When the topic of San Francisco’s homelessness problem comes up, there tends to be a lot of fist shaking at the government, capitalism, and society at large. The logic is that the inherent inequities of our economic system will always leave some people empty handed and our governing elites are too greedy to share some of their wealth with the have-nots. In short, there’s not enough resources to go around at the bottom of the ladder.

Given that San Francisco is the richest major city in the richest country in the world, I find that premise to be absurd. In a region hosting multiple trillion dollar companies, each with social justice initiatives rivaling that of a liberal arts college, we face such severe resource scarcity that San Francisco is reputationally synonymous with homelessness?

To quantify this gap, let’s explore the costs of an over simplistic policy: providing every homeless person with free housing and meals. For good measure, let’s set everyone up in a luxury high rise apartment with a rooftop lap pool and a sufficient food budget to buy absurdly priced Sweetgreen salads for every meal. Annually, this would cost:

Housing: $3,000/month x 12 months = $36,000
‍Food: $50/day x 365 days = $18,250
‍Total: $54,250

‍With a homeless population of 8,300, the policy’s total annual cost would be approximately $450 million. That sounds like a big number, until you realize the City of San Francisco’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing’s annual budget is $846.3 million.

Of course, homelessness isn’t nearly that simple—the challenge persists even with housing due to underlying issues like mental health, addiction, and lack of support. Outreach staff, addiction counseling and relocation assistance all costs money. But the sheer scale of our resource abundance compared to our resource needs implies that homelessness is a problem of governance, not resources.

‍Estimating the true cost of resolving San Francisco's homelessness crisis is challenging, as that would require predictability regarding the cost to successfully treat addiction, volume of police staffing needed to deter drug dealing, etc. To err on the side of caution, let's assume it will cost ten times our initial luxury apartment and Sweetgreen budget—$4.5 billion dollars, more than half a million dollars per year for every homeless person on the street.

San Franciscans would almost certainly be happy to shoulder that tax burden, if not of goodwill, then out of self interest. In the past few years, homelessness in the SOMA neighborhood has surged so drastically that it has become a very undesirable place to live. Condos are being listed for 40% below their sale prices from just a few years ago. With ~20,000 residential units in SOMA, that’s more than $9 billion in lost property value, and that’s just within one of San Francisco's 37 neighborhoods. Once you consider the effects on commercial real estate, retail businesses, tourism, and general liveability, $4.5 billion per year seems like a bargain.

Homelessness may be a governance problem, but that’s not to say governance is an easier problem to solve. Implementing the absurd $4.5 billion drug-free luxury apartments and Sweetgreen policy would require you mandate rehab and criminalize living on the streets. You would need to build 8,300 new apartments and countless rooftop pools. Before that, you would need to do battle with an army of NIMBYs who don’t want new apartment buildings to cast a shadow on their backyards. And of course, once homeless people in other cities find out San Francisco is handing out free condos, they’ll come too.

I don’t claim to have a solution to the governance problem. There’s a lot of political philosophy to be debated on the ethics of forced addiction treatment, efficacy of tough on crime policing, and human rights issues of having to eat Sweetgreen, but I know the solution exists. The Singapore’s and Luxembourg’s of the world prove that with abundant resources, homelessness can be solved. We just need to govern.