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

• jayd16 5y ago
  It never says how many people are housed in a single "unit." The number could be very misleading.
• kjgkjhfkjf 5y ago
  I appreciate the need to help homeless folks, but I don't understand why they need to be housed in California. Why can't we build housing for them somewhere else, where it's cheaper?
• 1024core 5y ago
  The scope of the expanding problem can be seen in the city budget: When Garcetti took office in 2013, the city was spending about $10 million treating homelessness. The budget he signed last year included about $1 billion. Someone is making a lot of money...
• WalterBright 5y ago
  Like all government housing projects, they'll turn into slums within a decade, and then be razed as urban blight.
• burnoutgal 5y ago
  They're spending money to build housing, which will be used to house people without homes. The headline makes it sound like they're paying a million dollars in rent, but in fact this is real estate development.
  • chernevik 5y ago
    That's still a mighty expensive unit.
  • kansface 5y ago
    40000 * 837000 = 33.48 billion dollars. This solution, as implemented, can not possibly solve the problem, ever. The upkeep on the housing alone would be a billion dollars a year!
    • GrantYE 5y ago
      Its because they don't actually want to house the unhoused. They want to make it seem like this impossible challenge to provide affordable housing that doesn't cost the average person in LA $1M+
      • Kalium 5y ago
        San Francisco had a similar problem in recent years, where trying to build housing for the unhoused was running a cost of about a million a pop. It's perhaps possible that this isn't a deliberate display of incompetence, but a set of systemic problems that make housing in California very expensive to build.
        • vkou 5y ago
          Also, it's worth noting that building a house isn't a hole that you throw money into, it's an asset that appreciates.
          • scantron4 5y ago
            Not if it gets trashed by the residents.
            • vkou 5y ago
              In a world where housing prices grow in an unbounded, absolutely detached from reality manner, it is.
              • b112 5y ago
                It's actually the land which goes up in value. Houses go down in value, like a new car. Sometimes this is masked, by regular maintenance, retrofits, and repairs. But if left to pot, a house is eventually worthless, then even a cost, for the new owner has to tear it down and rebuild. Land appreciates. A house costs.
  • Retric 5y ago
    On one hand: The program “is producing more units than promised, at a lower cost than expected,” Garcetti wrote. But I have trouble thinking that’s an efficient use of funds.
  • throwoutway 5y ago
    It sounds to the reader just like it is in reality: overspending on real estate. That’s a ridiculous sum of money for one unit of housing any way you look at it. I’m glad they’re housing the homeless, but are you telling me that there’s no way to build this cheaper?
  • asdff 5y ago
    LA also does spend money just booking rooms at for profit hotels for homeless people vs constructing shelters at cost too, so not everything they are doing is totally productive and efficient.
• kerneloftruth 5y ago
  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 option of shooting-up and camping on the streets clearly has not worked in any way -- show me the data for how that helps anybody.
  • flerchin 5y ago
    Treatment would IMO, include housing while under treatment, and some sort of halfway-housing afterwards.
    • kerneloftruth 5y ago
      Yes, exactly right. That is where they can learn and establish structure in their life, and build a foundation. These were once referred to as Independent Living Skills. Once taught and established, then they can hopefully translate that into a healthier life on their own.
    • TheCondor 5y ago
      Is there an "afterwards?" I don't know if there are "one time" or "one shot" solutions. Certainly there are some unhoused that can be helped by that but I'm under the impression that most have issues that go substantially beyond a one time check or a pill or a one time treatment.
  • lisper 5y ago
    > 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.
    • kerneloftruth 5y ago
• tapatio 5y ago
  Where's the link to sign up? I'm ready to check out of the rat race.
  • babelfish 5y ago
    Okay, start by becoming homeless.
  • throwaway1777 5y ago
    Step 1, get on hard drugs
• linksnapzz 5y ago
  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.
  • RIMR 5y ago
    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.
    • zdragnar 5y ago
      There are a lot of places in the country where you can live very comfortably for years on 500k. The idea that the only solution to homelessness in LA is to build $500-800k units is plain pure foolishness.
      • banannaise 5y ago
        Sure, assuming that you start out with solid physical and mental health. Guess what homelessness does to a person's physical and mental health?
    • linksnapzz 5y ago
      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.
• nimbius 5y ago
  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-figure increases in equity per year with little to prevent a ramshackle bungalow in inglewood from fetching a cash-only two million dollar price. when legislators typically try to address the very same landed gentry's cries for relief from the homeless, they wind up collecting windfall bond measure revenue. as they gain momentum and start striking ground, most communities put up fierce NIMBY opposition and mire whatever initiatives that are approved in court. the city in turn eventually gives up, settles, and uses the remaining funds to quietly continue sanitation and cleanup efforts of camps, occasionally running the homeless away for a day or two. for the city to bemoan rising costs and slow pace is a bit ironic as well. when LA decided to give up on property taxes it had to find a way to make up the difference. hence a league of esoteric inspections and byzantine permitting started popping up for new homes. it means contractors sit idle and watch the price of lumber skyrocket while your self-licking ice cream cone melts in the sun.
  • sevenf0ur 5y ago
    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.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • Day1 5y ago
      It seems insane because it is insane. Unfortunately, we already started down this path long ago and it will only get worse until catastrophe. I.e China takes over.
    • spicyusername 5y ago
      > Spending $837,000 to build a single studio to house a single homeless person seems insane I don't think it was known, in advance, that this would be the resulting cost, assuming that figure is accurate. I don't think any rational person would put forward such a program and that $837,000 to build a single studio house seems insane to everyone, not just non-Californians. I think the point OP is trying to make is that the skyrocketing cost is partly caused by a certain class of privileged Californian's continuing to fight the effort to build more housing.
• daenz 5y ago
  Is there any way to fix incentives with government contracts, so that the product that is purchased is the lowest price for the highest quality? In the free market, there are generally incentives for that because companies have a brand, and if you deliver poor quality, consumers eventually catch on, your brand suffers, and you lose business to your competitors. How does this work in the government? Where is the disincentive to keep contractors from delivering the shoddiest product for the government check? This mechanism seems totally absent.
  • jeffbee 5y ago
    It's largely illegal in California to have any criteria for selecting contractors based on anything other than lowest bid. This is because historically cronyism was a worse problem than poor quality.
    • anamax 5y ago
      CA has both cronyism and poor quality.
  • chernevik 5y ago
    Not really, and this is in the nature of government programs. Management has no personal incentive to control costs or quality, and many incentives that tend to work against those controls.
  • haroldp 5y ago
    That mechanism is totally absent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice That is precisely why these things happen.
  • nonameiguess 5y ago
    I'm not sure this is true for urban multi-unit housing. A whole lot of shoddy work gets sold at a high price simply because the location is attractive. Single-family and luxury builds are more held to this dynamic. But the mechanism would be the contract itself. It comes with requirements. Make high quality and low cost among the requirements. Actually hold the contractors to them. Require open competition for the bids. So why does this not work? I'm in defense contracting, not building, but at least in that realm, there isn't meaningful competition and no credible bill comes in low for a variety of reasons, but the biggest I can think of is the security and compliance requirements are so high that they represent a minimum regulatory hurdle very few contractors can clear, no matter how good and/or cheap their work might be, and when smaller operations emerge that do a good job and threaten the entrenched incumbents, the existing oligopoly just buys them. What can be done about that is the FTC not approving so many mergers and acquisitions on the part of giant contractors, and automating and/or streamlining some of the security hurdles. I don't think removing them is an option, since critical defense systems will be under constant attack by nation state actors and need to hold up under conditions of persistent warfare.
• GrantYE 5y ago
  ICON’s 15.5-foot-tall 3D printers can build the exterior and interior wall system for a single-story house in a week. The method cuts 30% off traditional construction costs and has been proven to produce homes for as little as $10,000. Compare that to a recent effort in Los Angeles to build 117 pre-fab tiny homes for the unhoused for $5.1 million. Compared to the LA efforts’ approximate cost of $43,590 per home, ICON could print homes at a 4x cheaper rate. - we wrote this for a story back in October. ( https://news.youexec.com/briefs/texas-startup-will-build-100-3d-printed-home-in-first-of-its-kind-development https://news.youexec.com/briefs/texas-startup-will-build-100... ) The fact that it costs them $800,000 in some cases is just ridiculous.
  • anamax 5y ago
    The $800k isn't being paid to the folks doing the actual construction. It isn't dominated by materials cost either. There are a lot of hands to be filled as money goes from the "house the homeless" fund to the actual projects.
• the_optimist 5y ago
  The primary measure of success in the last two generations in the United States has been an ability to combine plausible incompetence and graft, while remaining protected under a banner of nouveau political theory. Los Angeles has a tremendous pool of talent in this regard, perhaps some of the best in the world. Areas which are very obviously less afflicted include areas of 'Los Angeles County' outside of --and quite distinct from--the very broken "City of Los Angeles," and adjacent counties, such as Orange, Ventura, and Kern, all of which are wildly superior in the physical realization of governance.
  • linksnapzz 5y ago
    In the same way that Silicon Valley was enabled by Cold War defense spending, perhaps the entertainment industry created the LA Charitable Griftocracy.
  • mistrial9 5y ago
    I have seen events unfold at the School Board level which stretch the imagination -- a combination of poker face, herd mentality, deniability and secrets keeping, and unending, years long funding cycles. BUT "the primary measure of success in the last two generations" is just snark, since there has been lots of success in other ways. The problems here are bad though, since some kind of natural selection has resulted in people and processess that are very hard to get rid of, even while flatly and objectively failing in plain view.
  • kjkjadksj 5y ago
    Wildly superior in the physical realization of governance? Please. The reason why you don’t see homeless in these places is their policy is to use their police to force these people into LA. Go to venice and note how the tents stop immediately at the border with santa monica, and no its not because everyone who sets up in santa monica gets put into a shelter.
    • buzzert 5y ago
      Be careful trying to spin this as a negative thing. A lot of people would actually be quite happy with their police force moving homeless people out of their town, regardless of where they end up.
• chillingeffect 5y ago
  This is such sloppy journalism: > one project under development expected to hit as much as $837,000 for each housing unit, How typical is that? where is it? how long is it expected to last? what other features does it have? Does that include one-time architecting costs that make future developments cheaper? > HHH project includes 8,091 housing units — most with connected services for mental health and substance abuse treatment so how much of the $800k goes to the mental health etc services? the paper apparently read the audit, but doesn't bother going into any detail about this.
  • josephcsible 5y ago
    > so how much of the $800k goes to the mental health etc services? Is it clear that any of it is meant for those services, or could they all be extra costs above and beyond it?
• tempnow987 5y ago
  $837,000 is just the cost of the unit. If you are housing actual homeless, you MUST offer supportive services on-site or have some other types of supervision or these units are going to be trashed. You MUST budget for a lot of ongoing costs. I'd say $800K+ per unit + maybe $100K+/year for supportive services / maintenance etc? One question is, would that 800K + $100K/year go further somewhere else?
  • AniseAbyss 5y ago
    Yep you can't just put a psychotic person in an apartment and walk away. Homeless people have issues that made them end up on the street.
  • pooper 5y ago
    > One question is, would that 800K + $100K/year go further somewhere else? Where is that money going now? Who gets this money now and why would they give it up?
    • s1artibartfast 5y ago
      Before it went into people's pockets, so they could care for their families and improve their life conditions.
      • rglover 5y ago
        Exactly. Government stole it from tax payers to then act as a poorly run pseudo-charity, which is actually just a way for them to skim cream like mobsters while pretending to "do good." The foolish lap this up and immediately get defensive at anyone who proposes that, maybe, just maybe, politicians are lying to them and using their good nature against them. Maybe. So, we get a consistently declining standard of living for everyone, decaying urban centers, and increasing numbers of homeless people, or, the truth: real lives that need real help being used as political chess pieces by a cadre of narcissists who are master manipulators.
        • 5y ago
• rmason 5y ago
  Do you realize that you could give that homeless person a first class ticket to Detroit? Put them up in a hotel until an abandoned house could be totally rebuilt for them. Pay their electricity, water, heating costs and taxes for the next ten years and still save California taxpayers $600,000!
  • antihero 5y ago
    Yes but would they want to go?
    • reedjosh 5y ago
      But why should others have to pay for locating homeless people where they _want_ to go. It's giving money to them. It's an offer. It's not like you _must_ go there, but to expect tax payers to build homes where it's far too expensive to build... It's like sending the same people to a fancy restaurant. In what way does it make sense? To me, government intervention caused this, so maybe they should just peel back their building restrictions?
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • thescriptkiddie 5y ago
    Do you realize that forced relocation is a crime against humanity?
    • coding123 5y ago
      Not a huge deal to get past for me.
    • mikeg8 5y ago
      Not if they are unlawfully occupying a space to begin with.
  • seanmcdirmid 5y ago
    You could give them a ticket to Detroit, but they will wind up in LA quickly because they sold the house California bought them, but a bunch of drugs, and the weather is better for being homeless in LA than Detroit.
• jseliger 5y ago
  L.A. is fighting against CEQA, Prop 13, and its own bureaucracy and process: https://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-economics-fills-back-proposition-hhh-facilities-program/ https://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-economics-.... If we're actually going to do something substantial about homelessness, we need to focus on abundance, not scarcity, and supply-side progressivism: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/19/opinion/supply-side-progressivism.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/19/opinion/supply-side-progr...
  • mistrial9 5y ago
    " fighting against CEQA" this is like identifying the color of the shirt that a security guard is wearing, and declaring it to be the problem. CEQA was enacted because, under the banner of "free markets" .. unbelievable, extreme, vast, sustained chemical pollution was laid out into the open air, soil and water, for profit, again and again and again.. Ordinary people literally cannot believe things that have been done in California and elsewhere, for short-term profits
    • asdff 5y ago
      And today CEQA exists for nimbys to stall housing and infrastructure while polluters remain unaccountable.
• mikeg8 5y ago
  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 cost. BUT, When I see numbers in articles like this ($837k ea), after dealing with pandemic construction pricing myself, it's painfully obvious there is a terrible lack of cost-control. This is not a sustainable solution. And scapegoating on the pandemic is not helpful. I'm convinced most government agencies cannot manage this type construction in an affordable way, including my home county of Sonoma where we are spending $250k - $350k per homeless person to house them in refurbished hotel rooms (remodeling, not new construction). I don't know what the solution is, but I have become convinced that local governments cannot build their way out of this. We have to come up with something better.
  • sjg007 5y ago
    So you are saving ~30% right? Plus the land at probably <250k means $600k max net cost. I imagine the area you live in has $800k-$1m houses.
    • mikeg8 5y ago
      About right, might be saving closer to 35%. Land cost was $500k in 2018, but its 3 acres, had existing utilities, and I can re-build another existing structure on the property what was red-tagged and will be 2 bed 2 bath, ~1800sq/ft primary dwelling. The one currently under construction is technically the accessory dwelling unit, but it really is a stand-alone house. With just the new ADU, we will be in ~$850k but appraised value is expected to be $1-1.3m. When we spend another $350-$400k re-building the primary dwelling, it will probably be worth $1.6-$2m with ability to rent one unit. The metric I care most about is my sq/ft build cost which will be around $300/ft. This is incredibly low for a custom home which ranges in the $400-650 ft range for a decent quality custom and $1000+ ft for higher-end residences. The sqft size of units in LA is not mentioned, but based on the video, they are between 400-600 ft. $837k / 600 sqft = $1395 ft. Wayyyyyyy too high for "affordable" housing.
• jeffbee 5y ago
  This is not a story about government waste, it's a story about the high cost of building housing. If you want this price to be lower, lower the general cost of housing. The median sale price in Los Angeles is about 1 million dollars, and new construction sells for more. New construction at $837k is a comparative deal. Also, if you read the report, a significant part of the cost is intragovernmental transfers, i.e. they are charging themselves all the usual impact fees for water and sewer and whatnot.
  • coding123 5y ago
    Well it is both.
  • asdff 5y ago
    It is government waste though given the context. It would be one thing if this was the price for public housing, complete public housing that functions like a private apartment. It's not. It's for homeless shelters. These should be spartan builds, meant to maximize units for the cost. To me, the modern example of the idyllic homeless shelter is your average university dorm: 4 people sharing a bedroom, and an entire floor sharing bathroom and kitchen facilities. Historically, this is how the lowest rung of urban housing has always been developed from ancient Rome right up until the 1950s when whites used race and class to destroy urban fabric and declare SROs (really any neighborhood with poor people) slums, fit for conversion to surface parking for white collar office workers. It makes no sense to be building these shelters in this style of a private apartment with 1 bathroom and kitchen per unit. It just drives up the costs and increases developer profit, and gives a few people their own kitchen while keeping a lot of people cooking in a nylon tent over an open fire compared to the alternative of sparing these costly amenities from each and every unit, and offering them communally instead.
  • polalavik 5y ago
    It’s definitely both. LA taxpayers set aside some 1 billion dollars to address homelessness and instead of coming up with a viable solution the city chose to build 20-50 units at a time at the tune of 500-800k each to address a problem that exists orders of magnitude greater than that solution (~1000x). The number of homeless in Los Angeles is in the range of 60-70k if not more.
• 999900000999 5y ago
  Oh yes, my home city. I left LA for numerous reasons, absolutely unaffordable housing was one of them. Most people are doing extremely poorly in Los Angeles. It's the only city where you both have to pay an insane amount of rent, and own a car. The bare minimum survive in LA is probably around 80 k. But the median income there is only around 70k. Of the people I was meeting, almost no one had a job or any real interest in working. Very bad things tend to happen if you're around people like that. I moved to Chicago after being disenchanted with LA, and I met an amazing partner with a great career . I only meet people in real life after a particularly scary app experience. Like I said, bad things happen if you're around people who don't work. Not that you need to make too much in Chicago to live. A two bedroom in Chicago will run you from 1300 to 1600. You don't need a car since it has one of the best public transit systems in America, and a monthly Metro passes about a hundred bucks. So let's say you want to split a two-bedroom with a friend, for your transportation and housing. Housing you're only spending about $1,000 a month. Compared to LA where that same two bedroom cost $2,600, and you need to own a car. Most people just run out and finance something. So once you make your payments and your insurance, and your maintenance and your gas, you're easily spending between $700 to $900 on transportation alone. Base cost of living in Chicago, 1k + a few hundred for food , utilities and fun. In LA your taking 2100$ + that same few hundred. Plus I got a pretty significant raise when I moved to Chicago! No rational person should stay in Los Angeles ! 'But my family's here.' Most of my family ended up leaving because they just can't afford to it anymore. Why be the last person off of a sinking ship. The time to fix California's affordable housing crisis was decades ago before Prop 13 was passed. Too late now
  • lotsofpulp 5y ago
    Coastal California will never have affordable housing. The demand is way too high relative to supply, so people will trip over themselves to compete with each other for it, pushing prices to the limit. There may have been a possibility prior to the 90s before it was widely known about and the world’s population was much smaller, but it has been a few decades since it has been obvious that demand for coastal California is insatiable, and obviously the people living there are not going to want to share it with everyone in the world that wants to live there.
  • 5y ago
• kavaruka 5y ago
  :( this link is not available in Europe
  • mrweasel 5y ago
    At least you're important to them. Which is a nice sentiment, as they struggle to find a way to be in compliance with a three year old law. A law that just require them to respect the privacy of their visitors.
• legitster 5y ago
  In the last 50 years, cities across the country closed down over 1 million SROs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy 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 motel room (~350 sq ft - or more than double the average SRO), they should realistically be able to build over 10,000 units for that kind of money (that's including California's exorbitant cost per square foot). It would be like if the government banned motorcycles, and then said "okay, instead we'll make you a nice, compact crossover", and then handed over design and construction of the crossovers to a company that builds snowplows. What's frustrating is that SROs used to be provided by the private market, largely free to taxpayers! How much better a use of government money it would have been to just improve the situation in SROs than to quietly let them shutter and hope the poverty they represented just disappeared with them.
  • mwint 5y ago
    Basically, we’d be better off if the government had done nothing. Seems like that happens a lot.
    • long_time_gone 5y ago
      More like, we'd be better off if voters didn't demand short-term actions with negative long-term effects.
      • jvanderbot 5y ago
        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 everything with referendums and protests?
• slg 5y ago
  >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 city program. Housing in LA county will be cheaper and the median there is just under $800k[2]. So all of these projects are under the median cost of housing and the overwhelming majority are at least 25% below median. This doesn't seem like much of a controversy once you know that context. Housing in LA is simply expensive. [1] - https://www.redfin.com/city/11203/CA/Los-Angeles/housing-market https://www.redfin.com/city/11203/CA/Los-Angeles/housing-mar... [2] - https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-11-04/what-l-a-countys-median-home-price-795-000-buys-in-six-areas https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-11-04/what-l-a-c...
  • legitster 5y ago
    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 be in the 1th percentile.
    • slg 5y ago
      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.
      • 5y ago
• justinzollars 5y ago
  I can't understand why California politicians aspire to spread their ideas nationally. There is so much grift and lack of results.
• cryptonector 5y ago
  Sustainable!
• JadeNB 5y ago
  The title (which comes directly from the article) is surely clickbaity at best. It is not the case that there is one homeless person, whom LA is spending $837k to house; it is the case (so says the article, anyway) that LA has a massively overspending project whose amortised cost works out to "up to" (what a weasel word) $837k/person.
• vasco 5y ago
  > Our European visitors are important to us. > This site is currently unavailable to visitors from the European Economic Area while we work to ensure your data is protected in accordance with applicable EU laws. Thanks, I guess?
  • tgv 5y ago
    It's weapon grade American bullshit.
• fallingfrog 5y ago
  Part of the problem is that due to the mild climate, LA inherits a large part of the homeless population of the whole country. They come from all 50 states to the west coast. So this isn't entirely a problem of LA's making, even though they have to bear the costs.
  • asdff 5y ago
    Nothing is a mild climate when you are homeless. Its going to be 39* tonight on the streets of LA. If all you have is a nylon tent and no blanket you are probably going to join the ranks of homeless who have died from hypothermia this year in LA, which outnumbers the people who have died from hypothermia in NYC because they actually build homeless shelters in NYC. Six months from now the problem will be flipped and you will be contending with heat stroke as the pavement heats up to 95*, and the city generally lacks widespread cooling centers. Honestly a bigger reason why homeless is so overt here is because its not criminalized. You can smoke crack or shoot up meth openly and police in LA don't care, but try even smoking a joint in Baton Rouge or wherever else and you will be sent to jail.
• coding123 5y ago
  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.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • thebean11 5y ago
    Why are you too old to have a 30 year mortgage?
    • coding123 5y ago
      I don't want to work through my 70s and possibly 80s
• ShowalkKama 5y ago
  For the european fellows: https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https://ktla.com/news/los-angeles-is-spending-up-to-837000-to-house-a-single-homeless-person https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https://ktla.com/news/los-angeles-is...
• lil_dispaches 5y ago
  CA tax money is the biggest racket in the world.
• banannaise 5y ago
  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.
• Ansil849 5y ago
  This article is a perfect example of how word tenses can be used to manipulate and misrepresent information. The title says that the city "is spending" an amount, which suggests that this is a routine cost, leaving the reader of the headline to fill in the blanks 'oh, is spending annually?'. But the tense in the article itself is different: > Most of the units are studios or one-bedroom apartments. 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. "Is spending" != 'expected to spend'. The former has the unstated implication that this is a recurring cost, or at least that this is a cost the city is in the process of spending, whereas the article explains that this is only a projected cost.
• Forge36 5y ago
  How many years will the houses last? Is this land cost+improvements? What is the average cost? 800,000 per unit is high. But that appears to be the upper end of the bell curve.
• peter303 5y ago
  A conservation think tank issued a report saying Denver spends about $400,000 per year per unhoused person. https://commonsenseinstituteco.org/the-economic-footprint-of-homelessness-in-metro-denver/ https://commonsenseinstituteco.org/the-economic-footprint-of... But drilling down finds 10% of that is direct budgeted other other 90% indirect like the cost of police sweeps, mental health, etc.
  • asdff 5y ago
    Still at 40k per, that is certainly more than enough to buy a years worth of rent for an individual in Denver.
• HWR_14 5y ago
  This headline seems misleading. First, these are one-time costs, but most reporting on programs like these are annual costs. Second, this conflates a lot of numbers. Most are one bedroom (which could house a small family, as sleeping on a couch is more comfortable than a car), but the most expensive is $837,000. There's nothing even stated that the most expensive one-bedroom is $837,000). In fact, 86% are under $700,000 to build. In fact, they plan to hit 10,000 units in the next 5 years, with it seems about half of those coming from the first $1.2 billion allocation.
• renewiltord 5y ago
  Haha, this is normal among so-called progressive circles. They subscribe universally to the "if it's not good enough, it's better to have nothing". So you can't provide crappy housing, it's better for people to be on the street. You can't provide crappy jobs, it's better for people to have no jobs. You can't provide crappy healthcare, it's better for people to die. The secondary aspect of this is that these people will fight tooth and nail to ensure that crappy things don't exist but will put up some token "We should have X" to get the good thing built. Progressives...
• spaetzleesser 5y ago
  My ex used to do some auditing at LA city. Usually these contractors are vehicles to give tons of money to well connected friends of the city council or mayor for services like “consulting” and “management”. They also have large amounts of middle management. In one case social workers couldn’t handle the number of required visits per week (I think they each had 30 clients or more). The solution was to hire more consultants and project managers to analyze the situation instead of hiring people to reduce the workload to reasonable levels.
• logifail 5y ago
  (I apologise in advance for my apparent ignorance on this) but are we sure we properly actually understand why people are homeless? Is there a proportion of homelessness that is to some extent - although I hesitate to use this word - "voluntary"? Is there really nowhere else to go other than to sleep on the streets?
• worik 5y ago
  I do not understand the cost breakdown. So a developer wants to build a hundred basic units (350 square feet/30 square metres) in a block and the cost is costing eighty million dollars? We can do much better. Where are the factories building the prefabricated units to build apartments from? I have a friend from East Germany who's parents grew up in the Stalinist apartments. They solved this exact problem in the early 1950s. What is wrong with LA? And not to pick on LA. This is a problem throughout the West as far as I can tell. What is wrong with us? Why can we not efficiently build housing?
• narrator 5y ago
  Homelessness, like healthcare reaches a point of diminishing marginal returns where the problem just gets worse when more money is spent on it. If there was a hard upper limit on spending and then the government just had to get creative on doing things efficiently, things would work out better.
• egberts1 5y ago
  Smells like a payola to a certain people in trusted position.
• tabtab 5y ago
  The rust belt has spare houses and apartments. Why the hell can't we allocate better? We can't stuff everybody into CA, dammit!
• swamp_cypress 5y ago
  Reminds me of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWU6dJ8tub4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWU6dJ8tub4 (Milton Friedman's 4 Ways to Spend Money)
• davewasthere 5y ago
  Australia has that beat. We're spending around $4m (USD 2.87m) per person to house refugees in Nauru offshore detention. Because reasons. Persionally, I'd rather let the formally recognised refugees come to Australia and pay them each $100k a year for a savings of 3.9m/year/person. Bargain!
• nazgulnarsil 5y ago
  Please understand the connection between anti discrimination policy and expensive housing. It is illegal to discriminate in housing except via higher prices. So that's where all the pressure winds up for people to avoid the externalities of poor neighborhoods. I grew up on welfare and then became middle class via STEM and got to see both sides of it.
• tpoacher 5y ago
  This is what I see: https://i.stack.imgur.com/Sl9RD.png https://i.stack.imgur.com/Sl9RD.png (/s)