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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

#141

Post by com2kid »

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…

> My home will be built for about $350k (less land acquisition).

How in the world? I got multiple bids in Seattle to add a 200sqft dormer, 125k was the lowest bid I got.

A single bathroom around here costs a minimum of 15K to build, just to get people out to install the basics.

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

#142

Post by vasco »

rhizome wrote: post #111
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.

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?

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

#143

Post by thescriptkiddie »

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…

Requiring treatment as a prerequisite for housing is the status quo, and it has not been working.

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

#144

Post by holbrad »

wolverine876 wrote: post #83
dealforager wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is real free markets. Constant government intervention in the housing market, the stock market, education, healthcare, and everything else under the sun has led us to where we are today. It always feels nice for a bit when the government bails you out, but the long term consequences are always much more severe. Prices are information and when all the information is polluted, it becomes very difficult to…

Why would free markets help homeless people? Is there any basis for this, other than claiming that one's favorite solution is the best? Free markets serve those who pay the most, which is good for allocating iPhones, but not for healthcare, basic housing, basic food, education, safety, etc., which should not depend on ability to pay. > It's the same thing that happens in social media, trolls and bots pollute the info…

Generally for most goods markets work really well. There's two intrinsic failure cases: externalities and monopolies.

So arguably housing fits into the monopoly bucket, especially if you lean towards a land value tax.

Safety and a monopoly on force most would argue are the domains of government.

But the rest of your examples seem fine to be market based, though the devil is in the detail.

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

#145

Post by legitster »

wolverine876 wrote: post #127
999900000999 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

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

#146

Post by coding123 »

This pisses me off a LOT.

I'm currently owner building a house. It's going to end up costing 100k and I'm doing this paycheck to paycheck.

Doing it because I can't afford a house. I'm too old to have a 30 year mortgage.

Is LA willing to send me 1/8 of that cost to house my wife and I? And we'll do it ourselves.

Can the homeless build their own houses? Are these people just going to be getting hand-outs forever?

Why don't they just give Habitat money? This is insanity. I hope the LA administrators that started this mess are fired beyond fired.

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

#147

Post by mikeg8 »

_jal wrote: post #138
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…

Now build that in downtown LA explicitly for housing homeless folks, and let us know how your permitting process goes.

You would think that the city of LA would be able to do something to alleviate the permit process that the city of LA created to reduce the building costs being funded/managed by city of LA.

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

#148

Post by zamfi »

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.

Sure you can, you just also need to build new housing. The key is that the new housing has to be higher density than the old housing — the value is primarily in the land, not the house.

If a developer could legitimately and easily build a 4-plex where any single-family home exists right now, the prices of SFHs would likely stay high — they are still a luxury, and become more so as they become rarer, raising prices further — while the units in a 4-plex (still housing!) are more affordable.

Everyone wins. Except we can’t do that, because we can’t build denser housing in basically any of California.

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

#149

Post by lisper »

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.…

> communism

Who said anything about communism? I was talking about forcing people to undergo mental health treatment against their will simply because they can't afford a place to live.

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

#150

Post by linksnapzz »

RIMR wrote: post #73
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.

Funneling nearly a million bucks per homelessperson-head into the pockets of politically connected developers is not "improving the world", unless you happen to be one of the developers. The quanta of utility that they get from this will be much larger than any homeless person who gets a dwelling out of it, especially since they most likely need medical and supervised psychiatric treatment more.

My ability to see that LA is not actually looking for a solution, leads me to want to capture some of the cash they are foolishly setting fire to in order to prolong their problem.

Also, my socioeconomic status is such that I could really use a half-mil, tbh.

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