Money flow from SJ to NonProfits
In the past seven years San Jose alone has doled out $225M to nonprofits (NPO) for homelessness. This does not include the money received by NPOs from Santa Clara County, the state of CA, nor the federal government.
Above is the city’s response to a public records request to detail how much money NPOs received from SJ for homelessness. SCC declined to respond to the same public records request. Bottom line, regardless of the source of funds, no one knows how much is being received or spent in SJ for all homelessness related services and housing.
In this chart, pay special attention to: the objective of the organization — housing or advocacy, the employee exchanges between the city and NPOs, the lack of a single point of contact for any NPO performing services or housing in SJ, the growing number of PSH, homekey and supportive housing located in D3, the lack of financial analysis for amount of money each NPO received, the lack of transparency of fixed costs vs variable costs, and the lack of success metrics.
The chart is not complete. There are NPOs working in SJ not on this list. There is more affordable housing, PSH, homekeys, tiny homes, etc. that are not on this list. San Jose has some work to do in filling in the blanks.
Advocacy or Housing
Should taxpayers support actual housing or mere advocacy? For example, SV@Home appears to be an advocacy organization without directly contributing to housing stock or homelessness prevention. (Register nonprofits as Lobbyists) They received over $9M in funding since 2017 but they are not on the SJ public records request response.
Revolving door of personnel working for both the city and for NPOs that lobby city government
We have had city executives leave their jobs and then work for NPOs they had funded during their government careers and we have NPO interns working in SJ City government. NPO accountability registry
SJHD — No single point of contact for all resources delivered to SJ
We have organizations and NPOs working in San Jose without the knowledge of the SJ Housing Department, which leads to overlap and wasted effort to provide affordable housing, services, and homelessness reduction.
NPO 990 financial analysis
It’s difficult to slice through all the NPO 990 financial data to understand how South Second Street Studios revenue is $3.31M with salaries $3.74M (of those salaries, $2M in executive salaries). Financial analysis would highlight that salaries, a portion of expenses, are higher than total revenue.
Fixed vs Variable costs
One Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH) apartment costs $1.1M to build. That’s a shockingly high fixed one-time cost. But what’s more shocking are the hidden variable ongoing costs that can include: land lease, utilities, maintenance, mental health services, rehab services, job training services, laundry services, cleaning services, on-call property management services, security services, legal services, storage services, etc.
To effectively monitor NPOs operating in San Jose, we need a level of disclosure that a comprehensive publicly accessible data dashboard can provide. Necessary elements of the public NPO dashboard would include:
1. List any NPO or organization that is doing work in San Jose on homelessness, housing, advocacy, donations; regardless of funding source
2. List amount of money received from SJ
3. List amount of money received from SCC, CA, or Feds and is being spent in SJ (this should be under the direction/knowledge of the SJHD)
4. Description of NPO or organization (advocacy or housing/prevention)
5. Analyze financial effectiveness of NPO based on 990 expenditures and tangible results
6. List any interns or city employees who interchange work between the city and NPO
7. Separate out fixed costs from variable costs when providing a housing solution for any SJ location
