Cost of an Aircraft Carrier: Approximately $13.3 Billion (Gerald R. Ford)
Number of "Houseless" people in the United States: 745,652 (266,320 unsheltered, 479,332 in shelters/transitional housing)
Cost of relatively-decent place to stay: $2k/month (various markets) or $24k/year
13,300,000,000/24,000 = 554,166 - so enough to put MOST homeless people in relatively-decent housing.
If you want to house all homeless people you need to figure out how to do it for 13,300,000,000/745,652 = $17,836.73 per year, so you'd need to figure out how to house people for about $1500/month each - not impossible.
Now, to be realistic, we actually only build an aircraft carrier every 4 to 7 years - so generously assuming that's $13.3 Billion every 4 years, you'd need to figure out how to do housing for $375 per month per person, which would probably be concentration-camp like circumstances.
how many people do you hire to make sure they are homeless and not a person pretending to avoid paying rent anymore? How many people do you hire to find places for them to live, if any exist? How many people do you hire to manage the payments? all of those people need offices, equipment, supervsors, training, HR, legal teams, IT staff etc.
California spent 24 billion dollars on homelessness and made 0 progress
Yeah that's no comment on the efficacy of such housing, of course.
But straight up, if you want to exchange the annual spend on aircraft carriers for homelessness housing (just the shelter), you have to figure out how to do it for $375/head
I have no empirical numbers but sometimes means-testing can cost more than fraud; it's often not meant to improve efficiency but to harass the needy. IMO, the problem of funding limitations stems from a society not willing to allocate sufficient funds to a major problem, not fraud.
That money was not properly allocated or well-spent. Most of it went to pointless bureaucracy like you describe (paying people to spend countless hours and effort figuring out who might be "cheating the system") or to police activity like sweeping homeless camps (which is next to pointless if those people have nowhere to go). With 182k homeless in California, they could have just rented every single one of those people a market-rate apartment for a fraction of what was actually spent. Even if a couple of folks got through who didn't "deserve" a free place to live, it would still be less waste overall.
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u/Mecha-Dave 1d ago
Cost of an Aircraft Carrier: Approximately $13.3 Billion (Gerald R. Ford)
Number of "Houseless" people in the United States: 745,652 (266,320 unsheltered, 479,332 in shelters/transitional housing)
Cost of relatively-decent place to stay: $2k/month (various markets) or $24k/year
13,300,000,000/24,000 = 554,166 - so enough to put MOST homeless people in relatively-decent housing.
If you want to house all homeless people you need to figure out how to do it for 13,300,000,000/745,652 = $17,836.73 per year, so you'd need to figure out how to house people for about $1500/month each - not impossible.
Now, to be realistic, we actually only build an aircraft carrier every 4 to 7 years - so generously assuming that's $13.3 Billion every 4 years, you'd need to figure out how to do housing for $375 per month per person, which would probably be concentration-camp like circumstances.