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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

#111

Post by rhizome »

mwint wrote: post #98
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…

Basically, we’d be better off if the government had done nothing. Seems like that happens a lot.

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.

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

#112

Post by kjkjadksj »

long_time_gone wrote: post #104
mwint wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically, we’d be better off if the government had done nothing. Seems like that happens a lot.

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.

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

#113

Post by xenadu02 »

Dig1t wrote: post #78
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…

Prop 19 more or less eliminated the landed gentry problem. Previously children could inherit their parent's primary residence and get their parent's tax base, even if they didn't want to live in the home. Before we bought a house we rented and my landlord was in that position. He already owned his own home in addition to several other properties in SF... yet he inherited his mom's house at a 200k tax basis, a house that would sell for $1.2m. His children could inherit the house from him, keeping the 200k tax base. And their children. And their children. Forever creating a true landed gentry.

Now with Prop 19 children can only keep the lower tax basis if they use the home as their primary residence and it only excludes up to 1m in value.

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

#114

Post by eberkund »

long_time_gone wrote: post #104
mwint wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically, we’d be better off if the government had done nothing. Seems like that happens a lot.

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

Collectively we would be better off but many individuals would not be which is the crux of the problem.

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

#115

Post by ravenstine »

wolverine876 wrote: post #75
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.

> 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.

> 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.

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

#116

Post by slg »

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…

Remember these are new units and those median prices are for all units regardless of age and condition. It is really impractical to build new units in the 1st percentile. Those are almost always going to be old units that are poorly maintained.

You also can't just give this money to homeless people and let them buy or rent their own places because the fundamental problem is a lack of supply. Simply giving them money would increase the cost of homes for everyone else and in turn feed into a cycle of creating more homeless people. The city needs to build new homes to increase the supply.

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

#117

Post by s1artibartfast »

vannevar wrote: post #99
s1artibartfast wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Are their life conditions improved by having homeless people all over the place? There's a price to pay for living in an organized civil society, because people have learned the hard way that having an organized, civil society is better for their families and life conditions.

That is a balancing equation, not an absolute.

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

#118

Post by legitster »

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.

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.

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

#119

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

JJMcJ wrote: post #49
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…

> curtail rising taxes That, of course, was Proposition 13, a ballot initiative. The fallout was exactly what people predicted. Prop 13 did two things. It capped property taxes, though there have been a variety of ways of getting around that. The other thing was it capped increases in property taxes. Not quite Prop 13 but you can't have high increases in property values, and simultaneously have affordable housing. Im…

> Not quite Prop 13 but you can't have high increases in property values, and simultaneously have affordable housing.

If you means test things, it can work better. If you're an artist or a retiree in san francisco, and then someone goes and invents the internet, prices will go way way up around you. If you don't want to force the artists and retirees to learn to code to keep up with housing catering to newcomers, something like prop 13 helps. But then if they do go and learn to code, taking advantage of the new skyrocketing job market, then they don't need prop 13 protections. Prices went up but their income kept pace, so they don't need the protections.

A lot of these kinds of issues seem to come back to lack of means testing or poorly implemented, non-holistic, perverse incentivizing means testing.

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

#120

Post by 999900000999 »

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.

A more realistic plan would be to offer relocation assistance or at the very least relax building requirements.

None of that will happen, my first, my beautiful 600$ apartment is now 1300$. I miss the city LA used to be.

I had the privilege of living in a neighborhood with 3$ bottles of Soju and 4$ Tortas. It was absolutely amazing.

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