Was the Tent Included?

City homeless encampment on Gough (Chron photo)

Headline: S.F. pays $61,000 a year for one tent in a site to shelter the homeless. Why?

San Francisco is paying $16.1 million to shelter homeless people in 262 tents placed in empty lots around the city where they also get services and food — a steep price tag that amounts to more than $61,000 per tent per year...

The annual cost of one spot in one site is 2½ times the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco.

The arithmetic: a 1 BR apartment rents for $2,033 per month while the monthly cost of a tent site is $5,083.

The Chronicle article cites four reasons for the high costs:

hastily built encampments;

failure to send contracts out for bid;

hooking up water and electricity;

round-the-clock security.

We are not overly condemnatory of the immense sums that were spent during the first year of the coronavirus pandemic when lives and livelihoods were endangered. Undoubtedly, there was waste, profligacy, and profiteering in addition to courage, self-sacrifice, and severe financial hardship.

Now that normalcy is returning, $61,000 per tent per year is not "normal," is not sustainable, and is precisely the wrong message to be sending to those who need to get off the couch and go back to work.