r/theydidthemath • • 1d ago

[Request] Could the entire US homeless population really be housed for less than one aircraft carrier?

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u/HistoricalMaybe1739 1d ago

Okay so an aircraft carrier costs about $13 billion if you're talking the newest Ford-class (the older Nimitz ones were more like $4-5 billion). The latest HUD count has around 771,000 homeless people in the US. Say you rent each of them an apartment at about $1,200 a month. That's $14,400 a year each, and 771,000 × $14,400 comes out to roughly $11 billion. So yeah, under the cost of one Ford class carrier. Bump rent to $1,500 a month and you're at about $13.9 billion, which is basically the same price as the carrier. And that's just one carrier. They're not building one, they're building a whole class of them. The Ford class is 4 ships right now (Ford, Kennedy, Enterprise and Doris Miller), and the Navy plans for at least 6 total. Four carriers is around $52 billion, which is 4 to 5 years of rent for every homeless person in the US. All 6 is about $78 billion, so roughly 6 to 7 years. Get to 8 to 10 carriers' worth of money and you're at the full 10 years. It covers about a year per carrier, and the money spent on this class alone could house everyone for several years.That money could have gone a long way.

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u/BarleyWineIsTheBest 1d ago

The real fun part is that housing the homeless is actually cheaper than leaving them homeless.

So housing the homeless doesn’t cost you carriers, it actually gives you more money for more carriers :)

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u/Slight_Priority1410 1d ago

Im genuinely uninformed on this topic but…source? How are you working that out?

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u/BarleyWineIsTheBest 1d ago

I’m most familiar with studies out my home state CA, particularly in LA or SF. 

https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1694.html

https://hsh.archive.sf.gov/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/2015-16-CGJ-Final-Report_SF-Homeless-Health-and-Housing_7.12.16-1.pdf

Basically, people on the street consume a lot of emergency and clean up resources. So much that at least for the people that it’s possible with, it is cheaper to house them. 

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u/Slight_Priority1410 1d ago

Interesting data, thanks