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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

#81

Post by intrasight »

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.

And likely they are only spending it because of a court order.

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

#82

Post by LambdaComplex »

lightgreen wrote: post #70
morpheuskafka wrote: post #63

Monthly rent for a furnished apartment at my university (i.e. already overpriced and in demand) is $1049. Why not buy these people a ticket and a year's prepaid rent to somewhere with a much, much cheaper cost of living. It would save the city money and these people would have a real place to live (i.e. not homeless anymore, instead of homeless in a tent).

Problems with homeless is deeper than finding a place to sleep. For example, some homeless people voluntarily choose to sleep on the street even when they have homes (like one man I knew who refused to go home after his wife death after many years of struggling with cancer). Some people would destroy that property that would be given to them, and will be thrown out by the building administration. Homelessness is part…

If we get to the point where the government is actually trying to solve homelessness by giving people homes, then I'd be kinda optimistic about mental health getting taken seriously too. (More optimistic than I am now, at least)

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

#83

Post by Tiktaalik »

dcolkitt wrote: post #78
0xB31B1B wrote: post #57

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 b…

> one big way to prevent this downward trend in quality of life is to build more cheap housing One pedantic quibble. It's not necessary to build cheap housing specifically. It's perfectly fine simply to build more housing of any type. Today's new expensive housing will indirectly create more cheap housing in the pre-existing housing stock, by pulling demand out of the market. Throughout all of American history, new h…

Yes but we have a crisis now which means that we need both regular market housing now and affordable housing now.

We do not uh have the luxury of building luxury housing only then waiting 40 years for it to eventually become affordable.

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

#84

Post by [deleted] »

lightgreen wrote: post #70
morpheuskafka wrote: post #63

Monthly rent for a furnished apartment at my university (i.e. already overpriced and in demand) is $1049. Why not buy these people a ticket and a year's prepaid rent to somewhere with a much, much cheaper cost of living. It would save the city money and these people would have a real place to live (i.e. not homeless anymore, instead of homeless in a tent).

Problems with homeless is deeper than finding a place to sleep. For example, some homeless people voluntarily choose to sleep on the street even when they have homes (like one man I knew who refused to go home after his wife death after many years of struggling with cancer). Some people would destroy that property that would be given to them, and will be thrown out by the building administration. Homelessness is part…

[deleted]

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

#85

Post by tryonenow »

0xB31B1B wrote: post #57

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 b…

I suspect that you're excluding a nontrivial proportion of homeless people who simply do not wish to live with the burden of employment and responsibilities of rent/mortgage when they can live outdoors in perpetually nice weather. I don't know how significant this number is but I don't think it's fair to ask society to subsidize their lifestyle.

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

#86

Post by alsetmusic »

"In 2013 the Utah Housing and Community Development Division reported that the cost of emergency room treatment and jail time averaged over $16,000 per year per homeless person, while the cost of providing a fully subsidized apartment was only $11,000."[0]

Obviously, the numbers will change with the area. The cost of an apartment in the Bay Area or LA would be much greater, for example. But the book makes a good case that it'd cost society less overall to just take care of people than to ignore rampant homelessness. I'm inclined to believe it.

Related, there's an eye-opening limited series podcast on homelessness called "According to Need" that I found very compelling.[1] The host lives in the Bay Area, so there was a lot focus [t]here. I strongly recommend checking it out to learn just how stacked the system can be against people trying to overcome homelessness. For example, did you crash on someone's couch in the last thirty days? Doesn't matter if you've got nowhere to crash tonight, you don't qualify for a bed.

[0] The End of Policing, by Alex S. Vitale first edition pg 97

[1] https://99percentinvisible.org/need/

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

#87

Post by mulmen »

Swizec wrote: post #52
hedora wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, if that’s an option. Where I live they shut down the bus route in front of my house during covid. There’s no plan to bring it back. The entire neighborhood was built around the idea of transit. Of course that’s priced in to rent and of course that didn’t go down.

The next nearest bus stop is a 15 min walk from here. Still easily doable but not as nice, especially in the dark wet months. Service is unreliable so a bus is between 5 and 60 minutes away, if it isn’t cancelled.

To get to the office I have to do a transfer downtown. That 5-45 minute ordeal involves standing in human waste (mostly urine) with a very real risk of being shot or robbed or just randomly assaulted verbally or physically.

Or I can pay a $1,000.00 premium to live near the office.

I don’t live way out in the suburbs either. I am within the city limits in a “transit first” neighborhood with great walkability. I held up my end of this deal.

The problem with making cars infeasible is that public transit is simply terrible here, and we have one of the best systems in the country.

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

#88

Post by Tiktaalik »

Frustrating that we never hear about the costs of the status quo, of doing nothing and having the "solution" be that people sleep outside. Do folks think that's healthy? We pay for this in the incredible expense of highly trained (and paid!) EMT, fire and police.

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

#89

Post by BobbyJo »

Tiktaalik wrote: post #83
dcolkitt wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> one big way to prevent this downward trend in quality of life is to build more cheap housing One pedantic quibble. It's not necessary to build cheap housing specifically. It's perfectly fine simply to build more housing of any type. Today's new expensive housing will indirectly create more cheap housing in the pre-existing housing stock, by pulling demand out of the market. Throughout all of American history, new h…

Yes but we have a crisis now which means that we need both regular market housing now and affordable housing now. We do not uh have the luxury of building luxury housing only then waiting 40 years for it to eventually become affordable.

Market housing creates affordable housing by displacing demand. No matter what kind of housing you build, as long as it gets built now it will lower prices now.

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

#90

Post by spaetzleesser »

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.

Unfortunately often very true.
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