big cities are within about 30 percent of each other in terms of per capita spending.
But there’s another big factor — cost of living. The vast majority of the budgets of these cities goes to employee pay and benefits — and it stands to reason that a city with a higher cost of living would have to pay its employees more. And San Francisco has by far the highest cost of living (according to the latest figures from the Council for Community and Economic Research’s ACCRA Cost of Living Index) of all the cities in this chart.
So we adjusted per capita spending by the cost of living index (SF = 169, L.A. 145.4; Philadelphia, 124.1; and Chicago, 110.8) and discovered that in fact all four big cities spend roughly the same per capita — although San Francisco spends the least.
So is San Francisco a service-rich city (like L.A., Philadelphia, and Chicago)? Absolutely. Is SF’s spending far out of whack with what other similar municipalities spend? No, not at all. All things considered, it’s a little low.
PS: The Weekly spent much of its article attacking the lack of accountability in the city’s $500 million’ worth of nonprofit spending. That’s a huge issue, but oddly, the Weekly didn’t quote a single person who supports the system San Francisco uses to distribute services through nonprofits.
We’ve been critical of many individual nonprofits, and some are over-funded, wasteful, and of dubious value. But overall, as labor activist Robert Haaland told us: “The fact that an individual nonprofit isn’t performing up to standard doesn’t mean that the services aren’t needed.”
And there are many who say the San Francisco model is, in fact, a national standard. Margaret Brodkin, former director of the Mayor’s Office for Children, Youth, and Families, helped develop the current system of nonprofit accountability in that office. She has been invited to speak all over the country about the standards and data system they developed. “Others have replicated the data system we had in place. It’s held up as a national model, the data system as well as the standards,” she explained.
So it’s not so simple — and to use a few anecdotes and some inaccurate and misleading figures to call San Francisco the worst managed city in the nation is, well, a bit of a stretch. To say the least.
