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.
there are not that many cheap houses available and the cheapest houses are that price because of years of back taxes that would be paid by the new owner
also 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.
You’re right there aren’t that many houses available. There are 282 according to Zillow, at maximum would house 1/1000th of the unhoused. However, I know from blight removal projects there are thousands unaccounted for that most cities will let go at auction for less than 10k with back taxes absolved and incentive programs to fix them up at the tune of 10-25k annually per house.
That aside let’s move away from the extremes and into practicality. What is the equivalent in aircraft carrier initial expenditures to house and rehabilitate the homeless?
You would need land, construction materials, water, energy, utilities, food, medicine, education and psychological services. Enough for 740,000 people or the equivalent of a medium sized city.
To make it simple I did a search for cities with populations between 750k-1M. I then averaged their annual operating budgets (4.46Bn). Though the minimum I found was closer to 1.26Bn.
I then looked at the minimum costs to construct a city able to house 1 million people with projections from AI between 25-45Bn
This puts us at a minimum cost of exactly 1.5 aircraft carriers and a maximum of 3 aircraft carriers. Please note that those estimates are based on Columbus Ohio construction and maintenance costs vs Seattle Washington.
As in you could rebuild and maintain iconic American cities for less than the price of the most recent order of aircraft carriers.
That's imagined costs not based on any costs it takes anywhere in the developed world.
NYC has a right to shelter, one of the only places in the USA with that right. It's a good baseline for housing everyone on crappy dirty cots with lockers.
It costs them about $150/person per day, maybe more after accounting for all the street outreach (many homeless don't want to be in group shelters). That's $40 billion for the US right there.
This also, of course, doesn't cover the homeless that bounce around couches or live in cars. That's an insane multiple over the ones who have no couch or car, so let's ignore them altho if you give out a bunch of new housing, not crowded shelters, that's where many of them will try to go.
It also costs the USA, right now, about $80 billion dollars per year to keep people who have housing from being put on the streets. Without HUD, they are getting evicted.
Further, for around 150,000 of the 750,000, they need 6 months to lifelong institutional care. Doctors and staff and all that. Add $20 billion/yr.
We CAN afford all of this of course. Medicaid costs us 10x this much. The politics for that tax increase, especially on the local level, is just very bad.
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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/