This is the lie told everywhere that the only real solution to affordable housing is gov spending billions on a small set of tenement buildings, that take a decade to build, and are 3x over budget. Instead of reforming municipal policies to reduce rampant NIMBYist roadblocks, rethinking zoning from the ground up, streamlining regulations to make it easier to follow and enforce the rules safely, etc etc.
None of those things require billions of dollars to be committed. Just heart, communication skills, and charisma. There's a mountain of capital and regular people ready to build new housing, lack of capital, or will, or lack of demand to build has never been the problem. To discover the root problem requires asking why it's so rare/expensive despite that reality and why it's so harder today than it was 100yrs ago.
Increasing supply of housing and bringing prices down is also a needed solution to prevent some people from getting to the destitute stage, and yes, that is under local control.
Homelessness doesn't happen in a vacuum. It's not the homeless in one bucket then everyone else living in the real world, where the only dichotomy we have to accept when living in a city is public housing vs paying $3k/month for rent.
I am pretty sure that _something_ could be done with even a small portion of that _yearly_ ingress of capital.
Note the problems you will be up against.
Homeless populations are likelier to have more mentally ill, drug addicted, and people with criminal history among them. Any people around proposed sites would be obviously opposed to any new facilities being built near them. That is why the west coast states pay $200k+ per key to buy hotels and motels and convert them to homeless shelters, because locals cannot fight it since it is already zoned for multi tenant housing.
And then you have induced demand. Taxpayers in any other place would have no problem keeping their taxes lower by paying for flights and buses to anyone who needs them to get to SF.
Of course, if one is the retributive sort, nothing grinds one’s spleen more than someone worse off getting something “they don’t deserve”.
I personally don’t understand why the some exceptionally wealthy billionaire in California doesn’t solve the homelessness problem themselves, expending some mere fraction of their net worth (i.e., the value of a couple bucks to the rest of us).
If you were an exceptionally wealthy billionaire, how would you solve it? Especially considering that the obvious approach of "build housing" is largely illegal.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...
The proof of this is that the rich regularly manipulate zoning laws. Look at what Google and Apple did to Palo Alto.
Housing is more expensive because of the opposite, it incentives everyone to come get it.
On a federal level, housing and healthcare might be cheaper than imprisonment. But what is even cheaper (in the short run) is ignoring it altogether.
>I personally don’t understand why the some exceptionally wealthy billionaire in California doesn’t solve the homelessness problem themselves, expending some mere fraction of their net worth (i.e., the value of a couple bucks to the rest of us).
Because the problem is far more expensive than any single billionaire or even group of billionaires entire net worth. Even if they could handle just California's population. there are 290M people in the rest of the country, and a significant portion who would not mind coming to California for free housing.
https://www.npr.org/2022/11/06/1134230388/village-salt-lake-...
Median rent in SLC: 1.8k/mo, 21.6k/yr
Federal prison: ~39k/yr
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/09/01/2021-18...
Median rent in CA: 2.9k/mo, 34.8k/yr (according to Zillow)
CA prison: 106k/yr (!)
https://lao.ca.gov/policyareas/cj/6_cj_inmatecost
Incarcerating the homeless is not an economic decision, it’s an emotional one. Society doesn’t mind wasting endless amounts of money doing it, because the cruelty is the point.
