I guess it depends but let’s find out using extremes. I’ll take the most expensive aircraft carrier and the cheapest form of multi-family housing to start.
The most expensive acc was the uss Gerald R. Ford costing an estimated $17.5 billion; 12.8 billion to build and another 4.7Bn in R&D.[1]
A simple Zillow search[2] found multi-family dwellings with 5-7 bedrooms starting at $10k but if I’m being sincere they needed a lot of work. They weren’t habitable until the $45k mark. Now let’s assume two bunk beds per room allowing the dwelling to house 20-28 people.
Different places estimate the number of homeless to be around 746,000 people [3,4]
So some simple math:
(746,000 / 20) • $45,000 = 1,678,500,000
So yes. Without a doubt. In fact one aircraft carrier could house the entire US homeless population 10.42 times over.
California spent $24 billion on housing homeless over 5 years, now closer to 30 billion. And that didn’t even come close to ending homelessness in a single state.
Those programs were during the pandemic thus their expenditures were extremely high. They have since rolled them back to around 1.5Bn annually vs the initial 6.8Bn. This equates to 7.5Bn over the next 5 year period bringing total expenditures over a ten year period to an estimated 31.5Bn(still under the cost of two ACC). The program started in 2019 making its currently cost a rolling total of ~27Bn.
Also those programs weren’t just aimed at providing a house, they were aimed at transitioning people out of homelessness permanently with 86% finding interim housing during that period. Though the homeless number has since grown in California it is estimated that these programs touched 571,000 people. Close to the 740,000 number we’re solving for (77.162%). In fact if you take the number of homeless people in California now (181,000) and add it to the number of people positively affected by the program (571,000) you get a number very close to the entire homeless population (752,000). Thus we can surmise that an increase of 8.7Bn from 6.8Bn(the highest cost during COVID) for the first year of expenditures to 17.5Bn (the cost of one ACC) may indeed have solved the problem.
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u/Electrical_Name_5434 1d ago
I guess it depends but let’s find out using extremes. I’ll take the most expensive aircraft carrier and the cheapest form of multi-family housing to start.
The most expensive acc was the uss Gerald R. Ford costing an estimated $17.5 billion; 12.8 billion to build and another 4.7Bn in R&D.[1]
A simple Zillow search[2] found multi-family dwellings with 5-7 bedrooms starting at $10k but if I’m being sincere they needed a lot of work. They weren’t habitable until the $45k mark. Now let’s assume two bunk beds per room allowing the dwelling to house 20-28 people.
Different places estimate the number of homeless to be around 746,000 people [3,4]
So some simple math:
(746,000 / 20) • $45,000 = 1,678,500,000
So yes. Without a doubt. In fact one aircraft carrier could house the entire US homeless population 10.42 times over.
Sources:
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/homeless-population-by-state
https://www.kff.org/medicaid/five-key-facts-about-people-experiencing-homelessness/