A local non-profit called the Tipping Point Community announced Sunday that it is pledging $100 million to the city of San Francisco to help address the problem of homelessness over the next five years. Speaking to the Chronicle, Tipping Point founder and CEO Daniel Lurie says, "We’re seeing too many people on the street suffering. ... It’s time we draw a line in the sand."

The money will be used, as the organization explains on its website, in a three-pronged strategy to create more supportive housing units, "boost the capacity of the public sector" by expanding the work the city is already doing to deal with the homeless population, and "attack the root causes of homelessness, including improving the mental health, child welfare and criminal justice systems."

Tipping Point was founded 12 years ago with the mission of fighting poverty in the Bay Area, modeled on the Robin Hood Foundation in New York. You may recall the "Candid Camera"-style film they produced last fall called "Poverty Line Prices", in which all the items in a Nob Hill grocery store were priced at five times their normal cost, the point of which was to illustrate what it feels like shopping for food for a Bay Area family living at or below the poverty line — though this was lost on some of the customers who just thought they were being ripped off.

Lurie tells the Chronicle that he was approached six months ago by an anonymous private donor who told him that if his organization spearheaded an effort to reduce the number of San Francisco's homeless, the donor would kickstart the effort. So far, Tipping Point has already raised $60 million of the $100 million goal, including one individual donation of $15 million.

Lurie says it's not yet clear how much of the money will be devoted to building supportive housing units, but currently the largest chunk of the city's budget for homeless services — estimated last year at around $140 million out of a total budget of $265 million — goes toward maintaining supportive housing units that are already built, housing thousands of formerly homeless individuals.

But the goal of this new effort will be reducing the city's chronically homeless population, estimated to be around 2,000 people, by half within five years. Tipping Point has already doled out $2 million, including a $1.2 million donation to a local program that helps formerly homeless people living in supportive housing move on to traditional apartments — a process that saves the city $20,000 per person per year because of the cost of providing counseling and services in the city's supportive housing complexes.

Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing head Jeff Kositsky calls Tipping Point's donation, which is the largest of its kind in city history, a "game changer," and an "act of love and compassion." And Mayor Ed Lee tells the Chronicle, "This is going to be huge. I do believe we’ll be able to cut chronic homelessness in half with this help. I’m pretty excited about this."

But the paper also notes that former mayor Gavin Newsom had set a goal over a decade ago to reduce the number of chronically homeless, then believed to be around 3,000 people, to zero, though that proved to be a difficult goal. The latest, biennial, point-in-time homeless count was conducted in January and the numbers have not yet been released. SF's homeless population has remained fairly steady over the last decade according to this count at 6,000 to 7,000 people, with the 2015 official count at 6,686 — though some question the validity of these numbers since they don't include a count of those who may be temporarily housed the night the count is conducted.

Previously: City's Homelessness Department And Public Works Are Officially At Odds Over Encampments