Helping the homeless in San Francisco

I was at the meetup they held a few weeks ago at Atlassian; probably the most interesting bit to me (as a 10+ year SF resident) was Jeff Kositsky discussion about some of the structural work the city was doing to address the issues -- namely reorganizing three different groups into one, streamlining data collection and reporting, and trying to get services more accessible.

> We spend a lot of time in San Francisco and Silicon Valley thinking about ways to make people’s lives easier. And through that innovation, we’ve uncovered amazing opportunities – just think about life before Google Maps! But what if we aimed just 1% of that focus of looking out on what we can invent, in on what we can improve? What if we partnered with folks like those at ECS to match their decades of experience on issues like homelessness with our super powers in technology, software development, marketing, design and data sciences. What if we worked together – imagine all the good we could do.

Perhaps this is a failure of my imagination, or perhaps I'm misinterpreting the message, but this sounds to me like the author is inviting us to solve SF homelessness using technology.

Software is a set of tools for gathering and organizing data, but the problem of homelessness is a problem of budget and political will, not data.

If you took 1% of the software developers in SF and had them organize all of the data on homelessness, it would only document the magnitude of the problem. ("Big!")

Fundamentally, there just isn't enough political will today to buy shelter (and mental-health service) for everybody who needs it.

Even if someone could afford to buy enough land to build enough shelter, the residents of the city of SF won't let you build that many homes for the homeless in their backyard.

A data-driven political campaign might do the trick, but it really might not, and regardless that's really quite a different proposal from "why don't we use technology to solve the problem of homelessness?"

Am I wrong? Do we really just need to write a few good apps to solve this problem?!

I feel like the best thing Bay Area tech companies could do to help with homelessness is to use their influence to fix zoning and transit.

Granted this is short of them getting involved in campaigning for things like universal health care, better mental health facilities, drug decriminaiation, and other such issues that are harder to touch. But the impact of lowering overall housing costs would help many. And the reduced housing costs would reduce the demand for stupidly high tech wages helping with the inequality in the Bay Area.

CEOs of these tech companies must live in bubbles to not see the threat that Bay Area housing costs have to their business.

Since when did we start referring to ourselves as "the tech elite"? This seems like the wrong way to frame the problem, or our relation to it.

(Blog author here) Every three years, SF asks volunteers to walk around the city and physically tally up people they see living on the street using clipboards. Agencies like ECS have no way to communicate progress, numbers, or success/failures with one another, and the city has no visibility into the actual movement of people between services. I'm not suggesting a few good apps would help at all. In fact, the opposite. I'm saying that we spend too much time creating net new things, like apps, and not enough time partnering with the people that are actually working on the solution. The new department of homelessness is taking on "data consolidation and collaboration" as one of their big initiatives, yet they aren't working with tech companies that are experts in that area.

My point: no one is talking to one another and using our shared skills to actually affect change.