As far as I am concerned , that number is meaningless . Uhm , that was my point actually , I should have added a lot more sarcasm tags to my post I guess . If NYC spends $ 200 M to reduce homeless by 3000 , and SF manages to do just 2000 , which program is more effective ? How did you calculate it ? ? And you still can ' t measure it that way , because reducing the number of homeless people still means nothing without the context of how many people are at risk of being homeless . A city could have 10 people at risk of being homeless , but they all have homes thanks to city spending , and it then has zero homeless people for super cheap , yay ! Unless some idiot says , why are we spending thousands of dollars on homelessness when we have no homeless people ? Or it could have thousands of people at risk of being homeless , spend millions , and then have hundreds of homeless , and look really inefficient if all you look at is spending # of homeless .