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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

#71

Post by CountDrewku »

mullingitover wrote: post #68
sevenf0ur wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

No post body was provided.

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

#72

Post by chernevik »

daenz wrote: post #21

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 disin…

Not really, and this is in the nature of government programs. Management has no personal incentive to control costs or quality, and many incentives that tend to work against those controls.

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

#73

Post by RIMR »

linksnapzz wrote: post #15

I'll cut them a deal. LA can send me a check for merely $500,000; and I'll agree to never camp out on their streets. I also expect some sort of formal recognition for helping them meet their targets of reducing homelessness.

We get it, your socioeconomic status makes you confident that you'll never be affected by this problem, and you have no interest in improving the world for the people who are.

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

#75

Post by wolverine876 »

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.

> Liberal policies

Do you have any evidence of that?

> Spending $837,000 to build a single studio to house a single homeless person seems insane to most of the country.

That's not what is happening, in any meaningful way.

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

#76

Post by wolverine876 »

spicyusername wrote: post #65
sevenf0ur wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> $837,000

That's not what is happening. Per the article:

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

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

#77

Post by zdragnar »

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.

That is definitely not a universal truth. Anyone who has rented out a house knows just how expensive a bad tenant is.

I have had a few friends who were in that position because they had to move but couldnt sell their houses (2008-2014 era roughly). They would have been better off taking the loss on leaving it empty after taking out loans to undo the damage done.

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

#78

Post by Dig1t »

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…

I think you're talking about this in pretty black/white terms and the partisan framing doesn't do much. Prop 13 is a double edged sword IMO.

It does have the problem you describe of landed gentry not getting hit with high property taxes, but also it does protect middle class people from getting kicked out of their homes due to the popularity of the area they live in. My parents are the perfect example of this, my dad is a plumber and my mom is a teacher, my entire life they barely broke 100k combined and were BARELY able to give me and my sibling a decent life in LA. If their property taxes had risen with the rate of the area that they bought a house in as we grew up, we would have been unable to continue living there and forced to leave. The same thing goes with my grandparents.

California has very high income tax, which arguably compensates for the low property taxes. This strikes me as more fair, as the high earners are the ones hit with the tax bills rather than my grandma, who made nothing and had no way to pay the tax that comes with a $2M property valuation, despite having worked hard to buy her house when she was younger.

So yeah, you're right in some sense, but its not fair to completely ignore the alternative of lower/middle class people being kicked out of their homes if they didn't have prop 13. The real problem here is the NIMBYism that you describe and restrictive zoning.

ALSO, the landed gentry are sort of limited as well. Yes their primary home (the one they live in) has a limited tax bill, but additional homes they own, they will probably end up renting out, and that rental income will be subject to California's high income tax.

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

#79

Post by [deleted] »

logicalmonster wrote: post #38
kerneloftruth wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"That is hard to implement in a free country" The past 2 years proves that entirely untrue.

> Requiring medical treatments > Free country That choice is a radio button, not a checkbox. Can't have both.

[deleted]

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

#80

Post by Kalium »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #60
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.

They can choose anywhere to build, the government controls zoning, and they're making apartments. Doesn't that get past all the big systemic cost problems? Though the article doesn't actually say anything about average costs or cost per type of unit, and since this is a professional news outlet they don't link their sources...

> Doesn't that get past all the big systemic cost problems?

You would think so! Unfortunately, this is not the case. In SF, some of the systemic issues are planning processes voted into the city charter decades ago, so the city doesn't get to bypass them. Some of the larger issues, such as land price and CEQA, are state-wide issues that cities can't avoid.

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