For years, I have argued that lobbyist group The Coalition on Homelessness (COH), and in particular their CEO, Jennifer Friedenbach, should be removed from the conversation about homelessness in San Francisco. First, Friedenbach pushes a false narrative that housing will solve the problem. It’s not a lack of housing, it’s the drugs. Like other harm reduction proponents, Friedenbach believes in “Housing First,” which means illicit drug use cannot be banned even in taxpayer-funded “permanent supportive housing.”
Harm reduction advocates like Friedenbach believe giving people sober living options is more dangerous than being surrounded by drug dealers and users, but Gina McDonald, cofounder of Mothers Against Drug Addiction & Deaths, can prove otherwise. Using data from the Medical Examiner’s Office, McDonald created a chart of San Francisco overdose fatalities between January and April of 2025 that shows a staggering 57 percent occurred indoors. During that period, seven top providers of permanent supportive housing (PSH) in the city lost 60 people, with Episcopal Community Services and Tenderloin Housing Clinic topping the list with 12 each.
So why is Friedenbach so dangerous? In 2018, she and COH drafted a plan to raise $300 million a year for “homeless services” by increasing gross receipts taxes 0.5 percent on San Francisco businesses making more than $50 million annually. Known as Proposition C, the measure got some unexpected financial and personal support from Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of Salesforce, who not only funded the campaign but used his platform to push the ballot measure. After passing, it took a couple of years to wind through a court challenge from the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, but in June 2020 the funds were released. The Board of Supervisors then appointed Friedenbach to a seat on the “Our City Our Home” oversight committee (OCOH), which controls the money from Proposition C that she and COH lobbied for full-time (which, by the way, violates IRS law for a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization).
From 2021 through 2024 fiscal years, the city appropriated a total of $1.1 billion to the OCOH Fund and spent $821.7 million. In the 2024 fiscal year, the city expended $316.8 million in OCOH Funds across all service areas, a growth of $21.1 million in spending from the 2023 fiscal year. According to their website, this net increase was “largely driven by growth in the Permanent Housing Operations service area ($22.9 million increase) and Mental Health Operations service area ($11.7 million increase).”
So, what did San Francisco get for the $822 million? In their executive summary (which is as obtuse as the rest of their annual report), OCOH says it funded programs that have added and sustained around 5,300 total units of capacity since the fund’s inception in the 2021 fiscal year, with a net 807 units of capacity added in the 2024 fiscal year.
Friedenbach is on the “Our City Our Home” oversight committee, which controls the money from Proposition C that she and COH lobbied for full-time, and is in violation of IRS law for a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
Under the measure as it was passed, at least 50 percent of the funds raised must go toward permanent housing, 25 percent for mental health services, 15 percent for homelessness prevention, and up to 10 percent for shelter and hygiene services, the area Friedenbach oversees, which provides “low barrier services to those in immediate need and include navigation centers, emergency shelters, temporary hotel vouchers, case management services for justice-involved adults, cabin and trailer programs, and crisis intervention programs, such as vehicle triage centers.” For the 2024 fiscal year, OCOH claims around 3,300 households received shelter and hygiene assistance at a cost of over $32 million.
Interestingly, the report breaks down client demographics by race and ethnicity, gender identity, age, and sexual orientation, but not by zip code. Friedenbach has long claimed that the majority of the city’s homeless population “are from San Francisco,” but we know that’s not true. Over the past two decades, I’ve interviewed dozens of homeless individuals and have yet to meet a person who was born and raised in the city — most aren’t even from the Bay Area, and many aren’t from the State of California.
$90 million in unspent funds
Mayor Daniel Lurie inherited an $800 million, two-year budget deficit that he must address by June 1, and he’s considering something I have suggested since Proposition C passed — remove the restrictions and use future tax dollars, as well as about $90 million in unspent funds and interest, in a more effective way to deal with the real problem on the streets — drugs and mental health. The proposal would require approval by the Board of Supervisors, which would give voters an idea of whether they got a truly moderate board (as groups like GrowSF claim), or the usual progressive Friedenbach followers who allowed her ideology to destroy the city over the past three decades.
Lurie wisely wishes to focus on treatment beds, short-term stabilization sites, and recovery-focused interim housing. Unsurprisingly, Friedenbach, who City Hall sources say, “runs the show at OCOH,” is reluctant to loosen her grip on the purse strings. In her usual word salad, Friedenbach told the San Francisco Chronicle that changes to the Proposition C investment plan “will have real consequences to the people currently receiving services” and that voters need “more details, more oversight and more accountability.” Ironic, of course, considering OCOH completely lacks oversight and accountability. Friedenbach also added one of her terrible takes about how building new shelters “shouldn’t be paid for on the backs of the very poorest San Franciscans” when she was high-fiving billionaire Benioff after Proposition C passed a tax on businesses to fill the OCOH coffers.
Sharky Laguna, the most commonsense member of the City’s homelessness oversight commission — set up to approve the way Friedenbach’s group wants to spend Proposition C money — acknowledged that the homelessness and drug crises “have changed significantly since that assessment, so how the money is spent should change to reflect that,” telling the Chronicle, “Voters have been abundantly clear that they want to see progress, and I think we have to give the people who are charged with managing the process as much room as possible to succeed.” He has been vocal in saying that he supports the mayor’s proposal and calls it the “right thing to do.”
Unfortunately for Friedenbach, most San Franciscans are finally starting to see through her hypocrisy. She came into the homeless industry with zero qualifications to justify her role as San Francisco’s authority on homeless policy where she has had the ear of mayors, supervisors, and department heads. Her résumé (if you can call it that) includes a lot of fundraising and, prior to COH, serving as director of the Hunger and Homeless Action Coalition of San Mateo County. Her skill set, as thin as her résumé, touts “a long history of community organizing, working on a range of poverty-related issues including welfare rights, housing, homeless prevention, health care, disability, and human and civil rights.” She comes from a wealthy almond farming family, she owns a home, and her parents have a condo in the city. In other words, Friedenbach has never spent a day in her life wondering where her next meal will come from or whether she will have a roof over her head.
Friedenbach knows even less about the real crisis facing San Francisco — fentanyl — which she never mentions. “All they need is a house” has been her mantra and she’s sticking to it. From suing the city to prevent the removal of tent encampments to blatantly lying that the people living in RVs lining neighborhoods are “immigrants, the elderly, and working families living in them due to the ‘housing crisis,’” Friedenbach is nothing more than a repetitive relic who, despite controlling the narrative and the money, hasn’t been able to solve a single thing. I hope that Mayor Lurie does what no other official has been able to do and cuts Friedenbach and her merry band of propagandists out of the conversation.