I got two numbers into the permanent San Francisco discussion of homeless on the streets. The use of these two numbers will last twenty years. Here is the letter I sent to the S.F. Examiner, the paper with four times the circulation, in San Francisco, of the S.F. Chronicle. It was published today:
Re: S.F. Losing Tourist Tax Revenue
Tourist surveys for a dozen years have made it clear San Francisco homeless street people and beggars are what keep tourists from coming back. (1)
Tax
revenue from tourists are down now but a short and long run solution is
to get the homeless out of the parts of San Francisco that tourists
love.
My calculations show that a few thousand visible homeless on the streets keep one million tourists a year from coming here, that is a loss of tourist revenue of $200,000 per visible homeless person and a loss of 125 Bay Area jobs per visible homeless person.(2)
Get the visible homeless away from places tourists love.
You can check the citations at earlier blogs. It is all based on my study of Maui, an isolated location that is 95% dependent on tourism. The 125 jobs may seem high and the $200,000 too low. But we forget that many people actually live on each job, as found in Maui, and the $200,000 is an annual number based on a very small increase in the potential number of tourists.