California Official Launches Video Game To Solve Homelessness

Sharky Laguana, a member of the San Francisco Homelessness Oversight Commission, launched an interactive website on homelessness policy trade-offs.

When opening the Laguana website, the user receives a tutorial on how the interactive tools work, with two editable templates: Permanent Supportive Housing and Public Health Allocation Tradeoffs. The simulation is based on data from the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, with Laguana telling the San Francisco Standard that the models are not the key to a solution but rather illustrate concepts. (RELATED: Newsom’s 9% Homeless ‘Victory’ Is Based on Half-Baked Data)

“I’m the elected data officer for the San Francisco Homeless Oversight Commission, and this is my report, which is going to attempt to paint a holistic picture of how people move in and out of the services that we provide to the homeless population here in San Francisco. San Francisco’s homeless population has been around 8,000 people for several years now,” Laguana says in the introduction to his video.

“Our homeless budget has increased significantly during this time, so why aren’t we seeing a reduction in homelessness? To answer this question, we first need to understand that we are actually talking about well over 8,000 people,” adds Laguana.

The essential task of operating the models is to allow users to see the relationship between supportive housing, the number of units added each year, the monthly flow of residents, and the average length of stay.

According to the standard, the results show that shorter stays combined with lower influx lead to lower occupancy, thereby making more units available. Indeed, public health allocation trade-offs show that the more people the city helps with its limited budget, the less each homeless person receives.

A man walks his dog past a homeless man sleeping under a message painted on a closed store in San Francisco, California, April 1, 2020. (Photo by JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images)

“…Our inflows are increasing faster than our outflows. This is not sustainable in the long term. We have managed to keep the homeless population stable by increasing our budgets, which has allowed us to provide more services and more housing to more people. But the picture for future budget increases looks difficult,” Laguana says in the video on his site.

“If we can increase the flow within the system, it would help us maximize the number of people we can help and ultimately reduce the number of homeless people on our streets,” Laguana concluded.

San Francisco, like many cities in California, has struggled with homelessness for years. Data submitted to the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 2023 shows the estimated total number of homeless people reached 7,582. Notably, the city is not federally required to count its unsheltered homeless people each year, unlike its sheltered homeless people, but instead pulls homeless data from the previous year.

By 2024, with data on sheltered and unsheltered people counted in the same year, the total number of homeless people in San Francisco increased to approximately 8,323, with more than 20,000 seeking homeless services. However, reports at the time described the homeless count as dysfunctional and chaotic, with then-Mayor London Breed appearing confused about the accuracy of the data.

In the 2024-25 fiscal year, the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing’s budget reached nearly $850 million, dropping to $786 million the following fiscal year. Laguana stressed to the Standard that the two problems he sees in the crisis are preventing homelessness in the first place and moving more people through the supportive housing system.

Laguana was reappointed by San Francisco Democratic Mayor Daniel Lurie in August 2025 to the Homeless Oversight Commission. Previously homeless, Laguana then lived and worked in a single-room hotel on Market Street. He was first appointed to municipal office in 2019, serving on the Small Business Commission.