Rocketing rents and a shortage of low-income housing have San Francisco spending nearly $1 million a year to house homeless families in cities as far away as Sacramento.

According to the Human Services Agency, 114 homeless families entitled to city rent assistance are being housed somewhere besides San Francisco. That's about two-thirds of all the homeless families that receive city rental subsidies.

"It's a crisis - absolutely," said Jeff Bialik, executive director of San Francisco's Catholic Charities.

"Even Oakland is very challenging" when it comes to finding affordable housing for families, Bialik said. His agency routinely sends homeless families to farther-flung towns such as Vallejo, Benicia and Brentwood.

Welfare hotels in the Tenderloin just aren't a friendly fit for families, and the waiting list for federally subsided Section 8 housing is 12 years - so homeless-aid agencies don't even try.

It's pretty much the same story for the city's public housing, where the waiting list is more than nine years.

In fact, a decade after the city issued its Ten Year Plan to Abolish Chronic Homelessness, there's still a seven-month waiting list for space in a family shelter.

To compensate, the city has set up its own form of Section 8, giving homeless families an average rent subsidy of $600 a month for up to five years.

Jeff Kositsky, executive director of the Hamilton Family Center in San Francisco, says shipping families out of the city is a matter of simple economics.

The average family rent in San Francisco is between $2,500 to $4,500 a month, compared with $800 to $1,300 a month in the Sacramento area.

"We should be proud of helping families get off street, but it's sad so many on the lower end of society are being forced to leave the city," Kositsky said.

The alternative is to provide temporary shelter, food and case management locally - at a cost of about $45,000 per family per year.

Officials are counting on families that are moved out of the city to get back on their feet and eventually get off public rolls once they have stable housing.

San Francisco Human Services chief Trent Rhorer insisted, "We are not shifting costs to other counties."

Just a flesh wound: Beware - in the eyes of the law, being shot three times while being robbed doesn't necessarily count as "great bodily injury."

Take the case of Gary Moore, 52, a career criminal who's served time for a string of robberies and burglaries going back to 1982. He spent 20 years locked up following a 1991 crime spree.

Back on April 8, 2013, two years after his release, Moore allegedly walked into a Happy Donuts shop on Bayshore Boulevard at about 3 a.m. and drew a gun on the clerk behind the counter.

When her husband - who was making muffins in the back - heard her screams, he came running out to find his wife on the floor with Moore holding a .38-caliber revolver to her head, police said. Moore then allegedly pointed the gun at the husband and demanded he empty the register.

But as Moore turned the gun back onto the wife, the husband reached for a knife and lunged at him, stabbing Moore four times. Moore allegedly fired off three rounds - striking the husband in the back, forearm and chest - before fleeing the store.

The husband's wounds weren't fatal, and he was released after only one night in the hospital.

Nor apparently were Moore's wounds serious. Two months later, he allegedly showed up with a pair of accomplices at a San Francisco recycling center, holding two workers at gunpoint while they emptied the register and a safe.

Moore and the other suspects were captured in a car a couple of miles away, authorities said, and Moore was linked to the doughnut store robbery from DNA on the owner's bloody knife.

Prosecutors charged him in both robberies, and his bail was set at $3 million.

Fast forward to his preliminary hearing in the doughnut shop robbery the other day, when Judge Brendan Conroy of San Francisco Superior Court ruled that because the gunshot victim hadn't needed surgery, he didn't suffer "great bodily injury."

Hence, Moore won't face a mandatory life sentence if convicted.

While they could still press for a "three strikes" case against Moore, prosecutors were left fuming that the judge had stripped them of their biggest hammer before the trial had even begun.

For the record, we consulted a couple of Bay Area judges not connected to the case, who agreed that being shot doesn't automatically constitute great bodily injury - and that while maybe it should, it's up to the state Legislature to change the law.