If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, then you’ve already familiar with some of how the Homeless Industrial Complex operates. Here’s a somewhat naive look at some of those problems.
There are some decent nuggets in here, but there are several big parts of the problem this piece ignores.
“America has a homelessness crisis as record numbers of people are ending up on the streets in a few concentrated city centers.”
“Cities are spending billions of dollars on failing projects to try and solve this problem, which has attracted a growing list of companies happy to provide their services for a price.”
“Helping the homeless has become a lucrative business, with multi-million dollar government contracts awarded every day. But if there’s so much money to be made, do these companies really want a long-term fix?”
Austin: “49 apartments for the homeless built at a whopping $739,000 a unit.”
“The annual budget for the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority Rose from $63 million in 2015 to $808 million in 2022, a 1,300% increase in just 7 years. And what did the hardworking taxpayers of Los Angeles get for their money? The number of homeless people went up by 56%.”
“Everybody deserves the right to Affordable comfortable shelter.” False. Shelter is a good. Rights are God-given and Constitutionally guaranteed, not material goods.
LA: “The Inside Safe Homelessness Reduction Policy [was] to have social workers offer hotel rooms to homeless individuals while they sought out longer term housing arrangements data collected by the City and compiled by local news outlet The Center Square found that the plan had cost $250 million over just one year the program only served 1,463 individuals, which works out to be $17,000 per individual per month, that is over $200,000 every year being spent on one individual.”
“The homeless industrial complex is actually a combination of bad management structures, bad incentives, and bad market conditions.”
“The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority is a joint Powers Authority that gets funding from federal, state, county and city budget budgets, but it doesn’t actually do any of the work itself.”
“According to the authority’s own website, the LHSA offers funding programs, design outcomes, assessment and technical assistance to more than 100 nonprofit partner agencies that assist people in experiencing homelessness achieve independence and stability in permanent housing.” Or so they say. How much of the money given to those 100 programs is siphoned directly to the pockets of leftwing activists?
“The organization that only runs a few programs of their own has over 750 employees, primarily dedicated to liasing with their nonprofit partners overseen by highly paid executives, including the CEO of public Va Licia Adams Kellum, who is paid a base salary of $430,000 per year.” Nice work, if you can get it. And that $420K doesn’t include any money that might be kicked back to her…
“According to SalaryCube and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, this is roughly double the pay of the average CEO for organizations of this size in the private sector.”
“Most of the money entering this program goes to nonprofit partners, but since each of them are contracted for niche roles across dozens of different programs the real work is bogged down an endless siloing of responsibilities and overhead.” No, harvesting the graft to leftwing activists and causes via the overhead is the intended result.
“Even though these are nonprofit organizations, they all want to protect their role so their people can keep their jobs and they frequently get into turf wars over whose responsibility is what. They also don’t have a direct line of communication to one another since all report reporting goes back through the LHSA.”
“The Housing Authority isn’t even the central authority within Los Angeles. Within just this one city, different homeless issues are handled by the LHSA, the chief of Housing and Homeless solutions, county homeless services, the California Department of Housing and Community Development, the federal inter-agency Council of homelessness, in addition to federal, state, city, and local police departments.” The more red tape and bureaucracy, the more palms that get greased.
“A senior adviser on homelessness to Governor Gavin Newsom defended the state of California spending $17.5 billion that much money would have been enough to just pay rent at market rates for every homeless person in the state with around $4 billion left over.”
I think I’m done critiquing this video. Despite having some useful numbers, he’s not looking in the right places. “Addiction” and “mental illness” each receive one mention (besides the counselor accused of identity theft fraud), but no mention of how that’s the primary driver of keeping people on the street, and only one mention of “housing first,” and no analysis of why it’s a disastrous policy. Nor has he looked to see if the principles receiving fund are passing that money on to Democratic candidates and causes.
I think that an increase of 63 million to 88 million would be a growth of 139%. An increase of 1,300% is equivalent to an increase of 13 times the original amount.
The “homeless crisis” will last as long as the money does.
When it runs out, they’ll all either die off or reform themselves. My money is on “die”.
The public, on the other hand, will eventually lose its collective patience for all of this, and we’re going to transition to a much, much crueler commons. Think “Dickensian”, wherein people are getting hung for petty theft, and vagrancy means immediate incarceration in the local corrective work camp… Which people will smile at.
Compassion is a finite resource. The “advocates” would do well to remember that, as they unknowingly go about remodeling the existing environment.
The proper meaning of “everyone deserves the right to affordable shelter” is the same as the right to freedom of the press. Governments can’t implement bans or licensing schemes to impede the right, but you still have to pay the costs of printing.
Indeed, some homelessness is the direct result (like RV people in Si Valley) of ordinary people being priced out of their homes by self-serving zoning and permitting policy. By contrast, the importation and cultivation of chronically homeless addicts and mental cases is quite different, and we must be careful to distinguish the former class, whose rights have been abrogated, from the latter class, who are mere pawns to urban political machines.
I think that an increase of 63 million to 88 million would be a growth of 139%. An increase of 1,300% is equivalent to an increase of 13 times the original amount.
Good catch, I dropped a digit. The number is $808 million, now corrected.
The “homeless crisis” will last as long as the money does.
When it runs out, they’ll all either die off or reform themselves. My money is on “die”.
The public, on the other hand, will eventually lose its collective patience for all of this, and we’re going to transition to a much, much crueler commons. Think “Dickensian”, wherein people are getting hung for petty theft, and vagrancy means immediate incarceration in the local corrective work camp… Which people will smile at.
Compassion is a finite resource. The “advocates” would do well to remember that, as they unknowingly go about remodeling the existing environment.
The proper meaning of “everyone deserves the right to affordable shelter” is the same as the right to freedom of the press. Governments can’t implement bans or licensing schemes to impede the right, but you still have to pay the costs of printing.
Indeed, some homelessness is the direct result (like RV people in Si Valley) of ordinary people being priced out of their homes by self-serving zoning and permitting policy. By contrast, the importation and cultivation of chronically homeless addicts and mental cases is quite different, and we must be careful to distinguish the former class, whose rights have been abrogated, from the latter class, who are mere pawns to urban political machines.