juliawillemyns.substack.com/p/notes-from-the-bay?r=1nyhm8&utm_medium=ios

Official San Francisco financial data say the city's per-capita personal income was $167,542 in fiscal year 2023–24. That is far above $98,000. Separately, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports San Francisco County's average weekly wage was $3,779 in Q4 2025, which annualizes to roughly $196,500.

So while the "$98,000 per homeless person" figure may be one way to divide parts of the homelessness budget, it is not "more than the average resident earns." On official measures of average income/pay in San Francisco, the average is substantially higher than $98,000.

This sentence says the number of people dying of overdoses has, "near enough," barely changed. Official San Francisco data show the opposite.

• A San Francisco ordinance packet summarizing Office of the Medical Examiner data says 222 people in San Francisco died from drug overdoses in 2017 and 697 died in 2020.
• The San Francisco Department of Public Health reported 620 accidental drug overdose deaths in 2022, compared with 640 in 2021 and 725 in 2020.
• The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner's 2025 annual report says the number of accidental overdose deaths in 2025 was 625.

So the overdose death toll was not "near enough" unchanged across recent years; it increased dramatically from 2017 and remained far above that earlier level.