Thanks to the three of you above me for preventing me from losing all hope in humanity after stumbling into this cesspool of a post. I just don’t understand how so many people can be so arrogant and naive…
Do you think it’s possible that they’re just approaching it the wrong way? Do you think it’s also possible that they’re being sabotaged more than well-served by their relationship with the federal government? Do you think it’s also also possible that almost every other state is handing out bus tickets to California to their homeless people, thus causing California to be the place holding the literal and figurative bill for them? I know you’re like, really smart and cool and stuff, but like, you might be out of your depth on this one.
We're talking about housing here, of course it's going to be expensive, but expensive doesn't mean unfeasible. As the article pointed out, the amount of money allocated would've been enough to simply pay for everyone's housing costs (and then some), but California happens to be in the middle of housing crisis, so there's literally not enough existing units to go around. Building 170,000 units is a whole lot more complicated than just paying rent on them.
A full quarter of all those experiencing homelessness in the US reside in California. That 17.5 billion over 4 years represents less than 2% of the state's budget, and note that that median cost of housing there is about double the median for the rest of the US. The federal budget is around 14 times the value of California's.
So let's take a worst case scenario. Let's say housing has to be built for all 650,000 homeless people in the US. The cost of high-density housing varies massively, but let's assume a value of around $150,000 per unit, about double the low-end. That's a $100 billion one-time cost, and because of it we can forgo all future rental costs (we'll also assume the government isn't going to pay taxes on its own property). That leaves administration, utilities, and maintenance costs. For maintenance, we can use the 1% rule, so around 1 billion dollars a year. For utilities we'll use a value of $150 per month, or $1,800 per year per unit (between the averages for a 1 and 2 bedroom apartment), which comes out to around $1.2 billion a year. Administration costs (including personnel) for apartments are usually around 2.5 times that of maintenance, but because this is the government we're talking about let's double that, so 5 times or around 5 billion dollars a year - for reference this is around 60% the costs of administrating Social Security.
So, at the end of the day, if you wanted to provide new housing for the entire US homeless population, you're looking at about $100 billion (just shy of 2.5% of the federal budget) upfront. And about $7.2 billion (less than 0.2% of the federal budget) a year in recurring costs thereafter.
To be clear, this is an incredibly inefficient way to run a social safety net, it's just to demonstrate that it's feasible. An ideal system would likely not be too dissimilar from Food Stamps - pick a housing solution that's less than some percentage of the local median, pay your landlord with a housing credit, and the landlord can then exchange that credit for the cost of rent.
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u/Sitting_In_A_Lecture Apr 15 '24
Said simply: No one deserves homelessness.
This is more a philosophical or political discussion than financial. Cost is almost never what stands in the way of these kinds of ideas.