Is there any way to fix incentives with government contracts, so that the product that is purchased is the lowest price for the highest quality? In the free market, there are generally incentives for that because companies have a brand, and if you deliver poor quality, consumers eventually catch on, your brand suffers, and you lose business to your competitors. How does this work in the government? Where is the disincentive to keep contractors from delivering the shoddiest product for the government check? This mechanism seems totally absent.
Los Angeles is spending up to $837k to house a single homeless person
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Re: Los Angeles is spending up to $837k to house a single homeless person
#22 ICON’s 15.5-foot-tall 3D printers can build the exterior and interior wall system for a single-story house in a week. The method cuts 30% off traditional construction costs and has been proven to produce homes for as little as $10,000. Compare that to a recent effort in Los Angeles to build 117 pre-fab tiny homes for the unhoused for $5.1 million. Compared to the LA efforts’ approximate cost of $43,590 per home, ICON could print homes at a 4x cheaper rate. - we wrote this for a story back in October. ( https://news.youexec.com/briefs/texas-startup-will-build-100... ) The fact that it costs them $800,000 in some cases is just ridiculous.
Re: Los Angeles is spending up to $837k to house a single homeless person
#23They're spending money to build housing, which will be used to house people without homes. The headline makes it sound like they're paying a million dollars in rent, but in fact this is real estate development.
40000 * 837000 = 33.48 billion dollars. This solution, as implemented, can not possibly solve the problem, ever. The upkeep on the housing alone would be a billion dollars a year!
Its because they don't actually want to house the unhoused. They want to make it seem like this impossible challenge to provide affordable housing that doesn't cost the average person in LA $1M+
Re: Los Angeles is spending up to $837k to house a single homeless person
#24The sad part is how long such spending has gone on across the state. They're homeless because they're mentally ill, not because of the tautological nonsense of "they're homeless because they haven't a home". The mental illness is exceeded only by the stupidity of the policies. Instead of the singular focus on establishing state-paid housing, _requiring_ treatment for the chronically homeless is far overdue. The optio…
Not sure why you're being down voted, this is the most honest statement about so called "homelessness" in the united states. It is affordable housing advocates essentially leveraging the mentally ill while completely ignoring their plight.
But if you ask anyone who works to house the unhoused, the affordability of homes is the problem. If you don't have shelter to rely on, how can you possibly treat your mental illness in a safe environment. I actually think it is truly both. IT's the lack of available mental health treatment and the lack of affordable housing. Neither can be fixed with the perverse incentives of the current system we have.
Re: Los Angeles is spending up to $837k to house a single homeless person
#25The primary measure of success in the last two generations in the United States has been an ability to combine plausible incompetence and graft, while remaining protected under a banner of nouveau political theory. Los Angeles has a tremendous pool of talent in this regard, perhaps some of the best in the world. Areas which are very obviously less afflicted include areas of 'Los Angeles County' outside of --and quite distinct from--the very broken "City of Los Angeles," and adjacent counties, such as Orange, Ventura, and Kern, all of which are wildly superior in the physical realization of governance.
Re: Los Angeles is spending up to $837k to house a single homeless person
#26They're spending money to build housing, which will be used to house people without homes. The headline makes it sound like they're paying a million dollars in rent, but in fact this is real estate development.
It sounds to the reader just like it is in reality: overspending on real estate.
That’s a ridiculous sum of money for one unit of housing any way you look at it.
I’m glad they’re housing the homeless, but are you telling me that there’s no way to build this cheaper?
Re: Los Angeles is spending up to $837k to house a single homeless person
#27This is such sloppy journalism:
> one project under development expected to hit as much as $837,000 for each housing unit,
How typical is that? where is it? how long is it expected to last? what other features does it have? Does that include one-time architecting costs that make future developments cheaper?
> HHH project includes 8,091 housing units — most with connected services for mental health and substance abuse treatment
so how much of the $800k goes to the mental health etc services? the paper apparently read the audit, but doesn't bother going into any detail about this.
Re: Los Angeles is spending up to $837k to house a single homeless person
#28The sad part is how long such spending has gone on across the state. They're homeless because they're mentally ill, not because of the tautological nonsense of "they're homeless because they haven't a home". The mental illness is exceeded only by the stupidity of the policies. Instead of the singular focus on establishing state-paid housing, _requiring_ treatment for the chronically homeless is far overdue. The optio…
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Something like 85% of those homeless have unresolved psychiatric & drug-abuse issues. It's not compassionate to let them do their thing, and squat in filth on public sidewalks untreated.
Re: Los Angeles is spending up to $837k to house a single homeless person
#29$837,000 is just the cost of the unit.
If you are housing actual homeless, you MUST offer supportive services on-site or have some other types of supervision or these units are going to be trashed.
You MUST budget for a lot of ongoing costs.
I'd say $800K+ per unit + maybe $100K+/year for supportive services / maintenance etc?
One question is, would that 800K + $100K/year go further somewhere else?
Re: Los Angeles is spending up to $837k to house a single homeless person
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
40000 * 837000 = 33.48 billion dollars. This solution, as implemented, can not possibly solve the problem, ever. The upkeep on the housing alone would be a billion dollars a year!
Its because they don't actually want to house the unhoused. They want to make it seem like this impossible challenge to provide affordable housing that doesn't cost the average person in LA $1M+
San Francisco had a similar problem in recent years, where trying to build housing for the unhoused was running a cost of about a million a pop.
It's perhaps possible that this isn't a deliberate display of incompetence, but a set of systemic problems that make housing in California very expensive to build.