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LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

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Re: LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

#51

Post by didibus »

narrator wrote: post #8
advisedwang wrote: post #2

> the per-tent cost covers services, meals, sanitation and staffing OK, so $2600 gets a fair bit. Also looking at the report [1] this rate is calculated by dividing the total cost of the pilot by the duration and number of clients. So that is including one-time set up, planning and evaluation in the cost, which is probably a decent fraction of the cost as it's only an 8 month pilot. The recurring cost for extending m…

As long as the local government has tons of money doing nothing in their budget, they are going to find a way to spend it, and they're not going to care if they overpay because what else are they going to spend it on? In coastal California, the rule is never ever give that money back by lowering taxes. Taxes only go up. If there's too much money being generated by the taxes to spend, start spending it on homelessness…

> It costs an average of about $81,000 per year to incarcerate an inmate in prison in California

That's 6750$ per month.

Pick your poison I guess.

Re: LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

#52

Post by Swizec »

hedora wrote: post #37
sjg007 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the solution then? Utah built apartments for everyone. That seems to have worked.

Building more houses would help a lot in coastal California. Labor costs follow housing costs, so anything involving a local human being doing work is insanely overpriced. If housing prices dropped, the labor market would stabilize, lowering the cost of more construction. Instead, the planning commissions and zoning boards intentionally restrict the supply of housing, causing all sorts of market distortions. Similarl…

> My car gets 50-66% as many miles per gallon in the bay area as it does in other cities

I think the idea is that if commuting sucks enough you’ll stop doing it and those emissions go to zero.

Or you’ll switch to public or shuttle transit and emissions per person per mile drop by some ridiculously high factor. A bus can pack some 80 people into the space of 4 cars and I bet emissions aren’t 80x those of a car either.

Re: LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

#53

Post by notsureaboutpg »

darth_avocado wrote: post #35

I think the main takeaway here is government, as usual, thinking short term and spending more money on bandaid solutions. Yes, the $2600 gets you services, meals, sanitation and staffing. But in reality, you can get a decent 1BR apartment for $1500 that is waaay bigger than a tent, sanitation for free since it is an apartment, and have almost $1000 for groceries left over. And, you can fit more people in the apartmen…

Some unaccounted things:

1) You have to pay extra to get a landlord to agree to the risk of housing a homeless person with likely no way to pay rent if the government program ends who also is more likely to have drug problems / mental health issues. This person may also be more likely to harass other tenants. Even if you don't believe this to be true, many landlords will and they won't agree to rent to such people without a substantial extra charge.

2) Cost in potential missed rent from neighboring tenants. If a landlord agrees to this program and other tenants move out due to the behavior of the homeless tenant, then that lost cost is also a problem.

Re: LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

#54

Post by wyager »

BelenusMordred wrote: post #38
sixdimensional wrote: post #28

I'm super impressed by what Pallet[1] is doing in this space. I think LA is talking with Pallet to implement their temporary housing, which would be amazing. [1] https://www.palletshelter.com

I don't want to diminish the link above and it's efforts but how a first world society has to resort to stuff like this is just mind-boggling. I'm an expat in a developing country and even for the poorest people a roof over their heads is affordable. Everytime I go back to Australia or visit Europe I'm always shocked at the level of homelessness, it's just not right. Why are dirt-poor countries able to house their ci…

Low-cost urban housing is illegal to construct in the US due to building safety codes, rules on minimum size, etc. The US federal government (and some state/city governments) has a tendency to always increase safety standards just enough that the bottom X% of people are priced out. They do it with cars as well. New cars start dipping to the low-mid $10K range? Time to make infotainment systems mandatory and add more mandatory airbags. This doesn’t affect 90% of consumers but the bottom 10% get squeezed out again.

Re: LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

#55

Post by danr4 »

GartzenDeHaes wrote: post #39
darth_avocado wrote: post #35

I think the main takeaway here is government, as usual, thinking short term and spending more money on bandaid solutions. Yes, the $2600 gets you services, meals, sanitation and staffing. But in reality, you can get a decent 1BR apartment for $1500 that is waaay bigger than a tent, sanitation for free since it is an apartment, and have almost $1000 for groceries left over. And, you can fit more people in the apartmen…

You're misunderstanding the fundamental function of modern government. That $2600 goes to a contractor (political crony, friend, or relative) who then mostly pockets the money through salaries, sub-contracts, and such. This is the purpose of the spending and there was never an intent to help anyone in the first place.

Man it's so sad that you are right

Re: LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

#56

Post by [deleted] »

danr4 wrote: post #55
GartzenDeHaes wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're misunderstanding the fundamental function of modern government. That $2600 goes to a contractor (political crony, friend, or relative) who then mostly pockets the money through salaries, sub-contracts, and such. This is the purpose of the spending and there was never an intent to help anyone in the first place.

Man it's so sad that you are right

[deleted]

Re: LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

#57

Post by 0xB31B1B »

Posting this because most people in HN have a warped view of what homelessness is, especially in california. First of all, when most people think homeless they think "fentanyl addict out of his mind living in squalor" and while there are certainly a bunch of those people in the homeless population, they aren't even a majority of the homeless.

In general, about 2/3 of the homeless are transiently homeless. They will be homeless for less than 12 months, they are likely employed while they are homeless at least in a part time capacity, or they are in college. These folks generally refuse to get services and spend their time sleeping in their car, crashing on friends couches, and in a pinch, sleeping in tents outside away from the wild areas. In general, these people are on hard times due to bad luck more or less, and are struggling to get out of it.

Another 1/3 of the homeless are people who used to be in the prior group, but are now "chronically homeless". They may have gotten into drugs or developed a mental issue in the first 12 months that they became homeless. These people are the "out of their minds" camp dwellers we think about when we think about the homeless. The biggest risk factor for being in this group is becoming homeless in the first place, and the best way to prevent people from becoming transiently homeless is to prevent them from losing their stable housing or getting them into stable housing within the first 12 months of them becoming homeless. It is much harder to "rehabilitate" someone who has been homeless for 12+ months than it is to rehabilitate someone who has been homeless for One issue we have now is that is very easy for people to move from "safely housed" to "transiently homeless" and one big way to prevent this downward trend in quality of life is to build more cheap housing so people in the precarious spot have alternatives to living in a tent. Its not going to be an immediate feedback loop but its the only sustainable way to prevent the growing numbers of homeless in US cities.

Re: LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

#58

Post by vineyardmike »

narrator wrote: post #8
advisedwang wrote: post #2

> the per-tent cost covers services, meals, sanitation and staffing OK, so $2600 gets a fair bit. Also looking at the report [1] this rate is calculated by dividing the total cost of the pilot by the duration and number of clients. So that is including one-time set up, planning and evaluation in the cost, which is probably a decent fraction of the cost as it's only an 8 month pilot. The recurring cost for extending m…

As long as the local government has tons of money doing nothing in their budget, they are going to find a way to spend it, and they're not going to care if they overpay because what else are they going to spend it on? In coastal California, the rule is never ever give that money back by lowering taxes. Taxes only go up. If there's too much money being generated by the taxes to spend, start spending it on homelessness…

>more homeless people show up to take advantage of the great services.

I've never heard of homeless searching for the best place too be homeless! Is there a source for this?

Re: LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

#59

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

So digging into the report that is linked from the article and other commenters here (link below, search for "Pilot Safe Sleep Site" in that article), some relevant points:

1. The "$2600" number is calculated from the $1,491,410 total cost / 70 spaces / 8 months.

2. Regarding staffing, "The staffing plan Urban Alchemy recommends for a successful program is a minimum staff-to-participant ratio of one (1) to 12." So included in the price tag is at least 6 paid staffers, and I'm assuming 24 hour coverage is needed (or at least 16 hour coverage).

3. Regarding the price, "Given the program’s high cost, we recommend that the data outcomes/effectiveness of the program be reported on by the CAO and LAHSA before initiating additional sites. "

I think this all highlights what a mistake it was regarding the basic shutdown of federal mental hospitals in the early 80s [2]. If it turns out that the cost for dealing with homeless is this high for a simple tent encampment in a parking lot because of the cost of support services, why not provide that support in a more permanent medical facility (obv. not all homeless are mentally ill but many/most of long term homeless are).

[1] https://clkrep.lacity.org/onlinedocs/2020/20-0841_rpt_cao_03...

[2] https://sites.psu.edu/psy533wheeler/2017/02/08/u01-ronald-re...

Re: LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

#60

Post by visualradio »

sjg007 wrote: post #24
narrator wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as the local government has tons of money doing nothing in their budget, they are going to find a way to spend it, and they're not going to care if they overpay because what else are they going to spend it on? In coastal California, the rule is never ever give that money back by lowering taxes. Taxes only go up. If there's too much money being generated by the taxes to spend, start spending it on homelessness…

What's the solution then? Utah built apartments for everyone. That seems to have worked.

In order to eliminate taxes on the homeless, the state and local sales tax needs to be eliminated, and permanently set to 0%.

The state legislature can introduce a legislatively referred constitutional amendment to eliminate state and local sales tax and replace it with a distributive land tax.

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