If You Built a 400 Unit Apartment Building for the Homeless in Los Angles

I sat and watched a discussion group over the past month get onto the topic of trying to resolve the homeless problems in Los Angles, and they came to this delicate topic.

Suppose you built this place....three-story unit, taking up an entire block, with some green park in the middle (landscaped). 

Then you moved 400 folks into the units. 

The question then arose...how long would it take for the unit itself....to become one giant ghetto with drug dealers and alcoholics laying around?  And would the local neighborhoods next to this....would they accept this type of condition without causing massive grief over the destruction of their surroundings? 

This scenario has been on my mind and it's part of the whole landscape of trying to resolve this mess.

Maybe you could establish a test for the future occupants and find 400 folks who were non-drug users and non-drinkers.  But then you'd come to a portion of the 400 folks (maybe one-quarter to half of them) who were Paranoid Schizophrenic types.  This would be the group who'd be arguing with fellow occupants about the style of their clothing, the color of their shoes, the imagined aura of their heads, and the provocative nature of conversation (just how much of a Cowboys fan you really are....might set them off).

So all of this laid out....does it really mean that a 400-unit housing project would really resolve much of anything? 

That's the problem.  You could go and get 20-billion dollars from the federal government to build units like this all over Portland, Seattle, SF, and Los Angles, then find a decade later that the money did absolutely nothing but create newer and more intense homeless problems.  The odds of the 20-billion dollars in units being torn down within twenty years?  I'd give it better than a 50-percent chance.  And what happens then?  The homeless who found homes, then lost homes? 

Go and explain that to the public who paid taxes to build fake solutions. 

The 94-Million Dollar Problem

In a normal year, San Francisco will go and spend $94,000,000 on homeless folks within the city.  That's to handle the 'crisis' in the city for 8,000 to 9,000 people.

I sat and pondered over this.

This comes out to around $10,400 a year, per person.

In Alabama terms, if you handed me the money and said that it'd be a regular sum for at least ten years....it'd be a rather simple task.

I'd go find a huge chunk of land (say 300 acres) and lay out a mini-city of modular cabins (15 ft by 20 ft) with a basic studio appearance.  I'd issue out a free breakfast each morning, some baloney sandwiches with a Sun Drop cola for lunch, and a fried chicken plate each evening.

At the end of the year, I'd still have 25-million left in my hand.

The problem here is that this all San Francisco 'cost' and not Alabama 'cost'.  You toss in city managers making $90k, and a little empire of 100 homeless technicians, and you have eaten away at fair chunk of the $94-million.

What'll have to happen to change the dynamics of the SF homeless issue?  Well....you'd have to go and probably triple the $94-million to around $300-million....to really retake the city and end the 'crap-on-the-streets' chatter.  And where does the money come from?  Yeah, that's really the big question left to answer.

Then you come to pause on this last question....with the drug-usage dynamic playing into this....why would you assume that the numbers will stay at 8-thousand to 9-thousand?  I would go and forecast that the homeless numbers in SF will bump to 12,000 by the end of 2021.