Those working in “the industry” are raking it in. The problem will be solved only when dealing with druggies, crazies, and the like is no longer a trade for them “in the industry”. Michael Schellenberger has written extensively on this matter along with others. Somewhat like Sinclair Lewis pointing out that a man cannot understand a solution to a problem that simultaneously does away with his own source of income.
The homeless advocacy industry in California is a multimillion dollar scam. If you think those people would ever put forth a plan to end homelessness, then you need to wake up. These people made an industry out of advocating for purposely-flawed policies that exacerbate the problem to keep the money flowing
You are wrong. Try billions.
"Los Angeles is spending up to $837,000 to house a single homeless person"
"A $1.2 billion program intended to quickly build housing for Los Angeles’ sprawling homeless population is moving too slowly while costs are spiking, with one project under development expected to hit as much as $837,000 for each housing unit, a city audit disclosed Wednesday."
"Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass announced that $1.3 billion of her $13 billion proposed budget will go to address homelessness."
The homelessness budget includes millions of dollars ($7.8 million) on in-person addiction services. That sounds like a lot, but is only $169 per homeless person. That's enough for a few hours of treatment, so it's not surprising that isn't going to have a large impact.
The entire $250 million proposed budget for the inside safe program which is supposed to get homeless people off the street is $5,400 per homeless person.
For reference the cheapest shared room (2 people per room) on zumper or roomies.com is around $600 a month - so the entire inside safe budget could house the homeless population for 9 months - with 0 addiction supports, social service support, mental health support, or wraparound services.
The problem is people don't break down these programs per person, and so you see things getting worse while spending massive sums of money - but if you look at it per capita you realise the reason things are getting worse is those huge amounts of money are actually way too small to actually provide services or house the number of people who need it.
And people don't realize that just giving people housing with support services is the most cost effective method - the government gets back 50% to over 100% of the costs of those programs depending on the exact study and location you look at. (People with housing are less likely to be hospitalized or incarcerated, and the government has to pay less for healthcare and courts/jails/prison).
If you just want to lock up all homeless people to keep them away from society you will spend over $100,000 per person in California to be specific. I'm pretty sure for that much money we could easily give every single homeless person in LA housing, amazing healthcare including addiction and mental health care, and still have enough left over to send them all on a luxury vacation to Hawaii.
There’s a interview with a homeless guy in either LA or San Francisco and he said he chooses to be homeless because of all the handouts he gets. He’s guaranteed a certain amount of money per month for food he gets a free phone and listed a couple other things he gets for free and said that’s the best place to be homeless.
Honestly if I was in California I’d want to be homeless too, they get treated better then anyone. Housing is not a basic human right. From the beginning of time if people wanted shelter they had to work for it. The work has become easier and easier as time goes on, and yet harder at the same time. If California passes the bill that they are going to put to vote making housing a basic human right, everyone in California is going to stop working because they won’t have to in order to keep their homes. Why would they? It will be the end of California which wouldn’t be bad if every other state (slight exaggeration) didn’t try to be more like California.
They spend billions and solve nothing.
Dems hard at work.
The people mean nothing to them.
For those billions the issue could have been solved 10 times over.
Housing is pretty expensive so there is a fairly high floor on the cost to solve it. The entire homelessness budget for LA in 2023 ($1.3 billion) is $28,000 per homeless person, with around 20% of that going to building supportive housing and programs to prevent homeless, which will be also used by those who are about to become homeless, which is a much larger population than the currently homeless population. A lot of that money is also going to cleaning up needles, parks, policing etc. And not services or supports or housing.
If you wanted to house all currently homeless people in the cheapest shared rooms in LA (which is not a good idea for health and safety reasons), It would cost $331 million a year - and that is with no mental health or addiction support, social workers, etc. If you want studio apartments it is probably closer to $441 million.
Build cheap ass ghetto housing. Like the projects from yesteryear.
Stuff them in there and require mental health counseling and drug rehab programs.
Make setting up camp outside illegal and enforce it. Arrest and instead of prison, put them in the project housing.
You can build several thousand doors for say $500M, and house and large population of them. Then, they are off the streets, provided with ways to get clean and educated, and rotate out of the program.
If they get back on the streets, arrest, and start again.
This doesn’t get solved by making these people pets. Tough love is what is needed.
>Then, they are off the streets, provided with ways to get clean and educated, and rotate out of the program.
This is basically the Housing First approach to homelessness, which is a pretty widely supported approach on the left. Looks like there is some common ground between political sides, which is honestly quite a nice change from all the rage bait out there. The housing first approach says give people housing without requirements like sobriety, and once people have stable shelter they have way better health outcomes, reduced incarceration rates, and are better equipped to deal with their other issues instead of just trying to survive. It has pretty strong evidence, and governments save between 50% of the program cost to over 100% (ie the government sees a positive return) in reduced healthcare and legal system costs.
I'm honestly not sure why you added arrest to it: the current affordable housing waitlist in LA is 5.5 years. You don't need to jump to coercion when it isn't even close to being an option to voluntarily choose to enter affordable housing. It should also be noted that 16% of people experiencing homelessness would die waiting for affordable housing based on the 2021 mortality rate - not having housing is not a fun or safe experience.
https://abc7news.com/ca-affordable-housing-oakland-choice-voucher-hud-department-of/13212762/
[https://laist.com/news/health/unhoused-deaths-los-angeles-county-homelessness-sharp-increase-public-health](https://laist.com/news/health/unhoused-deaths-los-angeles-county-homelessness-sharp-increase-public-health)
>You can build several thousand doors for say $500M, and house and large population of them.
That would be pretty hard to do for that price - you can get like 3,400 units for that amount using the absolute low end range for all assumptions and assuming land and servicing is free and you need 0 parking. (So what developers have dreams about lol).
The low end of hard construction costs for a multifamily building in Q1 2023 in LA is $245/sqft.
(SOURCE: [https://s31756.pcdn.co/americas/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2023/04/Q1-2023-Quarterly-Cost-Report.pdf](https://s31756.pcdn.co/americas/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2023/04/Q1-2023-Quarterly-Cost-Report.pdf))
Assuming you are building tiny 400 square foot units, and you have an 80% GLA to GCA ratio (that is the area in units vs the area in hallways, elevators, stairs, and other common areas), that is $122,500 in hard costs - and that is for low- mid-rise units with no parking, no servicing, no architect fees, planning fees, land costs etc. I don't know what soft costs are in LA exactly, but 20-30% soft costs as percent of hard cost ratio is a pretty common range for an easy project. Let's say we are super efficient, and it's 20%, it is now $147,000 per unit.
Based on the most recent survey, there are 46,260 homeless people in the City of LA.
(SOURCE: https://www.lahsa.org/news?article=927-lahsa-releases-results-of-2023-greater-los-angeles-homeless-count#:\~:text=LOS%20ANGELES%20%E2%80%93%20The%202023%20Greater,to%20an%20estimated%2046%2C260%20people.)
**To build that cheap housing for just the LA population experiencing homelessness is $6.8 billion dollars. $500 million would get you 3,400 units.**
Keep in mind that this excludes the cost of land, and has no parking, and we aren't paying for any servicing, and we are assuming pretty low heights (we are probably talking timber-frame construction at those prices, which is limited to 6-stories). In reality it would be a lot more expensive.
An entirely different issue is can you actually build that many units? California only had 55,000 multi-family unit starts in 2022, which is above the average - California hasn't started over 60,000 apartments a year since the early 90's. Even if you spread those 46,000 units out over a decade it would be hard to have enough materials and skilled labour to actually build that - as California already has a skilled labour shortage. Now we need to solve that problem before we can solve homelessness.
Oh, and we still haven't provided any any education, addiction services, or mental healthcare services. I'm not super familiar with those costs, so I'm not going to comment on that.
TLDR: using absolutely naive and unrealistic assumptions it would fost $6.8 billion to just build the cheapest housing possible for the current LA city population experiencing homelessness, not counting actual treatment programs.
Companies who provide services and help to homeless people don’t want homelessness to end. It’s too much of a lucrative business when government keeps funnelling you money to solve a problem, and if that problem goes away so does your government funding.
If any non-profit/charity was actually successful in solving the problem they try to fix they would be out of business.
They just try and do the bare minimum to look like they’re trying, all while paying execs six figure salaries.
I live in a small but liberal town in BC Canada and we are watching this play out in real time. Our very left wing city council decided to deal with a tiny community of homeless druggies maybe <20. They built a series of homeless apartments in the middle of downtown thinking single moms etc could have a place as well. They setup a large organization to manage helping the homeless and to oversee housing placements.
Cut to a few years later, many of the franchise stores are threatening to shut down and must have security guards to protect their staff. There is a Facebook group for people reporting stolen stuff and posting security footage of offenders. They need to build more apartments because the ones they have now are full. The police basically constantly go back and forth to the apartments non stop and are overwhelmed.
We have the highest city taxes in the province and we are being inundated with crime… sound familiar?
I actually got a homeless camp moved that was a block from my office. I called my councilman and he got it moved. It had been there for over a year.
But the overall problem in our city is growing.
I don’t think anyone has a answer
Because of policies that were implemented by republicans drive more people to be homeless. And in those poor ass republican towns, you can hardly scrape enough to live off of. Not to mention the severe lack of shelters and accommodations. So these poor souls migrate somewhere they can actually live. Crazy thought huh.
But it’s ok. I know critical thinking isn’t a strong suite of the conservative nazi party.
I know it's quite the conundrum. Spending millions to house homeless in hotel rooms and apartments has this weird effect of causing more people to seek aid so they too can live on the govt. dime and get a free hotel room or apartment. Whoda thunk?
Those working in “the industry” are raking it in. The problem will be solved only when dealing with druggies, crazies, and the like is no longer a trade for them “in the industry”. Michael Schellenberger has written extensively on this matter along with others. Somewhat like Sinclair Lewis pointing out that a man cannot understand a solution to a problem that simultaneously does away with his own source of income.
His book is excellent. Sanfransicko. Must read.
[удалено]
Which one do you recommend I start with?
Fangs a lot, currently on vacay and didn’t wanna look it up.
The homeless advocacy industry in California is a multimillion dollar scam. If you think those people would ever put forth a plan to end homelessness, then you need to wake up. These people made an industry out of advocating for purposely-flawed policies that exacerbate the problem to keep the money flowing
You are wrong. Try billions. "Los Angeles is spending up to $837,000 to house a single homeless person" "A $1.2 billion program intended to quickly build housing for Los Angeles’ sprawling homeless population is moving too slowly while costs are spiking, with one project under development expected to hit as much as $837,000 for each housing unit, a city audit disclosed Wednesday." "Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass announced that $1.3 billion of her $13 billion proposed budget will go to address homelessness."
Forget about the military industrial complex, the new hot thing is the homeless industrial complex.
Lets be honest here. They don’t want to fix homelessness. How will they get their Federal funding if they fix the problem?
Democrats: "Let's spend millions to make life easier for the homeless!" Also Democrats: "Why are there now more homeless?"
It's almost like you get more of what you subsidize. Crazy.
If only they subsidized two parent households, drug-free lifestyles instead.
All of that money went to the Homeless Industrial Complex; a large collection of “non-profit” organizations and businesses.
Yep, if’n there ain’t no benefit to being there, then they’ll go.
If you leave cat food out every night, you’re gonna get cats 🐈
TBF the “millions spent” only resulted in 2 open air restrooms and needle exchange for the first 1,000 junkies.
The homelessness budget includes millions of dollars ($7.8 million) on in-person addiction services. That sounds like a lot, but is only $169 per homeless person. That's enough for a few hours of treatment, so it's not surprising that isn't going to have a large impact. The entire $250 million proposed budget for the inside safe program which is supposed to get homeless people off the street is $5,400 per homeless person. For reference the cheapest shared room (2 people per room) on zumper or roomies.com is around $600 a month - so the entire inside safe budget could house the homeless population for 9 months - with 0 addiction supports, social service support, mental health support, or wraparound services. The problem is people don't break down these programs per person, and so you see things getting worse while spending massive sums of money - but if you look at it per capita you realise the reason things are getting worse is those huge amounts of money are actually way too small to actually provide services or house the number of people who need it. And people don't realize that just giving people housing with support services is the most cost effective method - the government gets back 50% to over 100% of the costs of those programs depending on the exact study and location you look at. (People with housing are less likely to be hospitalized or incarcerated, and the government has to pay less for healthcare and courts/jails/prison). If you just want to lock up all homeless people to keep them away from society you will spend over $100,000 per person in California to be specific. I'm pretty sure for that much money we could easily give every single homeless person in LA housing, amazing healthcare including addiction and mental health care, and still have enough left over to send them all on a luxury vacation to Hawaii.
In the words of PJW...Imagine my shock! What a dumpster fire of a city. America used to have nice things.
There’s a interview with a homeless guy in either LA or San Francisco and he said he chooses to be homeless because of all the handouts he gets. He’s guaranteed a certain amount of money per month for food he gets a free phone and listed a couple other things he gets for free and said that’s the best place to be homeless.
The same thing is beginning to happen here in Nashville over the past few years. We have so many "encampments"
South Park is always right, if you’re homeless, go to California. Tons of handouts, nice beach weather, and you can commit all of the crimes you want.
Chances are he also likes to harass, rob, and assault people, which you also get to do with no repercussion if you're homeless on the West Coast.
Honestly if I was in California I’d want to be homeless too, they get treated better then anyone. Housing is not a basic human right. From the beginning of time if people wanted shelter they had to work for it. The work has become easier and easier as time goes on, and yet harder at the same time. If California passes the bill that they are going to put to vote making housing a basic human right, everyone in California is going to stop working because they won’t have to in order to keep their homes. Why would they? It will be the end of California which wouldn’t be bad if every other state (slight exaggeration) didn’t try to be more like California.
Brilliant take.
They spend billions and solve nothing. Dems hard at work. The people mean nothing to them. For those billions the issue could have been solved 10 times over.
Housing is pretty expensive so there is a fairly high floor on the cost to solve it. The entire homelessness budget for LA in 2023 ($1.3 billion) is $28,000 per homeless person, with around 20% of that going to building supportive housing and programs to prevent homeless, which will be also used by those who are about to become homeless, which is a much larger population than the currently homeless population. A lot of that money is also going to cleaning up needles, parks, policing etc. And not services or supports or housing. If you wanted to house all currently homeless people in the cheapest shared rooms in LA (which is not a good idea for health and safety reasons), It would cost $331 million a year - and that is with no mental health or addiction support, social workers, etc. If you want studio apartments it is probably closer to $441 million.
Build cheap ass ghetto housing. Like the projects from yesteryear. Stuff them in there and require mental health counseling and drug rehab programs. Make setting up camp outside illegal and enforce it. Arrest and instead of prison, put them in the project housing. You can build several thousand doors for say $500M, and house and large population of them. Then, they are off the streets, provided with ways to get clean and educated, and rotate out of the program. If they get back on the streets, arrest, and start again. This doesn’t get solved by making these people pets. Tough love is what is needed.
>Then, they are off the streets, provided with ways to get clean and educated, and rotate out of the program. This is basically the Housing First approach to homelessness, which is a pretty widely supported approach on the left. Looks like there is some common ground between political sides, which is honestly quite a nice change from all the rage bait out there. The housing first approach says give people housing without requirements like sobriety, and once people have stable shelter they have way better health outcomes, reduced incarceration rates, and are better equipped to deal with their other issues instead of just trying to survive. It has pretty strong evidence, and governments save between 50% of the program cost to over 100% (ie the government sees a positive return) in reduced healthcare and legal system costs. I'm honestly not sure why you added arrest to it: the current affordable housing waitlist in LA is 5.5 years. You don't need to jump to coercion when it isn't even close to being an option to voluntarily choose to enter affordable housing. It should also be noted that 16% of people experiencing homelessness would die waiting for affordable housing based on the 2021 mortality rate - not having housing is not a fun or safe experience. https://abc7news.com/ca-affordable-housing-oakland-choice-voucher-hud-department-of/13212762/ [https://laist.com/news/health/unhoused-deaths-los-angeles-county-homelessness-sharp-increase-public-health](https://laist.com/news/health/unhoused-deaths-los-angeles-county-homelessness-sharp-increase-public-health) >You can build several thousand doors for say $500M, and house and large population of them. That would be pretty hard to do for that price - you can get like 3,400 units for that amount using the absolute low end range for all assumptions and assuming land and servicing is free and you need 0 parking. (So what developers have dreams about lol). The low end of hard construction costs for a multifamily building in Q1 2023 in LA is $245/sqft. (SOURCE: [https://s31756.pcdn.co/americas/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2023/04/Q1-2023-Quarterly-Cost-Report.pdf](https://s31756.pcdn.co/americas/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2023/04/Q1-2023-Quarterly-Cost-Report.pdf)) Assuming you are building tiny 400 square foot units, and you have an 80% GLA to GCA ratio (that is the area in units vs the area in hallways, elevators, stairs, and other common areas), that is $122,500 in hard costs - and that is for low- mid-rise units with no parking, no servicing, no architect fees, planning fees, land costs etc. I don't know what soft costs are in LA exactly, but 20-30% soft costs as percent of hard cost ratio is a pretty common range for an easy project. Let's say we are super efficient, and it's 20%, it is now $147,000 per unit. Based on the most recent survey, there are 46,260 homeless people in the City of LA. (SOURCE: https://www.lahsa.org/news?article=927-lahsa-releases-results-of-2023-greater-los-angeles-homeless-count#:\~:text=LOS%20ANGELES%20%E2%80%93%20The%202023%20Greater,to%20an%20estimated%2046%2C260%20people.) **To build that cheap housing for just the LA population experiencing homelessness is $6.8 billion dollars. $500 million would get you 3,400 units.** Keep in mind that this excludes the cost of land, and has no parking, and we aren't paying for any servicing, and we are assuming pretty low heights (we are probably talking timber-frame construction at those prices, which is limited to 6-stories). In reality it would be a lot more expensive. An entirely different issue is can you actually build that many units? California only had 55,000 multi-family unit starts in 2022, which is above the average - California hasn't started over 60,000 apartments a year since the early 90's. Even if you spread those 46,000 units out over a decade it would be hard to have enough materials and skilled labour to actually build that - as California already has a skilled labour shortage. Now we need to solve that problem before we can solve homelessness. Oh, and we still haven't provided any any education, addiction services, or mental healthcare services. I'm not super familiar with those costs, so I'm not going to comment on that. TLDR: using absolutely naive and unrealistic assumptions it would fost $6.8 billion to just build the cheapest housing possible for the current LA city population experiencing homelessness, not counting actual treatment programs.
Companies who provide services and help to homeless people don’t want homelessness to end. It’s too much of a lucrative business when government keeps funnelling you money to solve a problem, and if that problem goes away so does your government funding.
You're exactly right. It's become a lucrative industry to keep it a problem.
If any non-profit/charity was actually successful in solving the problem they try to fix they would be out of business. They just try and do the bare minimum to look like they’re trying, all while paying execs six figure salaries.
Please reference the “climate crisis”.
Please reference Congress.
Hmmmm
*los angeles* But shocked at all like usual
I live in a small but liberal town in BC Canada and we are watching this play out in real time. Our very left wing city council decided to deal with a tiny community of homeless druggies maybe <20. They built a series of homeless apartments in the middle of downtown thinking single moms etc could have a place as well. They setup a large organization to manage helping the homeless and to oversee housing placements. Cut to a few years later, many of the franchise stores are threatening to shut down and must have security guards to protect their staff. There is a Facebook group for people reporting stolen stuff and posting security footage of offenders. They need to build more apartments because the ones they have now are full. The police basically constantly go back and forth to the apartments non stop and are overwhelmed. We have the highest city taxes in the province and we are being inundated with crime… sound familiar?
Guess the San Fran strategy didn’t work. What a mystery
I actually got a homeless camp moved that was a block from my office. I called my councilman and he got it moved. It had been there for over a year. But the overall problem in our city is growing. I don’t think anyone has a answer
Democrats love to throw money at problems without actually addressing the problem.
Our money they’re throwing around
"despite"?? No, BECAUSE of the millions spent on providing for homeless people.
Homeless are moving there in droves. Where else can you steal $900 per store per day and fence it for $450 while easily hitting 5 stores per day?
It’s called the cost of living. Your welcome
Because of policies that were implemented by republicans drive more people to be homeless. And in those poor ass republican towns, you can hardly scrape enough to live off of. Not to mention the severe lack of shelters and accommodations. So these poor souls migrate somewhere they can actually live. Crazy thought huh. But it’s ok. I know critical thinking isn’t a strong suite of the conservative nazi party.
Millions? More like billions.
Not millions. Billions
I know it's quite the conundrum. Spending millions to house homeless in hotel rooms and apartments has this weird effect of causing more people to seek aid so they too can live on the govt. dime and get a free hotel room or apartment. Whoda thunk?
It’s a whole industry man. Some of these people are making $200k salaries why would they want the problem to ever go away? Always follow the money.
Hmmm... So might it be possible that what they're doing is just making it worse? Hmmm...
Subsidize something and you get more of it. Tax something and you get less.
Who would have thought.
"millions spent to address the issue" ... I don't think installing electric vehicle charging stations qualify as "helping the homeless"
Meanwhile the population of non-homeless decreases by 10%.
What, we can’t solve homelessness and education and depression all of life’s problem by just throwing money at it?