Read part 1 here.
Billionaire Benioff on board
In 2018, Friedenbach 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, and she chose Evans as her spokesperson. One night while Twitter surfing, Evans came across a post from Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of software company Salesforce, referring to San Francisco as the “Four Seasons of homelessness.” Outraged, she tweeted back, “Did @benioff just compare SF’s homeless services to a luxury hotel chain? How out of touch can a billionaire be?!?!”
Intrigued, Benioff reached out to Evans and the two exchanged private messages. By the end of their chat, Benioff supported the measure. He and Salesforce donated a combined $8 million to the campaign (the most ever spent on a local ballot measure so near to election day), and Benioff became Proposition C’s biggest champion, chastising fellow CEOs for “not caring about homeless people.” Benioff also found a cheerleader in then San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight, who posted smiling photos of the two, wrote glowingly about Friedenbach and Evans, and defended Prop. C on social media. “I’m talking about getting [the homeless] off the street in San Francisco and into housing. The city economist’s report says Prop. C will make a big difference in the conditions on our streets because 4,000 new units will be created,” she tweeted on Oct. 28, 2018. When Twitter user “Bluoz” pointed to a grand jury report stating that housing wasn’t the answer, Knight snapped, “Yes, that’s what they said 10 years ago. I’m writing about conditions now and how they should improve with passage of Prop C.” If you’re wondering where I stood back then, I was on the right side of history: I endorsed “No on Prop. C” in the Marina Times, but I was no competition for the Dream Team of Benioff, Knight, Evans, and Friedenbach, and the measure passed.
After fending off a lawsuit filed by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, funds were released and The Our City, Our Home Oversight Committee (OCOH) was set up to ensure those funds were used “effectively and transparently.” Once again, then Supervisor Preston helped a friend, and the Board of Supervisors appointed Prop. C’s biggest lobbyist, Friedenbach, to the committee. In May 2023, the Homeless Oversight Commission was launched to oversee the floundering Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, and to “receive advice and recommendations from OCOH on the administration of Proposition C funds.” When Preston got Evans appointed to the oversight commission, it set up a fox guarding the henhouse scenario, with Prop. C lobbyists Friedenbach and Evans having an outsized say in how the money would be spent. Voters had no way of knowing what a stranglehold Friedenbach and Evans would eventually have on the money, with strict percentages implemented to match the pair’s ideology. “Permanent Housing is a central component … with at least 50% of the Fund allocated for this service area,” the website explains.
When Supervisor Preston got Evans appointed to the oversight commission, it set up a fox guarding the henhouse scenario, with Prop. C lobbyists Friedenbach and Evans having an outsized say in how the money would be spent.
From fiscal years 2021 through 2024, 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, representing a $21.1 million increase in spending from the 2023 fiscal year. According to OCOH, 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).” For $822 million, OCOH says it “funded programs that added and sustained around 5,300 total units of capacity” since the fund’s inception in fiscal year 2021, with a net 807 units of capacity added in the 2024 fiscal year. The executive summary is light on detail (for example, who are their “clients” and where are they now?) and spins the crisis in the streets as a housing issue, which it is not.
It’s the drugs
Friedenbach and Evans are proponents of “housing first,” which means moving people behind closed doors with no barriers. Drug and alcohol use are permitted. So is crime: a cross-check of publicly available criminal records with publicly available names of supportive housing clients over the past three months shows 100 criminals currently living in taxpayer-funded programs.
Harm reduction activists like Friedenbach and Evans believe giving people sober living options is more dangerous than being surrounded by drug dealers and users, but utilizing data from the Medical Examiner’s Office, Mothers Against Drug Addiction & Deaths cofounder Gina McDonald was able to prove that of San Francisco overdose fatalities between January and April 2025, nearly 60 percent occurred indoors.
In an August 2024 opinion piece for the San Francisco Standard titled, “San Franciscans awaken to the cruelty and futility of homeless sweeps,” Evans doesn’t mention the words “drugs,” “overdoses,” or “fentanyl” at all. She does whine that the city is “short several thousand beds” to provide emergency shelter or transitional housing to the 4,300-plus homeless people in San Francisco and is “overtaxed with an inflow of the unhoused.” She goes on to cite migrant families with minor-age children (nearly all here illegally) “who arrive without access to housing.” That’s rich considering since 2023 she has approved spending nearly $1 billion in OCOH funds. Evans is so far out of touch that she doesn’t get the Field of Dreams analogy: build free housing and they will come — from other cities, other states, and other countries.
On July 6, Evans told NBC Bay Area that OCOH “stood up 600 new shelter beds in the last two years,” and “it’s just not been enough to keep up with the growing rate of people experiencing homelessness.” Bringing it back full circle, Friedenbach chimed in, “The city has been taking away people’s tents.”
Watching Evans and Friedenbach blame city officials for a problem they helped to create while spending $822 million to solve nothing would be laughable if peoples’ lives weren’t at stake.
Anyone looking at the streets of San Francisco can see that Prop. C dollars spent under the tenure of Friedenbach and Evans has been an abysmal failure, yet both opposed Mayor Lurie’s proposal requesting $88 million from the OCOH fund to pay for temporary shelter over the next three years. The Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to approve $34.8 million — over $53 million shy of what Lurie wanted. (Apparently, they are still afraid of Friedenbach.) Separately, they voted 8–3 to allow the mayor’s office to spend up to $19 million of the fund’s excess revenue without supermajority approval from the board over the next two fiscal years. You read that right: OCOH is sitting on millions in excess revenue while grumbling about the city not doing enough to house every homeless person in perpetuity.
“Looking back on what we’ve done with those funds over that time, I think that those allocations pushed us to overinvest in permanent supportive housing relative to other types of homelessness interventions that we could have invested in during that time,” Board of Supervisors President Rafael Mandelman said. Let’s hope he and the other seven semisensible supervisors remember that and vote to keep Evans off the Homeless Oversight Commission.