14 ms·

LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

218 points by temp8964 5y ago

advisedwang 5y ago
> the per-tent cost covers services, meals, sanitation and staffing OK, so $2600 gets a fair bit. Also looking at the report [1] this rate is calculated by dividing the total cost of the pilot by the duration and number of clients. So that is including one-time set up, planning and evaluation in the cost, which is probably a decent fraction of the cost as it's only an 8 month pilot. The recurring cost for extending may be lower. I think it's misleading to compare that dollar amount to the monthly cost of an apartment. [1] https://clkrep.lacity.org/onlinedocs/2020/20-0841_rpt_cao_03-18-2021.pdf https://clkrep.lacity.org/onlinedocs/2020/20-0841_rpt_cao_03...
- fortran77 5y ago
  This is NPR reporting. Why would they mislead on an issue like this? I think they're a very credible source, given their progressive bent, to be asking these questions.
  - anonporridge 5y ago
    Because they're under the same competitive pressure in the attention economy as every other media outlet?
    - fortran77 5y ago
      Not really. They're funded a bit differently.
      - anonporridge 5y ago
        True. But they will still fail if they lose too many eyeballs. And the world is increasingly overflowing with distractions.
      - edoceo 5y ago
        A large portion of the funding comes from folks who give them attention.
        stretchwithme 5y ago
        Only 8% from government.
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    > Why would they mislead on an issue like this? I think they're a very credible source Do you not agree the number is misleading?
    - fortran77 5y ago
      No. Numbers are numbers.
      - chrisseaton 5y ago
        But it’s not per-tent is it? It per-tent-and-services-and-meals-and-sanitation-and-project-overheads. That’s misleading. > Numbers are numbers. But the number isn’t what they say it is. The phrase per-tent either intentionally or unintentionally misleads you to think that’s the cost literally for the tent and should be compared against rent.
        sjg007 5y ago
        Agreed. It's room and board plus. It's also public safety.
        megablast 5y ago
        That seems obvious, doesn't it??
        chrisseaton 5y ago
        Clearly not to someone in the chain of reporters and editors - since they compare it to rent, which doesn’t include these things. Either describing the number as per-tent is misleading, or the comparison to rent is misleading. Either way, part of it is misleading. They even basically acknowledge it’s a misleading comparison in the article!
  - ahelwer 5y ago
    I have no idea why people believe NPR to be progressive. The joke name "Nice Polite Republicans" exists for a reason. Liberal news coverage of homeless issues rarely takes a progressive framing, anyway.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - brianwawok 5y ago
      > The Pew survey found that the NPR audience tends Democratic (17% Republican, 37% independent, 43% Democratic) and centrist (21% conservative, 39% moderate, 36% liberal). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR_controversies
      - belenos46 5y ago
        Yes. And "democrat" != "actually liberal". The guy in the white house, sending Israel billions of dollars in aid while the Israeli government massacres civilians is a democrat, for fuckssake.
        Google234 5y ago
        Imagine supporting a terorist state in Hamas. Fortunately most democrats aren’t regressive leftist - yet.
        belenos46 5y ago
        Big yawn. Imagine suggesting that the hundreds -that we know about- of folks killed while just trying to live their damn lives constitute "a terrorist state" If I was that bad at basic logic, I'm not sure I'd tell on myself like that.
    - fortran77 5y ago
      I like NPR. But they're certainly progressive/left leaning. On the subject of homelessness, they've written many thoughtful stories: https://www.npr.org/search?query=Homelesss&page=1 https://www.npr.org/search?query=Homelesss&page=1
  - advisedwang 5y ago
    My guess is framing it as a $ per person per month came from whoever pointed the report out to the journalist, possibly one of the interviewees (Comptroller, Legal Aid, Councilmember etc). From there the comparison to rent is pretty natural. I don't think this is bad reporting or anything, I was commenting to help people avoid getting into the trap of thinking in the most obvious framing after skimming a headline.
- narrator 5y ago
  As long as the local government has tons of money doing nothing in their budget, they are going to find a way to spend it, and they're not going to care if they overpay because what else are they going to spend it on? In coastal California, the rule is never ever give that money back by lowering taxes. Taxes only go up. If there's too much money being generated by the taxes to spend, start spending it on homelessness or whatever utopian goal sounds good. Some problems though, like healthcare and homelessness don't get better if you spend more money on them. The prices of healthcare just go up, because there is limited supply of doctors and drug companies charge whatever they want, and more homeless people show up to take advantage of the great services.
  - sjg007 5y ago
    What's the solution then? Utah built apartments for everyone. That seems to have worked.
    - hedora 5y ago
      Building more houses would help a lot in coastal California. Labor costs follow housing costs, so anything involving a local human being doing work is insanely overpriced. If housing prices dropped, the labor market would stabilize, lowering the cost of more construction. Instead, the planning commissions and zoning boards intentionally restrict the supply of housing, causing all sorts of market distortions. Similarly, the transit system is repeatedly sabotaged. We spend a lot of money narrowing roads or intentionally lowering their rush hour throughput. Public transit is also systematically mismanaged. My theory is that they intentionally reduce practical commute distances to prop up housing values near the work. (Sometimes they claim they make commuting worse to protect the environment. My car gets 50-66% as many miles per gallon in the bay area as it does in other cities. Even driving up a mountain is more fuel efficient than rush hour around here. It’s pretty clear the traffic engineering here is not concerned with CO2 emissions.)
      - Swizec 5y ago
        > My car gets 50-66% as many miles per gallon in the bay area as it does in other cities I think the idea is that if commuting sucks enough you’ll stop doing it and those emissions go to zero. Or you’ll switch to public or shuttle transit and emissions per person per mile drop by some ridiculously high factor. A bus can pack some 80 people into the space of 4 cars and I bet emissions aren’t 80x those of a car either.
- wyager 5y ago
  $31,000/yr is already pretty shit, and it’s even worse when you consider the opportunity cost of not using that space on a person who’s actually going to gain a productivity benefit from living in SF.
  - alisonkisk 5y ago
    You missed some critical details in the story.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    Putting a dozen homeless people on a plot may be more space efficient than another single family home.
kiba 5y ago
Everybody works but the empty parking lot. Thankfully, LA is transforming the parking lot into additional housing.
yalogin 5y ago
Comparing this to regular rents is not really fair isn't it? Even if the government chooses to pay rent instead of providing this camp, getting landlord's to rent to a homeless person cannot be counted on. On top of that they still need to find work and food. Granted may be not a daunting task if the housing and security is taken care of.
- wmf 5y ago
  For this money the city could outright buy an apartment building or motel.
- fakename11 5y ago
  Comparing this to the cost of rent is very fair. Other states don't pay these exorbitant costs and are fine.
  - stouset 5y ago
    Other states don’t have even remotely the number of homeless we do.
anthony_romeo 5y ago
The title of this post has been editorialized to be more provocative. The NPR article is actually titled “High Cost Of Los Angeles Homeless Camp Raises Eyebrows And Questions” and is far less inflammatory than this title suggests.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ComputerGuru 5y ago
  The NPR title esp “High cost” is somewhat clickbait; the current title just gives the number outright.
  - anthony_romeo 5y ago
    I disagree. The article also clarifies why that price seems higher than it actually is (e.g. the program may reduce costs of policing elsewhere in the city by providing an orderly source of food and water (which that cost also includes)). It’s a more nuanced look than what the OP’s title suggests.
    - sjg007 5y ago
      Nobody like nuance unless it supports their narrative. I know a guy who hated Obama who said he played too much golf. When Trump started playing golf and exceeding even Obama's outings, he said, well a man who works hard needs a vacation. That experience taught me that regardless of political affiliation most people employ nuance when it suits them so they can clearly think in shades of grey. But our problem is that we insist on taking a position and pursue winning above all else.
      - anthony_romeo 5y ago
        Not everyone is a hack. Some people use nuance as a bludgeon, but that fact wouldn’t imply that hand-waiving away details is somehow a valid approach.
- 5y ago
sixdimensional 5y ago
I'm super impressed by what Pallet[1] is doing in this space. I think LA is talking with Pallet to implement their temporary housing, which would be amazing. [1] https://www.palletshelter.com https://www.palletshelter.com
- BelenusMordred 5y ago
  I don't want to diminish the link above and it's efforts but how a first world society has to resort to stuff like this is just mind-boggling. I'm an expat in a developing country and even for the poorest people a roof over their heads is affordable. Everytime I go back to Australia or visit Europe I'm always shocked at the level of homelessness, it's just not right. Why are dirt-poor countries able to house their citizens and the richest countries aren't? When will people see housing price appreciation far beyond wage inflation as a serious detriment to society?
  - ghufran_syed 5y ago
    Partly because of the rise in legally mandated standards - in california there are laws stating the minimum area of housing for a family of a given size which is way higher than the minimum that people would settle for if the price was correspondingly lower - most poorer people including me earlier in life would prefer to pay half or 1/3 the amount for half or 1/3 the space. The aim of the minimum is sometimes stated as “we don’t want people to live in slums”…and the result is that people either commute up to 2 hours each way, break the law, or end up on the street
  - icelancer 5y ago
    >> I'm an expat in a developing country and even for the poorest people a roof over their heads is affordable. It's affordable here, too. Just not in one of the wealthiest and thus most expensive cities in the United States.
    - BelenusMordred 5y ago
      That's a fair call, there's certainly places in the states that treat it as yet another utility rather than an investment. From my experience in Asia the attitude is so wildly different, they build more houses than is ever needed, people can run stores and sell basic goods out of their spare front room for a few hours a day as side income. I'm not familiar with local laws in the US but in Australia you'd get fined a few thousand dollars trying to sell groceries from a house in suburbia, many have to get in their cars and travel a few km to the designated "commercial" area simply to buy some bread. There's a lot the West could learn from the East yet we are far too stubborn to actually do it.
darth_avocado 5y ago
I think the main takeaway here is government, as usual, thinking short term and spending more money on bandaid solutions. Yes, the $2600 gets you services, meals, sanitation and staffing. But in reality, you can get a decent 1BR apartment for $1500 that is waaay bigger than a tent, sanitation for free since it is an apartment, and have almost $1000 for groceries left over. And, you can fit more people in the apartment than a 12x12 tent. I know that this calculation is an over simplification of costs, but it still gives you a decent perspective on what can be done with that kind of money. And I disagree this will save money long term or elsewhere. When you don't address the root cause and spend money wisely, you only leave room for more spending in the future.
- GartzenDeHaes 5y ago
  You're misunderstanding the fundamental function of modern government. That $2600 goes to a contractor (political crony, friend, or relative) who then mostly pockets the money through salaries, sub-contracts, and such. This is the purpose of the spending and there was never an intent to help anyone in the first place.
  - danr4 5y ago
    Man it's so sad that you are right
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - intrasight 5y ago
    And likely they are only spending it because of a court order.
  - spaetzleesser 5y ago
    Unfortunately often very true.
  - alisonkisk 5y ago
    This is completely baseless.
ravenstine 5y ago
Won't these programs just expand ad infinitum if we don't address the root causes of homelessness? I'm glad we're helping the homeless, but the lack of housing is a symptom and less so a cause. LA has way more homeless people than it used to. Why don't we address that?
- beervirus 5y ago
  What are you saying the cause is?
  - Google234 5y ago
    Drugs are a big part.
    - imtringued 5y ago
      Drugs aren't the root cause either, they are just emotional pain killers for the root cause.
  - tolbish 5y ago
    Housing being treated primarily as a vehicle for investment.
  - chadcmulligan 5y ago
    Its probably nicer being homeless in California than living poor in Minnesota or some other place thats cold (not an American, and never been to Minnesota). I've just always thought if I was homeless I'd move to the beach where its warm.
graderjs 5y ago
I'm not an expert and I admit my views on this are pretty extreme...but surely there's inefficiency there. What if we didn't judge what they were doing (it occurs anyway so we "tacitly approve" in effect), but instead provide the same service for them: tents on the street, muck-about area, access to food, drugs, but do so in an efficient way but at a better price. It seems the quality of things they get and the outcomes for the general public represent a pretty low ROI for 2600 a month/tent. A providor model might also enable a measure of control not in the sense of "controlling them" but more in the sense of we're able to maybe "improve" some things (maybe better food, better tents, better drugs, better outcomes for other non-vagrants who share the streetspace). edit: I should have read the article. That's exactly what they were doing. I incorrectly assumed it was a "measured cost" of homelessness. I suppose what I imagined tho was less like a refugee camp with fences and guards, and more like a re-use of some of the old port/industrial area close to where many of the LA camps used to be anyway. A more NGO/adhoc style approach. But maybe the current model is working, apart from cost, I don't know :p :) xx
0xB31B1B 5y ago
Posting this because most people in HN have a warped view of what homelessness is, especially in california. First of all, when most people think homeless they think "fentanyl addict out of his mind living in squalor" and while there are certainly a bunch of those people in the homeless population, they aren't even a majority of the homeless. In general, about 2/3 of the homeless are transiently homeless. They will be homeless for less than 12 months, they are likely employed while they are homeless at least in a part time capacity, or they are in college. These folks generally refuse to get services and spend their time sleeping in their car, crashing on friends couches, and in a pinch, sleeping in tents outside away from the wild areas. In general, these people are on hard times due to bad luck more or less, and are struggling to get out of it. Another 1/3 of the homeless are people who used to be in the prior group, but are now "chronically homeless". They may have gotten into drugs or developed a mental issue in the first 12 months that they became homeless. These people are the "out of their minds" camp dwellers we think about when we think about the homeless. The biggest risk factor for being in this group is becoming homeless in the first place, and the best way to prevent people from becoming transiently homeless is to prevent them from losing their stable housing or getting them into stable housing within the first 12 months of them becoming homeless. It is much harder to "rehabilitate" someone who has been homeless for 12+ months than it is to rehabilitate someone who has been homeless for <12 months. One issue we have now is that is very easy for people to move from "safely housed" to "transiently homeless" and one big way to prevent this downward trend in quality of life is to build more cheap housing so people in the precarious spot have alternatives to living in a tent. Its not going to be an immediate feedback loop but its the only sustainable way to prevent the growing numbers of homeless in US cities.
- spoonjim 5y ago
  Whenever I see someone who is quite clearly very recently homeless I give them as much money as I can afford to, like $50-100, because I feel like it can get them out of homelessness. When I see someone completely out of their mind I don’t feel like anything I can do will make a material difference, just get them different levels of stoned for the next 3 hours.
  - 5y ago
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
So digging into the report that is linked from the article and other commenters here (link below, search for "Pilot Safe Sleep Site" in that article), some relevant points: 1. The "$2600" number is calculated from the $1,491,410 total cost / 70 spaces / 8 months. 2. Regarding staffing, "The staffing plan Urban Alchemy recommends for a successful program is a minimum staff-to-participant ratio of one (1) to 12." So included in the price tag is at least 6 paid staffers, and I'm assuming 24 hour coverage is needed (or at least 16 hour coverage). 3. Regarding the price, "Given the program’s high cost, we recommend that the data outcomes/effectiveness of the program be reported on by the CAO and LAHSA before initiating additional sites. " I think this all highlights what a mistake it was regarding the basic shutdown of federal mental hospitals in the early 80s [2]. If it turns out that the cost for dealing with homeless is this high for a simple tent encampment in a parking lot because of the cost of support services, why not provide that support in a more permanent medical facility (obv. not all homeless are mentally ill but many/most of long term homeless are). [1] https://clkrep.lacity.org/onlinedocs/2020/20-0841_rpt_cao_03-18-2021.pdf https://clkrep.lacity.org/onlinedocs/2020/20-0841_rpt_cao_03... [2] https://sites.psu.edu/psy533wheeler/2017/02/08/u01-ronald-reagan-and-the-federal-deinstitutionalization-of-mentally-ill-patients/comment-page-1/ https://sites.psu.edu/psy533wheeler/2017/02/08/u01-ronald-re...
- aidenn0 5y ago
  The mental hospitals were bad. When something is known to be bad in California, it is made illegal, thus solving the problem completely (/s). There was a similar thing with the foster care system; I'm not sure if it was state-wide or just my county, but they banned foster care group homes (which had worse outcomes than typical foster families[1]). Of course everyeone already knew that it was better to place these kids in a typical foster family, but there was nowhere else to place them. Now there are plenty of "Theraputic residential treatment centers" which seem to be roughly the same thing, just with a different name. (Side note: if you can, become a foster family; there aren't enough) 1: Even the whole "outcomes are worse" is a bit dubious since usually kids don't end up in group homes until they've been kicked out of one or more foster families, so these kids were already being failed by the system before ending up in group homes.
- 5y ago
morpheuskafka 5y ago
Monthly rent for a furnished apartment at my university (i.e. already overpriced and in demand) is $1049. Why not buy these people a ticket and a year's prepaid rent to somewhere with a much, much cheaper cost of living. It would save the city money and these people would have a real place to live (i.e. not homeless anymore, instead of homeless in a tent).
- lightgreen 5y ago
  Problems with homeless is deeper than finding a place to sleep. For example, some homeless people voluntarily choose to sleep on the street even when they have homes (like one man I knew who refused to go home after his wife death after many years of struggling with cancer). Some people would destroy that property that would be given to them, and will be thrown out by the building administration. Homelessness is partially mental health problem, it cannot be solved just by handing out free apartments.
  - LambdaComplex 5y ago
    If we get to the point where the government is actually trying to solve homelessness by giving people homes, then I'd be kinda optimistic about mental health getting taken seriously too. (More optimistic than I am now, at least)
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - paulcole 5y ago
    How much of this comment is based on data and how much is you extrapolating from a single person you know? This article seems to suggest that giving out access to housing is in fact effective: https://www.vox.com/2014/5/30/5764096/homeless-shelter-housing-help-solutions https://www.vox.com/2014/5/30/5764096/homeless-shelter-housi...
    - lightgreen 5y ago
      I'm extrapolating it from various personal encounters, but I have no data. Vox doesn't have data either. They are stating that government spends money very inefficiently at homeless and assumes it would be more efficient to hand out homes. This is wrong because: * government will hand out homes also very inefficiently * handing out homes might be cheaper than policing homeless people, but it does not guarantee that it fixes homeless problem for reasons I described and for other reasons (like some people might consider declaring themselves homeless to get free apartments) I'm not saying Vox is wrong, I'm just saying that Vox is correctly writing about different aspect of the issue, but does not explain how to solve homelessness.
meiji163 5y ago
Throwing money at a corrupt bureaucracy didn't solve a complex problem? Shocker. Proposition HHH allocated $1.2 billion towards the problem and essentially nothing was accomplished.
erdos4d 5y ago
$2600 for a tent eh? I wonder what they really bought that fell off the truck.
alsetmusic 5y ago
"In 2013 the Utah Housing and Community Development Division reported that the cost of emergency room treatment and jail time averaged over $16,000 per year per homeless person, while the cost of providing a fully subsidized apartment was only $11,000."[0] Obviously, the numbers will change with the area. The cost of an apartment in the Bay Area or LA would be much greater, for example. But the book makes a good case that it'd cost society less overall to just take care of people than to ignore rampant homelessness. I'm inclined to believe it. Related, there's an eye-opening limited series podcast on homelessness called "According to Need" that I found very compelling.[1] The host lives in the Bay Area, so there was a lot focus [t]here. I strongly recommend checking it out to learn just how stacked the system can be against people trying to overcome homelessness. For example, did you crash on someone's couch in the last thirty days? Doesn't matter if you've got nowhere to crash tonight, you don't qualify for a bed. [0] The End of Policing, by Alex S. Vitale first edition pg 97 [1] https://99percentinvisible.org/need/ https://99percentinvisible.org/need/
- mod 5y ago
  Okay, but giving them housing likely doesn't eliminate the emergency treatment, nor the jail time, in a great many cases. (I would guess a majority, but I have no data to back that. My expectations is that the transient homeless are not getting into trouble for the most part.)
- an_opabinia 5y ago
  > But the book makes a good case that it'd cost society less overall to just take care of people than to ignore rampant homelessness. It will cost the government less, no question, the analysis is great in this regard. But the reason it doesn't happen is because the analysis is incomplete. My theory is, housing a homeless person decreases the value of the land where they're housed severely and quickly, land that takes relatively an extremely long time to grow in value. That's why what always happens is expensive tents on worthless, unexploitable land (parking lots under highways, sidewalks, city parks). I personally think this is horrible, but I believe it's a better model of what really happens.
Tiktaalik 5y ago
Frustrating that we never hear about the costs of the status quo, of doing nothing and having the "solution" be that people sleep outside. Do folks think that's healthy? We pay for this in the incredible expense of highly trained (and paid!) EMT, fire and police.
pdx6 5y ago
$2663/mo untaxed is a decent chunk of change. But let’s assume that is the cost to temporary house someone that has no other option. My question is, why is there no standardized process in California to address someone who is unhoused? I like to say make the solution like the Apple Store in the sense that for 99% of people, there is a possible researched path to recovery, housing, and employment. For $32k, 64k, 96k — 3 years, can we build a process using our modern knowledge of social work, psychology, addiction, etc. to get an individual back on their feet, or at least in a holding pattern with less misery?
spaetzleesser 5y ago
Stuff like this reminds me of the situation with healthcare, mental health and prisons. The US is reluctant to set up welfare and social systems in a proactive way but then the situation can't be ignored and they end up spending way more money on some band aids. Probably a lot of people who cost insane amounts of money while in prison could helped be much cheaper with drug addiction treatment and other mental health care. Same with homelessness. No subsidized living spaces so people end up on the street which then costs more than the subsidized living would have cost. Health care is the same. People believe universal health care is too expensive and somehow the country ends up with by far the most expensive health system per capita in the world with worse results.
reader_x 5y ago
This article takes the $2,600/tent at face value (maybe bc it’s click bait?) and never digs in: •what does it cost a jurisdiction to clean streets and parks of human feces when there are no portapotties? •what does it cost charities to run a soup kitchen when people have no means to store or cook food? •what cost the homeless when they are robbed and victimized? All these costs -and much more- are external to the equation as presented.
elongatedMusku 5y ago
That is more than what I earn in a month lol. Economies of scale.
kjgkjhfkjf 5y ago
Can anyone estimate how much it would cost a scrappy private company to provide similar services sustainably? My guess is that it would be far less than $2600/m.
- pentae 5y ago
  I imagine the main reason nobody does this is due to the minefield of legal issues, being accused of exploitation, etc. Not to mention the personal safety risk of your staff, and so on.
  - kjgkjhfkjf 5y ago
    It's so sad that these mechanisms that were set up to protect people are now preventing people from getting the help they need.
tangy_fluid 5y ago
Just give everyone a universal basic income.
anm89 5y ago
If anything the marginal cost per unit would be a better metric. The fact that big bureaucracy is expensive at small scale isn't that surprising. There is also a major fallacy here, that this money could be simply used to put people into homes dollar for dollar. If they are this inefficient getting people into tents, whats to say that the inefficiency isn't magnified with a more complicated project. There is no magical box that you can go drop cash into that pays rent for someone who was previously homeless. It comes with it's own set of logistics.
browningstreet 5y ago
Last year I went from making $20K/mo to <$2K/mo, for quite a while. As my money was drying up, I didn’t have a lot of options. I had credit but I didn’t want to use it. I had a kid, but I couldn’t promise him future school supplies. I was a “professional” type, so I could get house sitting gigs (via online) far and wide. I drove 10 hours for some of them and gigged online, still collected $1900/mo pre-tax from a client — I’d have to make good on the taxes eventually. Eventually I found a gig back in SF, starting salary was $200K. Then I landed a consulting gig at $250K. I finally took an FTE role at $200K with a 20% bonus and strong promotion probability. I made it. That part of the story took 18+ months and I struggled to make sub-rental deposits. I’m 50 years old. I had no one to draw from, I had no more debt I could create, aside for obscene %APR credit card options. Now imagine that I can’t draw 6 figures, I still pulled $2K in my worst months, I still had to move out of my home and live in my car and visit my partner who crashed on couches from friends who could only reasonably accommodate one of us… my ex- let me visit my kid as much as possible and sleep in his bedroom, but I couldn’t land a 6 figure job at the end of the narrative. The options aren’t awesome, nor sufficient, and the cruelty and neglect, even from other friends, is mortifying. It was really fucking hard for me, but I’m fine again. I don’t see how it’s humane for the likes of those who don’t have my arc as their probability. My European friends shake their heads and know the US is really broken.
- mamurphy 5y ago
  This comment, including the part about Europe, prompted me to research this issue a bit. I Googled 'European homelessness' and came across articles[0][1]that suggest that while there are a few cases of success in cities like Helsinki (or Salt Lake City[2]) with 'Housing First' policies, homeless is getting worse in Europe. Denmark and Finland seem to be doing well[1][3], and could serve as a model. I'd like to learn more about if Europe overall is doing better than the United States. I couldn't find comparative numbers with solid data. Thank you for sharing your story, I am glad you found a light at the end of the tunnel. [0]https://www.euronews.com/2019/03/22/homelessness-in-europe-a-hidden-figure https://www.euronews.com/2019/03/22/homelessness-in-europe-a... [1]https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-46891392 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-46891392 [2]https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-homelessness-housing/once-a-national-model-utah-struggles-with-homelessness-idUSKCN1P41EQ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-homelessness-housing/... [3]https://archive.thinkprogress.org/four-countries-the-united-states-can-look-to-when-fighting-homelessness-a2a43e2cc396/ https://archive.thinkprogress.org/four-countries-the-united-...
thenoblesunfish 5y ago
Misleading headline. That’s how much they’re paying per tent in this one, soon-to-end, 70 tent pilot program.
transfire 5y ago
WTF? I live in Florida and bought an entire house plus utilities for half that cost.
texaswhizzle 5y ago
I cannot believe so many cities in California allow camping anywhere in public. No wonder people are fleeing California cities. I cannot imagine what the exodus in NYC would look like if the next mayor allowed these tent cities in Central Park.
chakhs 5y ago
Isn't 2600 enough to pay rent for a studio apartment + food in the US? why would you spend the money on tents and whatever rather than paying for proper housing? I don't get it.

218 points by temp8964 5y ago

> the per-tent cost covers services, meals, sanitation and staffing OK, so $2600 gets a fair bit. Also looking at the report [1] this rate is calculated by dividing the total cost of the pilot by the duration and number of clients. So that is including one-time set up, planning and evaluation in the cost, which is probably a decent fraction of the cost as it's only an 8 month pilot. The recurring cost for extending may be lower. I think it's misleading to compare that dollar amount to the monthly cost of an apartment. [1] https://clkrep.lacity.org/onlinedocs/2020/20-0841_rpt_cao_03-18-2021.pdf https://clkrep.lacity.org/onlinedocs/2020/20-0841_rpt_cao_03...

fortran77 5y ago
This is NPR reporting. Why would they mislead on an issue like this? I think they're a very credible source, given their progressive bent, to be asking these questions.
- anonporridge 5y ago
  Because they're under the same competitive pressure in the attention economy as every other media outlet?
  - fortran77 5y ago
    Not really. They're funded a bit differently.
    - anonporridge 5y ago
      True. But they will still fail if they lose too many eyeballs. And the world is increasingly overflowing with distractions.
    - edoceo 5y ago
      A large portion of the funding comes from folks who give them attention.
      - stretchwithme 5y ago
        Only 8% from government.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  > Why would they mislead on an issue like this? I think they're a very credible source Do you not agree the number is misleading?
  - fortran77 5y ago
    No. Numbers are numbers.
    - chrisseaton 5y ago
      But it’s not per-tent is it? It per-tent-and-services-and-meals-and-sanitation-and-project-overheads. That’s misleading. > Numbers are numbers. But the number isn’t what they say it is. The phrase per-tent either intentionally or unintentionally misleads you to think that’s the cost literally for the tent and should be compared against rent.
      - sjg007 5y ago
        Agreed. It's room and board plus. It's also public safety.
      - megablast 5y ago
        That seems obvious, doesn't it??
        chrisseaton 5y ago
        Clearly not to someone in the chain of reporters and editors - since they compare it to rent, which doesn’t include these things. Either describing the number as per-tent is misleading, or the comparison to rent is misleading. Either way, part of it is misleading. They even basically acknowledge it’s a misleading comparison in the article!
- ahelwer 5y ago
  I have no idea why people believe NPR to be progressive. The joke name "Nice Polite Republicans" exists for a reason. Liberal news coverage of homeless issues rarely takes a progressive framing, anyway.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - brianwawok 5y ago
    > The Pew survey found that the NPR audience tends Democratic (17% Republican, 37% independent, 43% Democratic) and centrist (21% conservative, 39% moderate, 36% liberal). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR_controversies
    - belenos46 5y ago
      Yes. And "democrat" != "actually liberal". The guy in the white house, sending Israel billions of dollars in aid while the Israeli government massacres civilians is a democrat, for fuckssake.
      - Google234 5y ago
        Imagine supporting a terorist state in Hamas. Fortunately most democrats aren’t regressive leftist - yet.
        belenos46 5y ago
        Big yawn. Imagine suggesting that the hundreds -that we know about- of folks killed while just trying to live their damn lives constitute "a terrorist state" If I was that bad at basic logic, I'm not sure I'd tell on myself like that.
  - fortran77 5y ago
    I like NPR. But they're certainly progressive/left leaning. On the subject of homelessness, they've written many thoughtful stories: https://www.npr.org/search?query=Homelesss&page=1 https://www.npr.org/search?query=Homelesss&page=1
- advisedwang 5y ago
  My guess is framing it as a $ per person per month came from whoever pointed the report out to the journalist, possibly one of the interviewees (Comptroller, Legal Aid, Councilmember etc). From there the comparison to rent is pretty natural. I don't think this is bad reporting or anything, I was commenting to help people avoid getting into the trap of thinking in the most obvious framing after skimming a headline.
narrator 5y ago
As long as the local government has tons of money doing nothing in their budget, they are going to find a way to spend it, and they're not going to care if they overpay because what else are they going to spend it on? In coastal California, the rule is never ever give that money back by lowering taxes. Taxes only go up. If there's too much money being generated by the taxes to spend, start spending it on homelessness or whatever utopian goal sounds good. Some problems though, like healthcare and homelessness don't get better if you spend more money on them. The prices of healthcare just go up, because there is limited supply of doctors and drug companies charge whatever they want, and more homeless people show up to take advantage of the great services.
- sjg007 5y ago
  What's the solution then? Utah built apartments for everyone. That seems to have worked.
  - hedora 5y ago
    Building more houses would help a lot in coastal California. Labor costs follow housing costs, so anything involving a local human being doing work is insanely overpriced. If housing prices dropped, the labor market would stabilize, lowering the cost of more construction. Instead, the planning commissions and zoning boards intentionally restrict the supply of housing, causing all sorts of market distortions. Similarly, the transit system is repeatedly sabotaged. We spend a lot of money narrowing roads or intentionally lowering their rush hour throughput. Public transit is also systematically mismanaged. My theory is that they intentionally reduce practical commute distances to prop up housing values near the work. (Sometimes they claim they make commuting worse to protect the environment. My car gets 50-66% as many miles per gallon in the bay area as it does in other cities. Even driving up a mountain is more fuel efficient than rush hour around here. It’s pretty clear the traffic engineering here is not concerned with CO2 emissions.)
    - Swizec 5y ago
      > My car gets 50-66% as many miles per gallon in the bay area as it does in other cities I think the idea is that if commuting sucks enough you’ll stop doing it and those emissions go to zero. Or you’ll switch to public or shuttle transit and emissions per person per mile drop by some ridiculously high factor. A bus can pack some 80 people into the space of 4 cars and I bet emissions aren’t 80x those of a car either.
wyager 5y ago
$31,000/yr is already pretty shit, and it’s even worse when you consider the opportunity cost of not using that space on a person who’s actually going to gain a productivity benefit from living in SF.
- alisonkisk 5y ago
  You missed some critical details in the story.
- imtringued 5y ago
  Putting a dozen homeless people on a plot may be more space efficient than another single family home.

kiba 5y ago

Everybody works but the empty parking lot. Thankfully, LA is transforming the parking lot into additional housing.

yalogin 5y ago

Comparing this to regular rents is not really fair isn't it? Even if the government chooses to pay rent instead of providing this camp, getting landlord's to rent to a homeless person cannot be counted on. On top of that they still need to find work and food. Granted may be not a daunting task if the housing and security is taken care of.

wmf 5y ago
For this money the city could outright buy an apartment building or motel.
fakename11 5y ago
Comparing this to the cost of rent is very fair. Other states don't pay these exorbitant costs and are fine.
- stouset 5y ago
  Other states don’t have even remotely the number of homeless we do.

anthony_romeo 5y ago

The title of this post has been editorialized to be more provocative. The NPR article is actually titled “High Cost Of Los Angeles Homeless Camp Raises Eyebrows And Questions” and is far less inflammatory than this title suggests.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ComputerGuru 5y ago
The NPR title esp “High cost” is somewhat clickbait; the current title just gives the number outright.
- anthony_romeo 5y ago
  I disagree. The article also clarifies why that price seems higher than it actually is (e.g. the program may reduce costs of policing elsewhere in the city by providing an orderly source of food and water (which that cost also includes)). It’s a more nuanced look than what the OP’s title suggests.
  - sjg007 5y ago
    Nobody like nuance unless it supports their narrative. I know a guy who hated Obama who said he played too much golf. When Trump started playing golf and exceeding even Obama's outings, he said, well a man who works hard needs a vacation. That experience taught me that regardless of political affiliation most people employ nuance when it suits them so they can clearly think in shades of grey. But our problem is that we insist on taking a position and pursue winning above all else.
    - anthony_romeo 5y ago
      Not everyone is a hack. Some people use nuance as a bludgeon, but that fact wouldn’t imply that hand-waiving away details is somehow a valid approach.
5y ago

sixdimensional 5y ago

I'm super impressed by what Pallet[1] is doing in this space. I think LA is talking with Pallet to implement their temporary housing, which would be amazing. [1] https://www.palletshelter.com https://www.palletshelter.com

BelenusMordred 5y ago
I don't want to diminish the link above and it's efforts but how a first world society has to resort to stuff like this is just mind-boggling. I'm an expat in a developing country and even for the poorest people a roof over their heads is affordable. Everytime I go back to Australia or visit Europe I'm always shocked at the level of homelessness, it's just not right. Why are dirt-poor countries able to house their citizens and the richest countries aren't? When will people see housing price appreciation far beyond wage inflation as a serious detriment to society?
- ghufran_syed 5y ago
  Partly because of the rise in legally mandated standards - in california there are laws stating the minimum area of housing for a family of a given size which is way higher than the minimum that people would settle for if the price was correspondingly lower - most poorer people including me earlier in life would prefer to pay half or 1/3 the amount for half or 1/3 the space. The aim of the minimum is sometimes stated as “we don’t want people to live in slums”…and the result is that people either commute up to 2 hours each way, break the law, or end up on the street
- icelancer 5y ago
  >> I'm an expat in a developing country and even for the poorest people a roof over their heads is affordable. It's affordable here, too. Just not in one of the wealthiest and thus most expensive cities in the United States.
  - BelenusMordred 5y ago
    That's a fair call, there's certainly places in the states that treat it as yet another utility rather than an investment. From my experience in Asia the attitude is so wildly different, they build more houses than is ever needed, people can run stores and sell basic goods out of their spare front room for a few hours a day as side income. I'm not familiar with local laws in the US but in Australia you'd get fined a few thousand dollars trying to sell groceries from a house in suburbia, many have to get in their cars and travel a few km to the designated "commercial" area simply to buy some bread. There's a lot the West could learn from the East yet we are far too stubborn to actually do it.

darth_avocado 5y ago

I think the main takeaway here is government, as usual, thinking short term and spending more money on bandaid solutions. Yes, the $2600 gets you services, meals, sanitation and staffing. But in reality, you can get a decent 1BR apartment for $1500 that is waaay bigger than a tent, sanitation for free since it is an apartment, and have almost $1000 for groceries left over. And, you can fit more people in the apartment than a 12x12 tent. I know that this calculation is an over simplification of costs, but it still gives you a decent perspective on what can be done with that kind of money. And I disagree this will save money long term or elsewhere. When you don't address the root cause and spend money wisely, you only leave room for more spending in the future.

GartzenDeHaes 5y ago
You're misunderstanding the fundamental function of modern government. That $2600 goes to a contractor (political crony, friend, or relative) who then mostly pockets the money through salaries, sub-contracts, and such. This is the purpose of the spending and there was never an intent to help anyone in the first place.
- danr4 5y ago
  Man it's so sad that you are right
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- intrasight 5y ago
  And likely they are only spending it because of a court order.
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  Unfortunately often very true.
- alisonkisk 5y ago
  This is completely baseless.

ravenstine 5y ago

Won't these programs just expand ad infinitum if we don't address the root causes of homelessness? I'm glad we're helping the homeless, but the lack of housing is a symptom and less so a cause. LA has way more homeless people than it used to. Why don't we address that?

beervirus 5y ago
What are you saying the cause is?
- Google234 5y ago
  Drugs are a big part.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    Drugs aren't the root cause either, they are just emotional pain killers for the root cause.
- tolbish 5y ago
  Housing being treated primarily as a vehicle for investment.
- chadcmulligan 5y ago
  Its probably nicer being homeless in California than living poor in Minnesota or some other place thats cold (not an American, and never been to Minnesota). I've just always thought if I was homeless I'd move to the beach where its warm.

graderjs 5y ago

I'm not an expert and I admit my views on this are pretty extreme...but surely there's inefficiency there. What if we didn't judge what they were doing (it occurs anyway so we "tacitly approve" in effect), but instead provide the same service for them: tents on the street, muck-about area, access to food, drugs, but do so in an efficient way but at a better price. It seems the quality of things they get and the outcomes for the general public represent a pretty low ROI for 2600 a month/tent. A providor model might also enable a measure of control not in the sense of "controlling them" but more in the sense of we're able to maybe "improve" some things (maybe better food, better tents, better drugs, better outcomes for other non-vagrants who share the streetspace). edit: I should have read the article. That's exactly what they were doing. I incorrectly assumed it was a "measured cost" of homelessness. I suppose what I imagined tho was less like a refugee camp with fences and guards, and more like a re-use of some of the old port/industrial area close to where many of the LA camps used to be anyway. A more NGO/adhoc style approach. But maybe the current model is working, apart from cost, I don't know :p :) xx

0xB31B1B 5y ago

Posting this because most people in HN have a warped view of what homelessness is, especially in california. First of all, when most people think homeless they think "fentanyl addict out of his mind living in squalor" and while there are certainly a bunch of those people in the homeless population, they aren't even a majority of the homeless. In general, about 2/3 of the homeless are transiently homeless. They will be homeless for less than 12 months, they are likely employed while they are homeless at least in a part time capacity, or they are in college. These folks generally refuse to get services and spend their time sleeping in their car, crashing on friends couches, and in a pinch, sleeping in tents outside away from the wild areas. In general, these people are on hard times due to bad luck more or less, and are struggling to get out of it. Another 1/3 of the homeless are people who used to be in the prior group, but are now "chronically homeless". They may have gotten into drugs or developed a mental issue in the first 12 months that they became homeless. These people are the "out of their minds" camp dwellers we think about when we think about the homeless. The biggest risk factor for being in this group is becoming homeless in the first place, and the best way to prevent people from becoming transiently homeless is to prevent them from losing their stable housing or getting them into stable housing within the first 12 months of them becoming homeless. It is much harder to "rehabilitate" someone who has been homeless for 12+ months than it is to rehabilitate someone who has been homeless for <12 months. One issue we have now is that is very easy for people to move from "safely housed" to "transiently homeless" and one big way to prevent this downward trend in quality of life is to build more cheap housing so people in the precarious spot have alternatives to living in a tent. Its not going to be an immediate feedback loop but its the only sustainable way to prevent the growing numbers of homeless in US cities.

spoonjim 5y ago
Whenever I see someone who is quite clearly very recently homeless I give them as much money as I can afford to, like $50-100, because I feel like it can get them out of homelessness. When I see someone completely out of their mind I don’t feel like anything I can do will make a material difference, just get them different levels of stoned for the next 3 hours.
- 5y ago

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago

So digging into the report that is linked from the article and other commenters here (link below, search for "Pilot Safe Sleep Site" in that article), some relevant points: 1. The "$2600" number is calculated from the $1,491,410 total cost / 70 spaces / 8 months. 2. Regarding staffing, "The staffing plan Urban Alchemy recommends for a successful program is a minimum staff-to-participant ratio of one (1) to 12." So included in the price tag is at least 6 paid staffers, and I'm assuming 24 hour coverage is needed (or at least 16 hour coverage). 3. Regarding the price, "Given the program’s high cost, we recommend that the data outcomes/effectiveness of the program be reported on by the CAO and LAHSA before initiating additional sites. " I think this all highlights what a mistake it was regarding the basic shutdown of federal mental hospitals in the early 80s [2]. If it turns out that the cost for dealing with homeless is this high for a simple tent encampment in a parking lot because of the cost of support services, why not provide that support in a more permanent medical facility (obv. not all homeless are mentally ill but many/most of long term homeless are). [1] https://clkrep.lacity.org/onlinedocs/2020/20-0841_rpt_cao_03-18-2021.pdf https://clkrep.lacity.org/onlinedocs/2020/20-0841_rpt_cao_03... [2] https://sites.psu.edu/psy533wheeler/2017/02/08/u01-ronald-reagan-and-the-federal-deinstitutionalization-of-mentally-ill-patients/comment-page-1/ https://sites.psu.edu/psy533wheeler/2017/02/08/u01-ronald-re...

aidenn0 5y ago
The mental hospitals were bad. When something is known to be bad in California, it is made illegal, thus solving the problem completely (/s). There was a similar thing with the foster care system; I'm not sure if it was state-wide or just my county, but they banned foster care group homes (which had worse outcomes than typical foster families[1]). Of course everyeone already knew that it was better to place these kids in a typical foster family, but there was nowhere else to place them. Now there are plenty of "Theraputic residential treatment centers" which seem to be roughly the same thing, just with a different name. (Side note: if you can, become a foster family; there aren't enough) 1: Even the whole "outcomes are worse" is a bit dubious since usually kids don't end up in group homes until they've been kicked out of one or more foster families, so these kids were already being failed by the system before ending up in group homes.
5y ago

morpheuskafka 5y ago

Monthly rent for a furnished apartment at my university (i.e. already overpriced and in demand) is $1049. Why not buy these people a ticket and a year's prepaid rent to somewhere with a much, much cheaper cost of living. It would save the city money and these people would have a real place to live (i.e. not homeless anymore, instead of homeless in a tent).

lightgreen 5y ago
Problems with homeless is deeper than finding a place to sleep. For example, some homeless people voluntarily choose to sleep on the street even when they have homes (like one man I knew who refused to go home after his wife death after many years of struggling with cancer). Some people would destroy that property that would be given to them, and will be thrown out by the building administration. Homelessness is partially mental health problem, it cannot be solved just by handing out free apartments.
- LambdaComplex 5y ago
  If we get to the point where the government is actually trying to solve homelessness by giving people homes, then I'd be kinda optimistic about mental health getting taken seriously too. (More optimistic than I am now, at least)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- paulcole 5y ago
  How much of this comment is based on data and how much is you extrapolating from a single person you know? This article seems to suggest that giving out access to housing is in fact effective: https://www.vox.com/2014/5/30/5764096/homeless-shelter-housing-help-solutions https://www.vox.com/2014/5/30/5764096/homeless-shelter-housi...
  - lightgreen 5y ago
    I'm extrapolating it from various personal encounters, but I have no data. Vox doesn't have data either. They are stating that government spends money very inefficiently at homeless and assumes it would be more efficient to hand out homes. This is wrong because: * government will hand out homes also very inefficiently * handing out homes might be cheaper than policing homeless people, but it does not guarantee that it fixes homeless problem for reasons I described and for other reasons (like some people might consider declaring themselves homeless to get free apartments) I'm not saying Vox is wrong, I'm just saying that Vox is correctly writing about different aspect of the issue, but does not explain how to solve homelessness.

meiji163 5y ago

Throwing money at a corrupt bureaucracy didn't solve a complex problem? Shocker. Proposition HHH allocated $1.2 billion towards the problem and essentially nothing was accomplished.

erdos4d 5y ago

$2600 for a tent eh? I wonder what they really bought that fell off the truck.

alsetmusic 5y ago

"In 2013 the Utah Housing and Community Development Division reported that the cost of emergency room treatment and jail time averaged over $16,000 per year per homeless person, while the cost of providing a fully subsidized apartment was only $11,000."[0] Obviously, the numbers will change with the area. The cost of an apartment in the Bay Area or LA would be much greater, for example. But the book makes a good case that it'd cost society less overall to just take care of people than to ignore rampant homelessness. I'm inclined to believe it. Related, there's an eye-opening limited series podcast on homelessness called "According to Need" that I found very compelling.[1] The host lives in the Bay Area, so there was a lot focus [t]here. I strongly recommend checking it out to learn just how stacked the system can be against people trying to overcome homelessness. For example, did you crash on someone's couch in the last thirty days? Doesn't matter if you've got nowhere to crash tonight, you don't qualify for a bed. [0] The End of Policing, by Alex S. Vitale first edition pg 97 [1] https://99percentinvisible.org/need/ https://99percentinvisible.org/need/

mod 5y ago
Okay, but giving them housing likely doesn't eliminate the emergency treatment, nor the jail time, in a great many cases. (I would guess a majority, but I have no data to back that. My expectations is that the transient homeless are not getting into trouble for the most part.)
an_opabinia 5y ago
> But the book makes a good case that it'd cost society less overall to just take care of people than to ignore rampant homelessness. It will cost the government less, no question, the analysis is great in this regard. But the reason it doesn't happen is because the analysis is incomplete. My theory is, housing a homeless person decreases the value of the land where they're housed severely and quickly, land that takes relatively an extremely long time to grow in value. That's why what always happens is expensive tents on worthless, unexploitable land (parking lots under highways, sidewalks, city parks). I personally think this is horrible, but I believe it's a better model of what really happens.

Tiktaalik 5y ago

Frustrating that we never hear about the costs of the status quo, of doing nothing and having the "solution" be that people sleep outside. Do folks think that's healthy? We pay for this in the incredible expense of highly trained (and paid!) EMT, fire and police.

pdx6 5y ago

$2663/mo untaxed is a decent chunk of change. But let’s assume that is the cost to temporary house someone that has no other option. My question is, why is there no standardized process in California to address someone who is unhoused? I like to say make the solution like the Apple Store in the sense that for 99% of people, there is a possible researched path to recovery, housing, and employment. For $32k, 64k, 96k — 3 years, can we build a process using our modern knowledge of social work, psychology, addiction, etc. to get an individual back on their feet, or at least in a holding pattern with less misery?

spaetzleesser 5y ago

Stuff like this reminds me of the situation with healthcare, mental health and prisons. The US is reluctant to set up welfare and social systems in a proactive way but then the situation can't be ignored and they end up spending way more money on some band aids. Probably a lot of people who cost insane amounts of money while in prison could helped be much cheaper with drug addiction treatment and other mental health care. Same with homelessness. No subsidized living spaces so people end up on the street which then costs more than the subsidized living would have cost. Health care is the same. People believe universal health care is too expensive and somehow the country ends up with by far the most expensive health system per capita in the world with worse results.

reader_x 5y ago

This article takes the $2,600/tent at face value (maybe bc it’s click bait?) and never digs in: •what does it cost a jurisdiction to clean streets and parks of human feces when there are no portapotties? •what does it cost charities to run a soup kitchen when people have no means to store or cook food? •what cost the homeless when they are robbed and victimized? All these costs -and much more- are external to the equation as presented.

elongatedMusku 5y ago

That is more than what I earn in a month lol. Economies of scale.

kjgkjhfkjf 5y ago

Can anyone estimate how much it would cost a scrappy private company to provide similar services sustainably? My guess is that it would be far less than $2600/m.

pentae 5y ago
I imagine the main reason nobody does this is due to the minefield of legal issues, being accused of exploitation, etc. Not to mention the personal safety risk of your staff, and so on.
- kjgkjhfkjf 5y ago
  It's so sad that these mechanisms that were set up to protect people are now preventing people from getting the help they need.

tangy_fluid 5y ago

Just give everyone a universal basic income.

anm89 5y ago

If anything the marginal cost per unit would be a better metric. The fact that big bureaucracy is expensive at small scale isn't that surprising. There is also a major fallacy here, that this money could be simply used to put people into homes dollar for dollar. If they are this inefficient getting people into tents, whats to say that the inefficiency isn't magnified with a more complicated project. There is no magical box that you can go drop cash into that pays rent for someone who was previously homeless. It comes with it's own set of logistics.

browningstreet 5y ago

Last year I went from making $20K/mo to <$2K/mo, for quite a while. As my money was drying up, I didn’t have a lot of options. I had credit but I didn’t want to use it. I had a kid, but I couldn’t promise him future school supplies. I was a “professional” type, so I could get house sitting gigs (via online) far and wide. I drove 10 hours for some of them and gigged online, still collected $1900/mo pre-tax from a client — I’d have to make good on the taxes eventually. Eventually I found a gig back in SF, starting salary was $200K. Then I landed a consulting gig at $250K. I finally took an FTE role at $200K with a 20% bonus and strong promotion probability. I made it. That part of the story took 18+ months and I struggled to make sub-rental deposits. I’m 50 years old. I had no one to draw from, I had no more debt I could create, aside for obscene %APR credit card options. Now imagine that I can’t draw 6 figures, I still pulled $2K in my worst months, I still had to move out of my home and live in my car and visit my partner who crashed on couches from friends who could only reasonably accommodate one of us… my ex- let me visit my kid as much as possible and sleep in his bedroom, but I couldn’t land a 6 figure job at the end of the narrative. The options aren’t awesome, nor sufficient, and the cruelty and neglect, even from other friends, is mortifying. It was really fucking hard for me, but I’m fine again. I don’t see how it’s humane for the likes of those who don’t have my arc as their probability. My European friends shake their heads and know the US is really broken.

mamurphy 5y ago
This comment, including the part about Europe, prompted me to research this issue a bit. I Googled 'European homelessness' and came across articles[0][1]that suggest that while there are a few cases of success in cities like Helsinki (or Salt Lake City[2]) with 'Housing First' policies, homeless is getting worse in Europe. Denmark and Finland seem to be doing well[1][3], and could serve as a model. I'd like to learn more about if Europe overall is doing better than the United States. I couldn't find comparative numbers with solid data. Thank you for sharing your story, I am glad you found a light at the end of the tunnel. [0]https://www.euronews.com/2019/03/22/homelessness-in-europe-a-hidden-figure https://www.euronews.com/2019/03/22/homelessness-in-europe-a... [1]https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-46891392 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-46891392 [2]https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-homelessness-housing/once-a-national-model-utah-struggles-with-homelessness-idUSKCN1P41EQ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-homelessness-housing/... [3]https://archive.thinkprogress.org/four-countries-the-united-states-can-look-to-when-fighting-homelessness-a2a43e2cc396/ https://archive.thinkprogress.org/four-countries-the-united-...

thenoblesunfish 5y ago

Misleading headline. That’s how much they’re paying per tent in this one, soon-to-end, 70 tent pilot program.

transfire 5y ago

WTF? I live in Florida and bought an entire house plus utilities for half that cost.

texaswhizzle 5y ago

I cannot believe so many cities in California allow camping anywhere in public. No wonder people are fleeing California cities. I cannot imagine what the exodus in NYC would look like if the next mayor allowed these tent cities in Central Park.

chakhs 5y ago

Isn't 2600 enough to pay rent for a studio apartment + food in the US? why would you spend the money on tents and whatever rather than paying for proper housing? I don't get it.