Here’s Matthew Yglesias over at Vox on a fascinating new report out of Florida analyzing the costs of housing—and not housing—the homeless:
A new study is out providing support to one of my favorite ideas in public policy—that the best way to deal with the challenge of homelessness is to give homeless people homes to live in. To some it sounds utopian and it’s natural to worry about the cost, but a great deal of evidence suggests that it would be cheaper to house the homeless than to let them languish on the streets and deal with the aftermath.
The latest is a Central Florida Commission on Homelessness study indicating that the region spends $31,000 a year per homeless person on “the salaries of law-enforcement officers to arrest and transport homeless individuals—largely for nonviolent offenses such as trespassing, public intoxication or sleeping in parks—as well as the cost of jail stays, emergency-room visits and hospitalization for medical and psychiatric issues.”
Guess how much the study found it would cost, per year, to give each person a place to live and a caseworker to keep an eye on them? Just $10,000. So it costs less than a third as much to just house people than it does to repeatedly arrest them for doing a bunch of normal human behavior that’s illegal to do in public but totally not illegal to do inside your own home, like sleep and drink and pee? And to then also pay for the inevitable physical and mental health issues that arise or are aggravated when you live on the street and keep getting fucking arrested for sleeping or peeing or drinking? GEE WHIZ, WHO COULD’VE SEEN THAT COMING?!?
Yglesias again:
When it comes to the chronically homeless, you don’t need to fix everything to improve their lives. You don’t even really need new public money. What you need to do is target those resources at the core of the problem—a lack of housing—and deliver the housing, rather than spending twice as much on sporadic legal and medical interventions. And the striking thing is that despite the success of housing first initiatives, there are still lots of jurisdictions that haven’t yet switched to this approach. If Central Florida and other lagging regions get on board, we could take a big bite out of the remaining homelessness problem and free up lots of resources for other public services.
There are some interesting graphs about the national decline in homelessness after federal policy started shifting toward a housing-first model. Go read the whole thing.
Incentives ought to alter those statistics, however. “If you build it they will come.”
This is a logical fallacy called a ‘false dilemma,’ where to make their suggestion seem more reasonable, the author makes it seem as if there are only two possible choices.
Here, the article claims that our only choices are to give the homeless houses or keep spending as much enforcement money as we do now. Obviously, there are other possible options that should be considered.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_modest_prop…
I think it is a good idea, but if we are going to do it might I suggest we pick out the cheapest place to do it. No need to house them in an expensive city, better to place them somewhere with a very low cost of living like New Mexico or Detroit. Detroit is actually a great idea because they could make money by renting their currently unoccupied housing stock to cities looking to get rid of their chronically homeless bums.
Hey, as long as we’re going down this line of thinking, has anyone looked into the cost/benefit analysis of shipping the homeless off to a deserted island?
Hitler created Jewish ghettos in Germany. Hawaii had a leper colony on Molokai and Japanese internment camps, same as did Portland.
People on the street might benefit most from Social Workers, who stand on street corners with signs, offering services to reconnect the disenfranchised with their estranged families and educational opportunities, such as the guaranteed student loan program, which provides enough financial aid to cover not just tuition and books, but living most expenses.
I don’t see how this compares to reality when you consider that Bud Clark Commons cost $47 million to build and who knows how much to operate annually and it only consists of 130 studios and a 90 bed temporary shelter. At that rate housing a thousand homeless would cost a quarter of a billion dollars just to build barely adequate space for them plus the annual costs of maintenance and administration of the property built. At that rate you could give them all $25,000 dollars a year each for ten years just for the construction costs. At least if you gave them cash the local economy would benefit from increased food, alcohol, and drug sales. You could call it trickle up economics.
Thanks, I was talking about this a day or two ago and saves me digging it up again. We could also, um, decriminalize things like being poor. Not to mention institute rent controls and cap housing costs generally.
If you listen to the City and note its homeless priorities, the impression you get is that if you are chronically homeless, addicted to drugs, or live in an “embarrassing” (to the City) homeless camp like R2D2 or Diginity Village, you will get money, housing, etc. thrown at you to make you go away. If you are simply struggling, on a waiting list for HUD housing, or someone with a low-paying job and a family to support, you can go fish . . . and don’t forget to pay your Arts Tax and your Streets Tax. You can drop it in the mailbox as you walk to work.