The US is the richest country on Earth, excluding small states like Singapore with <10 million people. And the Bay Area is one of the US’s economic hubs.
To highlight out how absurdly rich the Bay Area is, the BEA states that the San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley Metropolitan Statistical Area had a total GDP of $588,335,543,000 as of 2020, with a population of 4,739,649 as of 2020, according to the Census Bureau. This means that the GDP per capita of the SF metro area was $124,130 in 2020, higher than Singapore, Norway, Ireland, and Switzerland.
But it gets crazier. If you look at just San Francisco county (which basically just includes the city), then its GDP is $201,547,346,000. With a population of 870,014, that means the GDP per capita of San Francisco is a mindboggling $231,660, richer than Luxembourg, Monaco, and Liechtenstein, and every other micronation for that matter.
The idea that solving homelessness in the Bay Area is a matter of just making the city richer, is false. There’s more than enough money.
Many people commute to work in businesses in San Francisco who don’t live there. I would expect GDP per capita to be misleading in such cases for some purposes.
Broadening to the San Francisco-San Jose area, there are 9,714,023 people with a GDP of $1,101,153,397,000/year, giving a GDP/capita estimate of $113,357. I know enough people who commute between Sunnyvale and San Francisco or even further that I’d expect this to be ‘more accurate’ in some sense, though obviously it’s only slightly lower than your first figure and still absurdly high.
But the city of San Francisco likely has a much smaller tax base than its putative GDP/capita would suggest, so provision of city based public services may be more difficult to manage.
Note that A) zooming in on most city hubs will find you monetary concentrations like this, e.g. Manhattan has a GDP pc of $370k B) I have never actually heard anyone argue that making the city richer is the path to solving homelessness despite living there for a long time, so suspect this might be an error—are you conflating this with deregulating the housing market? Or do people actually argue somewhere that more money would solve homelessness?
To highlight out how absurdly rich the Bay Area is, the BEA states that the San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley Metropolitan Statistical Area had a total GDP of $588,335,543,000 as of 2020, with a population of 4,739,649 as of 2020, according to the Census Bureau. This means that the GDP per capita of the SF metro area was $124,130 in 2020, higher than Singapore, Norway, Ireland, and Switzerland.
But it gets crazier. If you look at just San Francisco county (which basically just includes the city), then its GDP is $201,547,346,000. With a population of 870,014, that means the GDP per capita of San Francisco is a mindboggling $231,660, richer than Luxembourg, Monaco, and Liechtenstein, and every other micronation for that matter.
The idea that solving homelessness in the Bay Area is a matter of just making the city richer, is false. There’s more than enough money.
Many people commute to work in businesses in San Francisco who don’t live there. I would expect GDP per capita to be misleading in such cases for some purposes.
Broadening to the San Francisco-San Jose area, there are 9,714,023 people with a GDP of $1,101,153,397,000/year, giving a GDP/capita estimate of $113,357. I know enough people who commute between Sunnyvale and San Francisco or even further that I’d expect this to be ‘more accurate’ in some sense, though obviously it’s only slightly lower than your first figure and still absurdly high.
But the city of San Francisco likely has a much smaller tax base than its putative GDP/capita would suggest, so provision of city based public services may be more difficult to manage.
Note that
A) zooming in on most city hubs will find you monetary concentrations like this, e.g. Manhattan has a GDP pc of $370k
B) I have never actually heard anyone argue that making the city richer is the path to solving homelessness despite living there for a long time, so suspect this might be an error—are you conflating this with deregulating the housing market? Or do people actually argue somewhere that more money would solve homelessness?