4 ms·

This $40K doesn't include emergency medical services, private programs, federal & state programs. It's just the city budget for the homeless. Any project shoul

This $40K doesn't include emergency medical services, private programs, federal & state programs. It's just the city budget for the homeless. Any project should have metrics to judge its success and a reasonable budget to accomplish the goal. If you were given a budget of nearly $300M for 7,500 homeless, how would you decrease the number of homeless? If you really think outliers take up the majority of the cost, how many homeless could you house with what budget?

wolfgang42 8y ago
You have completely misunderstood my point: if I housed 7,498 homeless with a budget of $300M, leaving just two homeless people on the streets, I would have then spent $150M per homeless person. You also have to keep spending money on someone for some amount of time after they stop being homeless, to keep them from becoming homeless again. I agree that metrics are useful, but using a terribly flawed metric just because it's the only one we have seems like a bad idea. (I will not respond to your other points about budgets because I don't have any easy answers for them--this subject is not my main area of expertise. I will leave it to others who are more informed than I to provide actual statistics and actionable suggestions elsewhere in these comments.)