The billionaire from San Francisco gives $ 30 million to study homelessness

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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – A billionaire from San Francisco donates $ 30 million to the University of California San Francisco to research the root causes of homelessness and potential solutions.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, a native of the city, has embraced homelessness as a philanthropic cause, injecting millions of dollars into action taken in 2018 to ask rich businesses to pay for their services.

The five-year initiative funded by Benioff will conduct academic research, provide testimonials and fact sheets, and train expert speakers to the homeless. The homelessness and housing initiative of UCSF Benioff will be part of the Vulnerable Population Center of the UCSF, headed by Ms. Margot Kushel.

Some San Francisco residents are frustrated by technology companies such as Salesforce, a cloud-based software company, claiming that they contribute to inequality with well-paying jobs that drive up home prices.

More than 4,000 people sleep on the streets every night in the city, where the median price of a two-bedroom home is $ 1.3 million. A family of four earning $ 117,400 a year is considered low income in San Francisco.

Benioff approached the university because he wanted officials to spend tax money to make decisions with the best data available, Kushel said. The plan is for researchers who analyze the data and provide a neutral and reliable analysis.

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The initiative will have the ability to help a city, for example, to decide whether and how to implement an alcohol management program, to study the results of this program, and then to share widely information.

"We want to be a quick response team to really help the public," Kushel said. "This is democratizing the data, this is meant to spread them."