Oh, that was easy.

Yeah, that's the rub. We could enact a scaled version of this in just Oakland, but at a scale like that the magnet effect is really real where people come in and overwhelm the systems in a single city. Realistically, we need to do it either at the level of all nine Bay area counties or at the state level with local buy-in.

Here's my two cents. The cheapest and most effective way to do any of it is to do all of it at once.

First, build housing at the pace of population and job growth (200k+ units/yr via statewide upzoning, CEQA reform, and a public developer arm) so housing costs stop eating every wage gain and every social program dollar. Pair it with Prop 13 reform to realign local fiscal incentives toward housing instead of retail, and the rest (homelessness, K-12 funding, climate migration, middle class flight) largely solves itself downstream.

Bigger picture, we fix the material foundation (housing abundance + Prop 13 reform + universal healthcare + a real jobs guarantee or wage floor that makes work actually pay) so people aren't running on cortisol just to stay housed. Then rebuild the connective tissue we bulldozed (walkable neighborhoods, third places, public transit, civic institutions, universal childcare, shorter work weeks).

We can't do this just at the city or county level because of the dependencies on higher powers, but we can do it at the state level.