San Franciscos latest attempt to confront its entrenched homelessness crisis now includes an interactive online tool designed to expose the hard trade-offs buried inside the citys billion?dollar policy choices.
San Francisco Homelessness Oversight Commission member Sharky Laguana has launched a public website that allows residents to test different homelessness strategies and see how policy decisions ripple through the system. According to WND, the project reflects growing frustration among taxpayers who have watched spending soar while street encampments, open-air drug use, and public disorder remain stubbornly visible in one of Americas most progressive cities.
Upon opening Laguanas site, users are guided through a tutorial explaining how the interactive tools function, with two toggleable models: permanent supportive housing and public health allocation trade-offs. The simulation draws on data from the citys Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, with Laguana telling the San Francisco Standard that the models are not magic solutions but are meant to clarify how the system actually operates.
I am the elected data officer for the San Francisco Homeless Oversight Commission, and this is my report, which is going to try and take a big picture look at how people flow into and out of the services that we provide to the homeless population here in San Francisco. San Franciscos homeless population has been roughly 8,000 people for several years now, Laguana states in the intro of his video. He frames the project as an effort to move the debate away from slogans and toward measurable outcomes, a shift many conservatives have long argued is necessary after years of ideology-driven policymaking.
Our budget for homelessness has increased significantly during this time, so why are we not seeing reduced homelessness? To answer that question, we need to first understand that were actually talking about a lot more than 8,000 people, Laguana adds. His point underscores a reality often ignored in progressive rhetoric: the visible homeless count on any given night masks a much larger churn of individuals cycling through shelters, hotels, and city-funded programs.
The core function of the models is to let users see how supportive housing capacity, the number of units added each year, monthly inflow and outflow of residents, and the average length of stay interact over time. By adjusting those variables, the tool makes clear that simply throwing more money at permanent housing without addressing throughput and personal responsibility will not solve the problem.
As reported by the Standard, the results show that shorter stays combined with lower inflow lead to a smaller occupancy rate, freeing up more units for those in immediate need. In the public health allocation model, the trade-offs demonstrate that the more people the city attempts to serve with a limited budget, the less each individual receives in terms of intensity and quality of care.
Our inflow is increasing faster than our outflow. This is not sustainable over the long run. Weve been able to keep the homeless population stable by increasing our budgets, which has allowed us to provide more services and more housing to more people. But the picture for future budget increases looks tough, Laguana states within his site video. His warning highlights a basic fiscal reality: even deep-blue San Francisco cannot endlessly expand spending without confronting limits, a concern long raised by critics of Californias expansive welfare and housing bureaucracy.
If we can increase the flow within the system, that would help us maximize the number of people we can help and ultimately help reduce the number of homeless people on our streets, Laguana concluded. That emphasis on efficiency and movement through the system aligns more closely with conservative calls for accountability and performance metrics than with the status quo of permanent dependency.
San Francisco, like many cities throughout California, has struggled with homelessness for years as progressive policies on drugs, mental health, and public order have coincided with rising street encampments. Data submitted to the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 2023 shows the estimated total of homeless people hit 7,582, with the city notably not required to count its unsheltered homeless annually and instead relying on prior-year figures.
In 2024, when both sheltered and unsheltered data were collected in the same year, the total number of homeless in San Francisco jumped to an estimated 8,323, with more than 20,000 people seeking homelessness services. Yet reports at the time described the unsheltered count as dysfunctional and chaotic, with then-Mayor London Breed reportedly confused about the accuracy of the data, raising further doubts about the reliability of the numbers used to justify massive spending.
In fiscal year 202425, the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housings budget reached nearly $850 million, before dropping to $786 million the following year as fiscal pressures mounted. Laguana told the Standard that the two central challenges he sees are preventing people from becoming homeless in the first place and moving more individuals through the supportive housing system rather than allowing it to become a one-way, permanent destination.
Laguana was appointed by Democrat San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie in August 2025 to the Homelessness Oversight Commission, a body created to bring at least some scrutiny to a system many residents view as bloated and ineffective. Having previously experienced homelessness himself and later living and working in a single-room occupancy hotel on Market Street, he first entered city government in 2019 on the Small Business Commission, giving him a vantage point on how high taxes, regulation, and failed social policy intersect to drive both economic decline and human suffering.
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