No need to build cheap or new housing, plenty of places to rent for $600 - $1000 a month. That $11B could house all the homeless in the US for two years.

Without coming off as too obtuse, is your argument that the best return we can expect is from investing in basic needs?

Or that for any investment to be moral we must have satisfied more primal basic needs?

What if it were the case that investment in basic research today alleviates a greater amount of suffering over a longer time horizon? What would the moral investment be?

> Without coming off as too obtuse, is your argument that the best return we can expect is from investing in basic needs?

If the ROI is not letting mentally ill people die in the street is that enough?

>Or that for any investment to be moral we must have satisfied more primal basic needs?

Yes. Why not? Why not make this a metric?

>What if it were the case that investment in basic research today alleviates a greater amount of suffering over a longer time horizon? What would the moral investment be?

We can fix these issues now by redirecting this $11B to the $2.5B HUD budget for homeless grants. What research is needed to end homelessness and hunger? It is not a hard problem, only hard because of the greed endemic in the culture. All these people who think this is a good idea to spend money on are only interested in themselves and they use these grand notion of it somehow helping people in the future to make themselves feel better.

That doesn't matter. Landlords would under no circumstances accept those people as tenants for the same reasons that the government renting hotels for the homeless has been so unsuccessful in the past. Namely the perception that the homeless will destroy their property. This isn't necessarily true but all it takes is a handful of bad examples and suddenly landlords are sceptical at best if not outright refusing.

Homelessness is a symptom of systemic issues, it's not the cause. Fixing those systemic issues will cost significantly more than 11B annually.

Don't get me wrong, I think we should be making those a first priority but scientific projects are not who we should be targetting for poor spending. The research this project will do and the research that most of these space oriented science projects do have the potential to significantly shape our understanding not just of space but of how the world works which has direct quantifiable benefits for industry.

If you want to pick an expenditure to be upset about instead, be upset about how much the US spends on the military. Alternatively be upset about the inefficiencies of the US medical system or the lack of taxes paid by large corporations or any of the other inefficiencies and failures of the US government and economic environment. Any of those could have their efforts redirected towards improving the issues that lead to homelessness and wealth inequality.

TLDR: Scientific research on average pays back many multiples of the original investment and 11B isn't remotely close to enough to even impact the root causes of homelessness. Pick your battles and focus on actual inefficiencies in the US that are worsening the homelessness issue or actual opportunities to increase tax revenue/reuse actually corrupt/wasteful spending.

Most homeless people aren't homeless because they can't find an apartment. Housing is a tiny part of the problem here.