Well in SF and Seattle the spending continually increases and the homelessness problem manages to get worse every year. Sounds like a money pit.

The money pit is the cost of housing. Homelessness and artificial housing scarcity go hand-in-hand.

Dumping this on Local government and homeless people move around based on what’s best for them. Solve it nationally and you don’t have that problem.

Is that not due to simply not spending?

If you estimate ~20k per homeless person per year * 550,000 homes in the US you get on the order of 11 Billion dollars per year out of something like 7,150 Billion of total government spending.

On the other hand if you look at social security as one way to reduce homelessness it’s vastly more expensive.

Neither one of those actually speaks to our spend.

I was more acknowledging it's not that easy to put a single number on that spend. The low number is a little over half that 11 billion I mentioned, but you can easily come up with other metrics which provide vastly larger figures.

Okay got it. :D That's totally fair. Honestly, I don't think we are spending, or the problem wouldn't be where it is right now.

Two things are needed. One, attack the root cause. To remedial spending to beat back this problem that we're now faced with.

We need those things, because Downstream effects from all of this will be very very expensive.