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).”…