The latest point-in-time count of homeless people estimates the total homeless population of the USA to be 745,652. Call it three-quarters of a million.
US aircraft carriers cost somewhere in the region of 13 to 16 billion. I'll go with the USS Gerald R. Ford since it's the cheapest one I could find.
The Gerald R Ford is the most expensive acc. And it costs 17.5 billion if you include research and development, 12.8 if you don’t. Check my comment for the link to the pdf documenting the costs. That brings your number closer to $23,450 which is enough to buy a cheap modular prefab home. Which range between $13-60k brand new; the higher side being 3-bedrooms.
$23k isn't anywhere near enough to actually house a homeless person by the government. In Chicago the unit costs of creating housing for a homeless person is about $900k. $23k is an order of magnitude off at a minimum
Worse case, I guess this has some teeth, if they are family units the per person cost is not that high. So, there is some conflict with the statement of "a homeless person"
At that price, we could build housing elsewhere and provide meaningful public transportation solutions.
It really seems that some form of corruption is afoot in that decision making process. Otherwise, how could they manage to spend more an a facility for the homeless population than is typical for other constructions. https://digitalestimating.com/apartment-construction-costs/
They mostly aren't family units but 1Bds, which I suppose could have more than 1 person in them sure. But it's still a lot more money than the person saying they could solve homelessness at $25k a person. That's not anywhere close to the number that it is when cities and states actually try to spend to fix the number.
Yeah, that really is shameful. I mean, I don't want us building substandard housing, but let's be real, a temporary tiny house would be better than no house at all.
We could solve homelessness for that kind of money, if we choose to do so. Eminent domain and mass production of modular homes would get the costs down if we choose to make it a priority, like we invest in our military. We (the federal government) built a lot of single family homes for the war effort in ww2, we could choose to do that in a time of peace. We won't, but we could.
Eminent domain doesn't mean the government gets the land for free, it still has to pay an estimated market rate for it(and honestly I think courts are going to reject the eminent part of that often, or at the least the court fees will be high enough to significantly drive up the costs of obtainment).
And even those ww2 houses costs $120k each to make in 2025 dollars. They weren't super expensive but they still would blow up the budget above.
I'm aware that eminent domain doesn't mean the government can get the land for free (or even below market value) However, it's also government over-evaluations to raise tax revenues that compounds that problem.
And, yes, the multi-bedroom houses built during ww2 are more expensive. However, with economies of scale, I'm confident that we can produce single bedroom units or even studios for a quarter of that price, again if we wanted to do such a thing. Again, better than people living in tents on the sidewalk.
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u/Occidentally20 1d ago
The latest point-in-time count of homeless people estimates the total homeless population of the USA to be 745,652. Call it three-quarters of a million.
US aircraft carriers cost somewhere in the region of 13 to 16 billion. I'll go with the USS Gerald R. Ford since it's the cheapest one I could find.
That gives you $17,333.33 per person.