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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

#161

Post by Auracle »

ahelwer wrote: post #10
fortran77 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is NPR reporting. Why would they mislead on an issue like this? I think they're a very credible source, given their progressive bent, to be asking these questions.

I have no idea why people believe NPR to be progressive. The joke name "Nice Polite Republicans" exists for a reason. Liberal news coverage of homeless issues rarely takes a progressive framing, anyway.

There’s an easy litmus test for news organizations - words. Do they use Latino or Latinx, for example? Illegal alien vs. undocumented immigrant vs refugee. Sex vs gender assigned at birth (usually when talking about a trans person).

NPR used to be fairly centrist, but these days they’re far to the left. If I turn on my car there’s about a 9/10 chance my local station will be talking about some form of identity politics.

That’s all the radio, though. I believe they at least try to approach the center in their online articles.

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

#162

Post by pentae »

kjgkjhfkjf wrote: post #153

Can anyone estimate how much it would cost a scrappy private company to provide similar services sustainably? My guess is that it would be far less than $2600/m.

I imagine the main reason nobody does this is due to the minefield of legal issues, being accused of exploitation, etc. Not to mention the personal safety risk of your staff, and so on.

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

#163

Post by toast0 »

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…

> Some problems though, like healthcare and homelessness don't get better if you spend more money on them. The prices of healthcare just go up, because there is limited supply of doctors and drug companies charge whatever they want, and more homeless people show up to take advantage of the great services.

If you spend the healthcare money on training more doctors (including making available more residencies), or researching more things that are safe and effective for specialty nurses to do without needing a doctor, you can reduce the bottleneck there and maybe get better results.

Even things like making sure residents have safe transportation home after (overlong) shifts would help. I've heard a lot of unsafe driving anecdotes from my cousin who is currently a resident.

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

#164

Post by ffggvv »

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).

a lot of these people specifically come to california because they want to live on the street and do drugd and visit the beach and enjoy it. i’ve seen many of them admit it. losers in iowa or some random state where they could easily get an apartment for 500 bucks a month or live with parents but would rather move to california and not have a job

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

#165

Post by spoonjim »

londons_explore wrote: post #114
spoonjim wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I see someone who is quite clearly very recently homeless I give them as much money as I can afford to, like $50-100, because I feel like it can get them out of homelessness. When I see someone completely out of their mind I don’t feel like anything I can do will make a material difference, just get them different levels of stoned for the next 3 hours.

When you give $50-100, please employ them to do a task. Ie. "Here's $50. Go and buy me some ice cream. You can have another $50 when you bring it to me". It discourages begging and encourages an entrepreneur mentality.

Sorry, I’m not a complete shitheel.

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

#166

Post by Klinky »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #160
Klinky wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Housing prices in my area have literally doubled in the last 5~ years. Sitting on a house doesn't look so bad with those returns. At the same time flipping is also a housing investment method that inflates prices while often diluting the quality of the housing market, as it's often not done properly. Let's also not forget the housing crisis saw a lot of money pouring into bad investments. Assuming people only make wi…

> Sitting on a house doesn't look so bad with those returns Those returns are underwritten by voters rejecting new housing. If that political landscape changes, the incentives for landholders evolve.

I dunno, I do see "luxury" apartments being built rather often around here, but starting at $2K/mn for a 1 bedroom isn't really affordable.

Political NIMBYism probably does play some part along with the pandemic, but again, that doesn't mean these investors are paying attention to that. There is a gold rush on at the moment.

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

#167

Post by BurningFrog »

onion2k wrote: post #106
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…

Today's new expensive housing will indirectly create more cheap housing in the pre-existing housing stock, by pulling demand out of the market. Only if people actually live in those houses, and they're bought by people living in the cheaper houses right now who then move up in to the new housing stock. If people buy the new houses as investments and leave them empty most of the year then it has no impact on the rest…

I'm fascinated by how widespread this weird idea is.

Even if we buy the exotic premise that investors would buy houses and leave them empty - generating zero rental income for these greed driven people - as an investment, we still have to explain why they would only do this with new housing stock.

Why can't you do the same trick with existing housing?

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

#168

Post by capeterson »

0xB31B1B wrote: post #67
spoonjim wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I see someone who is quite clearly very recently homeless I give them as much money as I can afford to, like $50-100, because I feel like it can get them out of homelessness. When I see someone completely out of their mind I don’t feel like anything I can do will make a material difference, just get them different levels of stoned for the next 3 hours.

the crazy thing is that there are a ton of "recently homeless" folks you encounter in your daily life without even knowing it. Something like 10% of the cal state university students are homeless. My wife is a doc in the ER and deals with a bunch of folks who are going through these issues. Many retail workers, service workers etc are homeless, shower at the gym, and have been living in their car or friends couches f…

If anyone was wondering about a source, as I was, here:

https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-cal-state-homeless...

https://presspage-production-content.s3.amazonaws.com/upload...

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

#169

Post by stickfigure »

slg wrote: post #124
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…

This generally doesn't happen for two primary reasons. First cities are not closed systems. Places like LA and the Bay Area have a built up demand that exceeds housing. The new housing would have to be added at an extremely high right to keep up with that demand otherwise the city just grows rather than becomes cheaper. When a city simply grows, the cheaper units never flow down to the bottom of the market as someone…

With sufficient deferred maintenance, today's 3 bedroom luxury condo is next decade's slum. It takes time to reach steady-state.

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

#170

Post by tolbish »

beervirus wrote: post #79
ravenstine wrote: post #44

Won't these programs just expand ad infinitum if we don't address the root causes of homelessness? I'm glad we're helping the homeless, but the lack of housing is a symptom and less so a cause. LA has way more homeless people than it used to. Why don't we address that?

What are you saying the cause is?

Housing being treated primarily as a vehicle for investment.
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