On Mission Street, March 2014

The S.F. Chronicle reports that despite spending $167 million a year on the homeless, the city is not having a whole lot of luck housing them.

The annual $167 million price tag is $20 million more than the operations budget for the Children, Youth and Family Services department, $6.3 million more than for Public Worksand $3.8 million more than for Recreation and Park.

Nearly half of the homeless money, $81.5 million, goes for rent subsidies and programs to assist the 6,355 people living in “permanent supportive housing” – long the cornerstone of the city’s program for helping the down and out. READ MORE

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I’ve been a Mission resident since 1998 and a professor emeritus at Berkeley’s J-school since 2019. I got my start in newspapers at the Albuquerque Tribune in the city where I was born and raised. Like many local news outlets, The Tribune no longer exists. I left daily newspapers after working at The New York Times for the business, foreign and city desks. Lucky for all of us, it is still here.

As an old friend once pointed out, local has long been in my bones. My Master’s Project at Columbia, later published in New York Magazine, was on New York City’s experiment in community boards.

As founder and an editor at ML, I've been trying to figure out how to make my interest in local news sustainable. If Mission Local is a model, the answer might be that you - the readers - reward steady and smart content. As a thank you for that support we work every day to make our content even better.

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