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On Nov. 6, San Francisco will decide whether large corporations should be taxed further to help the city's growing homeless population, the Associated Press reported.
Residents will vote on Proposal C, which proposes to tax hundreds of the city's wealthiest businesses to raise approximately $ 300 million each year to support homeless and mentally ill residents of San Francisco. The city is already spending about $ 300 million a year on homelessness services, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
The homeless population of San Francisco reached 7,499 in 2017, an increase of 2% over 2013, according to city statistics. In January 2017, more than 4,350 people lived on the streets. More than 500 of these unprotected people were minors and the vast majority of them were "unaccompanied children" or "young people in transition."
Some elected officials, including the mayor of San Francisco, London Breed, opposed proposal C. While acknowledging the growing homeless population, they said the measure was not the right solution.
"I have to make decisions with my head, not just with my heart," said Breed, who the San Francisco Chronicle says plans to add 1,000 additional beds for homeless residents by the end of 2020. "I do not believe that doubling what we spend for homelessness without a new responsibility, while we do not even spend what we have now, it's a good government. "
Breed is concerned that the measure will discourage companies, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The debate over this proposal has sparked a social media dispute between Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and philanthropist Marc Benioff, founder of Salesforce, San Francisco's largest private employer.
Dorsey said he wanted to solve the problem of homelessness in the city, but that he supported the evaluation of proposal C. by Breed. Benioff asked how Twitter supports programs that reduce homelessness and have introduced a beneficial tax break for Twitter since 2011.
Benioff has widely criticized technology leaders who refuse to participate in social protection programs, calling them "immaterial" the amount they would have lost for such initiatives.
"People want action to support the homeless," he said. "It's an easy way, unfortunately, many of these technical CEOs, they do not give money to the homeless, they do not give money to public schools, they do not give money to public hospitals … They work and live inside their bubbles. "
Earlier this year, Seattle introduced a tax on big employers to fight homelessness in the city, The Washington Post reported. The measure has faced stiff opposition from Amazon and other companies. In June, less than a month after the tax increase, Seattle City Council repealed the measure.
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