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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

#201

Post by 999900000999 »

wolverine876 wrote: post #160
legitster wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My grandparent's first apartment in SF didn't have it's own kitchen or bathroom. They thought it was a nice enough place, but you literally couldn't legally rent it out today.

> My grandparent's first apartment in SF didn't have it's own kitchen or bathroom. They thought it was a nice enough place, but you literally couldn't legally rent it out today. Are you defining a unit with a kitchen and bathroom as a 'luxury apartment'? Would you live without them?

My first apartment didn't have a kitchen. And it was fine, we are talking about a homeless shelter. You do not need to have stainless steel appliances, it should be a short-term stopgap until you find a better solution. Historically lower income people had to share common amenities like a shower. Just because it would be nice for every single person to have a big apartment with brand new appliances doesn't make it feasible .

I don't know about you, but given the choice between sleeping on the streets or having to share a shower with a reasonable number of other people, I'd share that shower.

Instead LA built a bunch of vanity projects which provide no real help to the vast majority of homeless people. The only thing you can really do is move your feet, which is what I did .

Anyone struggling to find affordable housing in LA should get out. You can move to Vegas and drive in every other week to see your friends.

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

#202

Post by seanmcdirmid »

legitster wrote: post #145
wolverine876 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These units for the homeless are basically luxury condos. What is luxurious about them? Or are you referring to the price?

My grandparent's first apartment in SF didn't have it's own kitchen or bathroom. They thought it was a nice enough place, but you literally couldn't legally rent it out today.

My apartment in Lausanne had a bathroom and a kitchen, except the kitchen was one stovetop and a sink in a small cabinet next to the door. It was small, still cost me 900 CHF/month (in 2006!), but Lausanne is expensive.

I don't think those would be allowed in most (American) cities either, I don't think 20 sqm is rentable.

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

#203

Post by WalterBright »

wolverine876 wrote: post #160
legitster wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My grandparent's first apartment in SF didn't have it's own kitchen or bathroom. They thought it was a nice enough place, but you literally couldn't legally rent it out today.

> My grandparent's first apartment in SF didn't have it's own kitchen or bathroom. They thought it was a nice enough place, but you literally couldn't legally rent it out today. Are you defining a unit with a kitchen and bathroom as a 'luxury apartment'? Would you live without them?

I lived for 3 years in a college dorm with no kitchen or bathroom. I even had to have a roommate.

Some of the best times in my life.

For my senior year I moved into an apartment with my own bathroom and kitchen. It turned out to be a step down.

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

#204

Post by 1024core »

rhizome wrote: post #122
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 uni…

> 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.

You'd be surprised to learn how little planning is done for the next step. Authorities (at least here in SF) are myopically focused on moving people into housing; there is no step 2 after that. That's why we have to keep building more housing, as people are not graduating out of the housing to make room for others.

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

#205

Post by banannaise »

Homeless-care services like this are the equivalent of dealing with tech debt. Every homeless person incurs gigantic recurring costs, and to make them no longer homeless requires even larger temporary costs. All of this could have been avoided by solving for the tech debt that leads to homelessness, but there's apparently no real appetite for investing resources into that.

So now we have to pay down our tech debt. As you can see from the reaction to programs like this, we're more likely to simply sink escalating maintenance costs into the existing system instead.

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

#206

Post by iso1210 »

sfe22 wrote: post #159
jvanderbot wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely this. In LA there are constant referendums about homelessness, in CA massive budget increases, and yet, nobody will allow a shelter or multi-family unit to be constructed in their neighborhood, lest their soaring land value peak. In CA, it's my firm belief that people have a tad too much power over the minutae of government operations. What did we even elect people for if we are going to try to solve everyt…

So CA is too democratic in your opinion? It should slide more towards tyranny?

That's the paradox isn't it. Mob rule ends up being tyranny.

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

#207

Post by muaytimbo »

wolverine876 wrote: post #154
ravenstine wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you have any evidence of that? This is a totally valid question. Wouldn't the overwhelming liberal majority rule in California be evidence in and of itself? I guess there could be liberals in name who enact conservative policy (or maybe little policy at all), but I haven't seen evidence of that.

> Wouldn't the overwhelming liberal majority rule in California be evidence in and of itself? I guess there could be liberals in name who enact conservative policy (or maybe little policy at all), but I haven't seen evidence of that. Good points. First, what do the outcomes depend on? Policies of California state and local government are only limited factors. They do not create the economy, migration, weather, real e…

I think these are good questions.

You can find a nice graphic of homelessness by state here: https://www.usich.gov/tools-for-action/map/#fn[]=1300&fn[]=2...

States like CA and NY seem to have the most growth in homeless population. That might be considered supporting evidence.

"They do not create the economy, migration, weather, real estate development, etc. etc. (though they some limited effect on all of them). There are many other powers in the world. The government's power to control events is pretty limited." I disagree with this statement, look at all the shutdowns as of late. The government seems to have almost unlimited power which court systems are unwilling to check, they can literally shut entire sectors of the economy down and stop home showings, in direct contradiction to your statement. In normal times they hold enormous influence over these sectors with licensing requirements, regulatory schemes, and political corruption. The result is migration, which also as of late has resulted in net outflows in CA, NY, and IL.

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

#208

Post by seanmcdirmid »

rhizome wrote: post #122
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 uni…

> 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 are housing functioning tenants (the easier homeless cases that don't involve mental illness or substance abuse, the ones that can get back on their feet with some help), those units are likely to get damaged quickly and require extensive refurbishment within a year or two. Hopefully they are using discretion in who gets that housing, or it will wind up costing them another $100k every couple of years to keep the unit inhabitable.

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

#209

Post by richardfey »

vasco wrote: post #142
rhizome wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, what should have been done is enforce laws (and pass legislation if necessary) to prevent the SROs from being allowed to decline into slums.

Even if SROs would be slums, they would be better than the street slums of LA. How is a tent city better than a decrepit building?

The tent cannot fall on your head? But I get what you mean.

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

#210

Post by GlobalFrog »

legitster wrote: post #118
kjkjadksj wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you may underrate how much people in the local community hated SROs. It was definitely politically popular at the time to remove them.

And why not allow them now? If you compare the housing market to the job market, the general opinion (in the US) is that there should be very few restrictions for jobs in terms of low salaries and work conditions (and the lack of unions allows that). The same reasonning should allow to have low quality housing but cheap. But there are no downside for the ones who profit from employing people with very low salaries and very poor work conditions, whereas letting exist cheap housing indeed makes the property value around them go down. So it is really a choice made today not to reduce homelessness.
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