Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

ktla.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 368 posts

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

#121

Post by long_time_gone »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #112
long_time_gone wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like, we'd be better off if voters didn't demand short-term actions with negative long-term effects.

Voters didn’t order the SROs in bunker hill destroyed. Follow the money. Who stood to gain in the time when that SRO was raized into a parking lot then turned into the hotel Bonaventure in downtown LA? It wasn’t voters, it was a handful of politically connected people.

You can drill-down to a specific SRO building to find a unique story, but the overwhelming trend from 1960-2010 was to eliminate SRO because of health and safety concerns.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy

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

#122

Post by rhizome »

slg wrote: post #70

>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…

The city isn't spending $837K to house one homeless person, they've spent that on housing the first homeless person in that unit. Unless they're planning on these people never improving their situation to the point of moving out and for the unit to be destroyed in the process, the units can be reused. We'll see if the paper writes a story on how the cost of housing a homeless person has been cut in half after the units turn over to new tenants after the old ones move into their self-sufficient lives.

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

#123

Post by hardtke »

mikeg8 wrote: post #39

I'm finishing construction next month an 1,100 sq/ft single family home in the north bay area; a very high cost-of-living region. We started construction in Sept 2021, after an intentional delay of a couple months to let lumber prices drop after peaking in May-June. My home will be built for about $350k (less land acquisition). I'm acting as contractor and have connections in the industry so very few can build at my…

Are your subcontractors fully insured? Do they fully pay workers compensation? Are their employees legally authorized to work in the US? There is a quite substantial price premium in the market now for contractors that follow the law, and government projects are forced to follow the law.

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

#124

Post by wolverine876 »

legitster wrote: post #66

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 mote…

Where do all these numbers and other claims come from? Without evidence, we're all writing works of fiction - compelling stories, but not reality.

> handed over design and construction of the crossovers to a company that builds snowplows.

Who is analogous to the snowplow building company?

> SROs used to be provided by the private market, largely free to taxpayers!

What do we know about SROs and their outcomes?

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

#125

Post by lotsofpulp »

999900000999 wrote: post #50

Oh yes, my home city. I left LA for numerous reasons, absolutely unaffordable housing was one of them. Most people are doing extremely poorly in Los Angeles. It's the only city where you both have to pay an insane amount of rent, and own a car. The bare minimum survive in LA is probably around 80 k. But the median income there is only around 70k. Of the people I was meeting, almost no one had a job or any real intere…

Coastal California will never have affordable housing. The demand is way too high relative to supply, so people will trip over themselves to compete with each other for it, pushing prices to the limit.

There may have been a possibility prior to the 90s before it was widely known about and the world’s population was much smaller, but it has been a few decades since it has been obvious that demand for coastal California is insatiable, and obviously the people living there are not going to want to share it with everyone in the world that wants to live there.

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

#126

Post by ravenstine »

999900000999 wrote: post #50

Oh yes, my home city. I left LA for numerous reasons, absolutely unaffordable housing was one of them. Most people are doing extremely poorly in Los Angeles. It's the only city where you both have to pay an insane amount of rent, and own a car. The bare minimum survive in LA is probably around 80 k. But the median income there is only around 70k. Of the people I was meeting, almost no one had a job or any real intere…

LA isn't even better than most other cities. You'd think it would be considering how many people have come here and how much it costs, but it's possibly one of the most mediocre cities in existence. Countries with much smaller economies (yet longer histories) than LA manage to have better looking skyscrapers and scenery, along with roads that aren't crumbling to the same degree. There's some great things in LA, but there's great things elsewhere and people are happy in other parts of the world. Somehow there are still some "angelinos" getting high on their own supply over "la la land". Literally no one comes to visit anymore unless LA happens to be on the way to something.

It's sad because this used to be the place to be (one of them, I mean). At least that's what we wanted to believe.

I'm still in LA because I happen to be paying a ridiculously low monthly rent for a 4 bedroom house in an area where I have friends and family (yeah... I know). As soon as that rent shoots up, LA will have to be in my rear view mirror. Probably California all together.

Some are probably gonna downvote me, but guess what, I got highly downvoted back in ~2015 when I was pointing out the decline of San Francisco; now it's issues are commonly accepted. You can't explain away the need for poop patrols, the garbage overflowing in the streets, or the fentanyl zombies. Eventually people won't be able to deny that LA is suffering serious socio-economic issues, just as how few will apologize for SF anymore.

Believe it or not, I want these places to succeed. That's why I openly criticize them. Cities in California are my home.

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

#127

Post by wolverine876 »

999900000999 wrote: post #120
legitster wrote: post #66

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 mote…

I don't buy the argument SROs were removed to get rid of Slums. In fact, my first apartment, ironically in LA was a very small step up from an SRO. It had a private bathroom, but not much else. Now the city has effectively made this housing illegal to build. These units for the homeless are basically luxury condos. It's never been about helping people, Garcerti and the boys just ripped off the people of Los Angeles.…

> These units for the homeless are basically luxury condos.

What is luxurious about them? Or are you referring to the price?

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

#128

Post by rglover »

wolverine876 wrote: post #93
rglover wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Government stole it from tax payers to then act as a poorly run pseudo-charity, which is actually just a way for them to skim cream like mobsters while pretending to "do good." The foolish lap this up and immediately get defensive at anyone who proposes that, maybe, just maybe, politicians are lying to them and using their good nature against them. Maybe. So, we get a consistently declining standard of livin…

> Government stole it from tax payers Actually, we agreed that it was a good idea and organized our government to carry it out, and we broadly support it. > The foolish Commenters and citizens who disagree with you are "foolish"? People can't possibly disagree with you for legitimate reasons? Is your opinion the standard by which we measure legitimacy? Lucky I met you! > decaying urban centers Urban centers have been…

No post body was provided.

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

#129

Post by nonameiguess »

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…

I'm not sure this is true for urban multi-unit housing. A whole lot of shoddy work gets sold at a high price simply because the location is attractive. Single-family and luxury builds are more held to this dynamic.

But the mechanism would be the contract itself. It comes with requirements. Make high quality and low cost among the requirements. Actually hold the contractors to them. Require open competition for the bids.

So why does this not work? I'm in defense contracting, not building, but at least in that realm, there isn't meaningful competition and no credible bill comes in low for a variety of reasons, but the biggest I can think of is the security and compliance requirements are so high that they represent a minimum regulatory hurdle very few contractors can clear, no matter how good and/or cheap their work might be, and when smaller operations emerge that do a good job and threaten the entrenched incumbents, the existing oligopoly just buys them.

What can be done about that is the FTC not approving so many mergers and acquisitions on the part of giant contractors, and automating and/or streamlining some of the security hurdles. I don't think removing them is an option, since critical defense systems will be under constant attack by nation state actors and need to hold up under conditions of persistent warfare.

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

#130

Post by wolverine876 »

legitster wrote: post #94
slg wrote: post #70

>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…

I think this is a great point, but may still disagree with it. To put it another way, we are taking people out of homelessness, and putting them in houses that are more expensive than 30-40% of units on the market. So the members of the program are getting a much worse deal than if they were just given money directly to pay rent. The cost to house homeless shouldn't be slightly below median. Realistically, it should…

> So the members of the program are getting a much worse deal than if they were just given money directly to pay rent.

There are programs like that, including large ones like federal Section 8. It's not simple at all: Landlords will often refuse to rent to Section 8 participants. Also, people who are unhoused often need other services in order to get back on their feet.

Post reply on HN