Bevan Dufty laughed when asked whether his new job as San Francisco’s homelessness czar was given to him as a reward for refusing to criticize his rival, Ed Lee, in the 2011 mayoral race. He said it is a thankless position.

“If this is payback, I thought I was much more respectful to the mayor than this job would suggest I was,” joked Dufty, a former member of the Board of Supervisors whom Lee named last week to replace outgoing director of homeless policy Dariush Kayhan. “I would hope he would be thoughtful enough to give me a position where I could lay back and people wouldn’t pay attention.”

Dufty said he planned use the $156,000-a-year post to help expand programs that move people out of homelessness and into jobs, apartments and more mainstream lives.

“The mayor said to me he wanted somebody with gravitas,” Dufty said, “somebody who was a known quantity, who had worked with members of the city-elected family, and would be taken serious in the business community.”

The position, which carries the new title of Director of Housing Opportunity, Partnerships and Engagement, or HOPE, is seen as unenviable largely because its holder is charged with overseeing homelessness policy without having much influence over the programs, staff or budgets dedicated to the issue. Traditionally, say veterans of homeless advocacy, the job involves defending whatever homeless programs the current mayor has in place.

“The position is absolutely a flack for homelessness policy,” said Paul Boden, organizing director for the Western Regional Advocacy Project, a group that lobbies in support of programs for the homeless. “Mayors catch a lot of shit for homelessness programs. That’s because they take it on like they’ve got the answer and they’re going to fix it.”

San Francisco's Human Services Agency, which oversees public assistance programs for the poor, has a 2012-13 fiscal-year budget of $694 million for all its progams. The city Department of Public Health, whose programs include indigent health care, substance-abuse treatment, street outreach teams and other programs targeting the needy, will spend $1.6 billion in the same period. Many more millions are budgeted for other agencies that help support the city’s homeless population.

Over the years, piles of audits, civil grand jury reports and journalistic exposés have asserted that San Francisco could get more for its money. But the mayor’s special assistant for homelessness traditionally has no direct authority over how the cash is spent.

Dianne Feinstein, who was mayor from 1978 to 1988, created the position for an advisor on homelessness as the issue was gaining national attention. The idea at the time was to coordinate the work of various city departments whose work touched on homelessness.

By 2002, however, a civil grand jury had determined that Mayor Willie Brown’s homelessness czar, George Smith, who flew repeatedly to New York to learn how that city aids the homeless, ran an office that was “ineffectual and inconsistent in its relations with other city departments.”

In 2003, Mayor Gavin Newsom created an additional post to advise on homelessness for Angela Alioto, a former mayoral rival who had dropped out of the race and endorsed his candidacy. He promised she would have influence on his administration’s homelessness policy. In the unpaid position, Alioto eventually led a task force that produced a report called “The San Francisco Plan to Abolish Chronic Homelessness.”

“I was telling Bevan, this is a lot of work, and the goal is permanent supportive housing,” Alioto said in an interview this week. “You have to have mental health support. You can’t just house someone and walk away.”

In 2008, Newsom appointed Kayhan, the former head of the nonprofit SF Connect, to serve as head of his office of homelessness. Kayhan became a public face for programs affecting the homeless, such as Care Not Cash, which replaces city stipends for the poor with housing; and the city’s sit-lie law, which allows police to cite people for reclining on sidewalks.

Later that year, after Newsom credited Care Not Cash with reducing homelessness, a civil grand jury report said the decrease was a result of city employees distributing bus tickets to vagrants to get them out of town. An October 2011 audit showed that city-funded supportive housing programs had largely failed to transition formerly homeless people to more normal lives.

In May, the city counted 6,455 homeless people still on the streets.

Dufty said he would seek to involve high tech entrepreneurs, who were prominent donors in Lee’s 2011 election campaign, in helping to pay for anti-homelessness programs.

“We are not going to be launching initiatives via press release,” he said. “I’m going to work with business communities, high tech communities, who are connected with the mayor and happy with him, and looking at ways to do better,” Dufty said. “I’m prepared to get in there and roll up my sleeves and give answers, and accept criticisms.”

Dufty won’t say, however, if he has any criticisms about how the city has handled homelessness thus far.

“I think it’s too early for me to offer criticisms,” he said.