My moderately-informed opinion here is that donating to CA YIMBY is probably a fair amount more effective than donating to organizations providing direct services in SF. Current annual spending on homelessness in SF is $668m, or about $33k per person who spends at least some part of the year homeless. My best guess is that adding additional marginal dollars to that is unlikely to make big changes. On the flip side, marginal spending is likely to make a much bigger difference to CA YIMBY, which has annual spending in the single-digit millions. With that budget, CA YIMBY has successfully lobbied for bills that are estimated to lead to the construction of 2.2 million new housing units in California.
My understanding is that CA YIMBY impacts homelessness in three ways. First, their work in enabling additional housing construction addresses the biggest rootcause of homelessness, which is high housing costs. Second, because NIMBY laws also tend to impede the construction of low-income and supportive housing, YIMBY reforms enable existing homelessness spending to go farther in actually getting people housed. Third, CA YIMBY directly lobbies for state-level funding for low-income and supportive housing, unlocking more resources with which to address homelessness in SF.
With all that said, the disadvantage of donating to political advocacy is that it take a long time to translate into material changes (laws need to pass, housing needs to get built), and I don’t have anything like a good numerical estimate of how many dollars to CA YIMBY would translate into a currently homeless individual eventually getting housing.
My moderately-informed opinion here is that donating to CA YIMBY is probably a fair amount more effective than donating to organizations providing direct services in SF. Current annual spending on homelessness in SF is $668m, or about $33k per person who spends at least some part of the year homeless. My best guess is that adding additional marginal dollars to that is unlikely to make big changes. On the flip side, marginal spending is likely to make a much bigger difference to CA YIMBY, which has annual spending in the single-digit millions. With that budget, CA YIMBY has successfully lobbied for bills that are estimated to lead to the construction of 2.2 million new housing units in California.
My understanding is that CA YIMBY impacts homelessness in three ways. First, their work in enabling additional housing construction addresses the biggest root cause of homelessness, which is high housing costs. Second, because NIMBY laws also tend to impede the construction of low-income and supportive housing, YIMBY reforms enable existing homelessness spending to go farther in actually getting people housed. Third, CA YIMBY directly lobbies for state-level funding for low-income and supportive housing, unlocking more resources with which to address homelessness in SF.
With all that said, the disadvantage of donating to political advocacy is that it take a long time to translate into material changes (laws need to pass, housing needs to get built), and I don’t have anything like a good numerical estimate of how many dollars to CA YIMBY would translate into a currently homeless individual eventually getting housing.