San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

by Michael Shellenberger

And yet most influential homelessness advocacy organizations are not service providers, and have small budgets. The annual revenue of Jennifer Friedenbach’s Coalition on Homelessness, the most influential homelessness advocacy organization in San Francisco, was just $656,892, according to its most recently available tax filing.7 To put that number in context, consider that the annual revenues of the Nature Conservancy and the National Rifle Association were $1.2 billion and $353 million, respectively, in 2018.8 As such, advocates for the homeless would not be so successful in passing ballot measures, raising taxes, and increasing funding for homelessness programs if voters didn’t support spending more money on the problem. If voters thought the homelessness industrial complex was causing more harm than good—enabling addiction and overdoses, for example, rather than preventing them—they would not have voted to keep giving them more money over the past thirty years. The problem, in other words, isn’t coming from within the homeless industrial complex. It’s coming from within ourselves.