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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

#61

Post by reedjosh »

antihero wrote: post #34
rmason wrote: post #32

Do you realize that you could give that homeless person a first class ticket to Detroit? Put them up in a hotel until an abandoned house could be totally rebuilt for them. Pay their electricity, water, heating costs and taxes for the next ten years and still save California taxpayers $600,000!

Yes but would they want to go?

But why should others have to pay for locating homeless people where they _want_ to go. It's giving money to them. It's an offer.

It's not like you _must_ go there, but to expect tax payers to build homes where it's far too expensive to build...

It's like sending the same people to a fancy restaurant. In what way does it make sense?

To me, government intervention caused this, so maybe they should just peel back their building restrictions?

Re: Los Angeles is spending up to $837k to house a single homeless person

#62

Post by vkou »

linksnapzz wrote: post #28
re6fae5Wied5tha wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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.

No, it's not particularly compassionate, but when no alternative exists, it's better than criminalizing poverty, or from sweeping people out of 3rd street, into 4th street, and then, three weeks later, back to 3rd.

You'll find that most progressives don't actually like people camping in parks, they just think it's the best option out of all the shitty ones currently available.

If you want to fix homelessness, you need to provide all three of housing, psychological, and addiction services. Housing, not shelters - most people prefer sleeping in a tent to sleeping in a shelter. If you're not doing all three, you're just wasting your time and money.

Re: Los Angeles is spending up to $837k to house a single homeless person

#63

Post by istjohn »

kerneloftruth wrote: post #5

The 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…

They're homeless because housing costs are absurd in California. There are mentally ill people all across the country, but few places have a housing crisis anything like that in California. Only a quarter of the homeless in California suffer from severe mental illness[1].

1. https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2021-08-07/men...

Re: Los Angeles is spending up to $837k to house a single homeless person

#64

Post by pueblito »

2Gkashmiri wrote: post #44
lisper wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're homeless because they're mentally ill Some but not all. There are many disparate causes of homelessness and mental illness is just one of them. > _requiring_ treatment for the chronically homeless That is hard to implement in a free country.

yeah communism is bad because it expects people to be fed and housed on state expenses while capitalism throws freeloaders off the wagon. sure its such a difficult proposition to implement in a free country. i mean i am in india and every poor household gets basically free rations every month, free healthcare in government hospitals and now even a medical insurance for treatments in private run hospitals at no cost.…

Unskilled labor starts at $15/hr. A loaf of fresh bread is $5.

Re: Los Angeles is spending up to $837k to house a single homeless person

#65

Post by spicyusername »

sevenf0ur wrote: post #31
nimbius wrote: post #17

the fact that any housing is getting built is frankly a refreshing turn of events. for people unfamiliar with los angeles, is very much a city of landed gentry. republican legislation designed to curtail rising taxes for elderly residents 40 years ago wound up creating a cloistered elite of land-owners that pay nearly nothing in tax and resist any attempt to create additional housing. They coast on a bubble of six-fi…

Liberal policies is why Los Angles has been dealing with a homeless crisis for so long. Spending $837,000 to build a single studio to house a single homeless person seems insane to most of the country.

> Spending $837,000 to build a single studio to house a single homeless person seems insane

I don't think it was known, in advance, that this would be the resulting cost, assuming that figure is accurate. I don't think any rational person would put forward such a program and that $837,000 to build a single studio house seems insane to everyone, not just non-Californians.

I think the point OP is trying to make is that the skyrocketing cost is partly caused by a certain class of privileged Californian's continuing to fight the effort to build more housing.

Re: Los Angeles is spending up to $837k to house a single homeless person

#66

Post by legitster »

In the last 50 years, cities across the country closed down over 1 million SROs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy) in an effort to remove slums or just neglect at increasing property value. There are now over half of a million homeless. It's honestly impressive the number is not more.

For the 1.2 billion dollars they are spending, if all of the apartments were built to the spec of a roadside motel room (~350 sq ft - or more than double the average SRO), they should realistically be able to build over 10,000 units for that kind of money (that's including California's exorbitant cost per square foot).

It would be like if the government banned motorcycles, and then said "okay, instead we'll make you a nice, compact crossover", and then handed over design and construction of the crossovers to a company that builds snowplows.

What's frustrating is that SROs used to be provided by the private market, largely free to taxpayers! How much better a use of government money it would have been to just improve the situation in SROs than to quietly let them shutter and hope the poverty they represented just disappeared with them.

Re: Los Angeles is spending up to $837k to house a single homeless person

#67

Post by scantron4 »

vkou wrote: post #57
Kalium wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also, it's worth noting that building a house isn't a hole that you throw money into, it's an asset that appreciates.

Not if it gets trashed by the residents.

Re: Los Angeles is spending up to $837k to house a single homeless person

#68

Post by mullingitover »

sevenf0ur wrote: post #31
nimbius wrote: post #17

the fact that any housing is getting built is frankly a refreshing turn of events. for people unfamiliar with los angeles, is very much a city of landed gentry. republican legislation designed to curtail rising taxes for elderly residents 40 years ago wound up creating a cloistered elite of land-owners that pay nearly nothing in tax and resist any attempt to create additional housing. They coast on a bubble of six-fi…

Liberal policies is why Los Angles has been dealing with a homeless crisis for so long. Spending $837,000 to build a single studio to house a single homeless person seems insane to most of the country.

It's nothing to do with liberal policy. It was pure corruption that happened right under the noses of voters. The sales tax ballot measure to fund housing had an innocent-looking line which restricted the contractors eligible for the jobs. The contractors had to have experience building this type of housing.

The problem with this is that there were only two contractors that met the requirement, and as a result they could charge whatever they wanted since it was practically a no-bid contract.

Los Angeles could've spent dramatically less, and housed more people, had they simply purchased housing on the open market with the money. These prices are pure graft.

Re: Los Angeles is spending up to $837k to house a single homeless person

#69

Post by s1artibartfast »

pooper wrote: post #53
tempnow987 wrote: post #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?

> One question is, would that 800K + $100K/year go further somewhere else? Where is that money going now? Who gets this money now and why would they give it up?

Before it went into people's pockets, so they could care for their families and improve their life conditions.

Re: Los Angeles is spending up to $837k to house a single homeless person

#70

Post by slg »

>The audit found 14% of the units build exceeded $700,000 each, and one project in pre-development is estimated to cost almost $837,000 per unit.

It sounds like that "up to" in the title is doing a lot of work if 86% are below $700k. I would also like to throw in the added context that the median home price is roughly $915k[1]. Also be mindful whether we are discussing LA county or LA city. The article is about an LA city program. Housing in LA county will be cheaper and the median there is just under $800k[2]. So all of these projects are under the median cost of housing and the overwhelming majority are at least 25% below median.

This doesn't seem like much of a controversy once you know that context. Housing in LA is simply expensive.

[1] - https://www.redfin.com/city/11203/CA/Los-Angeles/housing-mar...

[2] - https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-11-04/what-l-a-c...

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