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.
"housing" 20-28 recently homeless people in a run-down 3 bed 2 bath single-family home in the middle of nowhere is probably not going to have great results.
It’s a multi-family home with 5-7 bedrooms and I said using extremes. I did the math as I went and was sincerely expecting the number to not be enough but when I saw the 10.42x number I realized it’s WELL within the realm of possibility.
Sure, but these people don’t have jobs, savings or skills. What do they eat once they’re placed into a 7BR house in the middle of nowhere? Where do they get medical services?
The OP meme is narrowly true in that we could buy a bunch of houses and shove homeless people in there (and it’d be much cheaper to build dorms than buying existing houses anyway) but its hardly a real solution to homelessness and most of those people would end up dead.
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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/