San Francisco is world-renowned for its landmarks—the Golden Gate Bridge and cable cars—and as the birthplace of companies like Airbnb, OpenAI, Levi Strauss and Uber. Sadly, it has also become well known for the 8,300 people within its boundaries who sleep in doorways, cars, and tents and beneath bridges on any given night.

Despite billions of dollars invested over the past two decades and the dedicated efforts of service providers and City officials, homelessness in San Francisco has not improved significantly. In fact, there is no accurate account of the amount the City spends on homelessness, since the official figures do not include items such as the burden on local hospitals or the cost to the judicial and detention systems.

It would be one thing if all this effort and money led to long-term solutions. But they haven’t. Even with individual success stories, no large-scale, lasting solutions to recurrent homelessness have yet emerged.

The current system is fragmented, marked by service gaps, and hindered by a complex management structure. The system has failed unhoused people, who are left to navigate a maze of programs that would befuddle those in the best of circumstances.