And when we fill those 2000 units up in the first year, and more homeless move to Portland to take advantage of the generous services the city offers, where will that money come from? And the 2000 after that, and after that? Helping people is great, but homelessness is not a problem Portland will ever be capable of "solving" on its own, which means we also need to start looking at new laws and rules that make our city cleaner and safer again.

The City general fund is $600M per year. The County health, human, and community services budget is about the same.

The $184M would be bonded - costing maybe an additional $10M/year out of an about $250M a year City bond fund servicing budget.

That leaves $116M spread out over 10 years. That's a nit if it can end street camping. $12M a year? The City is asking $7M/year for additional officers alone - would they even be necessary with people off the streets? What other City costs could be reduced if we solved this? What would be the value to businesses and residents?

A financial and benefit analysis presented in an interesting way could be a feature article.

R - will it save money if 2000 people get taken off the streets only to be replaced with 2000 new homeless transplants who relocate to Portland to take advantage of our homeless services? That's the biggest problem with all of this - Portland is not a closed universe. Unless all other cities undertook similar programs simultaneously, Portland will simply spend a lot of money to become more attractive as a destination for the homeless. You see the same thing happening down in Los Angeles. More people housed every year, yet somehow also more homeless every year.

Ignoring the ridiculous $300M startup cost. How do 2,000 units cost $41M per year to maintain?? That's over $20,000 per unit every year. Even if all of these units are completely free to the users instead of being just subsidized, the city is basically paying $1700/month in "rent" for each unit. Why don't we just give 2,000 families $1500/month for use on housing? They could probably find better housing and the city saves money.

I understand I am oversimplifying, but at some point we need to start tracking where this money goes. I'm fine to pay more in taxes to help the less-fortunate, but if the money is just wasted, then who is actually being helped? At what point would we be better served just handing people cash instead of creating these massively costly government-run projects?