What Salt Lake City did was simple: It created attractive housing that street people actually longed to live in, provided the new residents with plenty of on-site counseling to help them with problems such as drug abuse and unemployment, and put one person in charge who could get government and nonprofit agencies to work together.

Special report: A decade of homelessness

The result is that in the decade since Salt Lake and San Francisco launched campaigns to end chronic homelessness, Salt Lake's hard-core street population shrank so drastically it is expected to be statistically gone by next year - but San Francisco still struggles mightily. And Salt Lake did this by spending $20 million a year in a million-resident metropolitan area. San Francisco spends $165 million.

http://www.sfgate.com/nation/article/Salt-Lake-City-a-model-for-S-F-on-homeless-5587357.php