.. and those "vast sums" have only gone up since. This year's homeless spending is expected to exceed $1.1Billion (with a "B").
It's built on a swamp after all.
The summer is a brutal mix of heat and humidity that basically runs from May through September with frequent severe storms or tropical events. October and November start to get cold and from December through March it alternates between the 70s and 30s. March and April are nice again as long as you can get out of the rain.
Houston does not exist without HVAC and living without it is difficult and frequently dangerous.
I really don't understand how people are upset about stuff like this. It follows directly from commitments which nearly every voter/homeowner in the community would find obvious and uncontroversial.
* The state should address homelessness by buying homes for people who need them, within the high-cost metros where they are homeless.
* The state is only marginally different from other builders/buyers of housing. It may have preferential rules, but it can't totally bypass the rules, confiscate land, force construction workers to work for free, or anything like that.
* $837k is a very normal amount of money for a house in the region, and we should reject out of hand any changes which would substantially collapse property values.
You want the market rates to be high, and you want the state to pay close to market rates when it houses people, and you want the state to house people who have no ability to pay... ergo the state is going to spend quite a bit of money on each person it houses. How could it be otherwise?
San Francisco is spending $60k per year on each transient living in a tent on top of the various food stamps, general assistance and food deliveries etc. Many of these people are not from California. As I wrote previously this is a national problem not a local one - Hawaii is struggling with transients who have flown in and thanks to previous social networking know where to immediately register as 'unhoused'.
This is a huge intractable problem that needs cost efficient nationwide triaged solutions not complimentary housing in the most expense parts of the country for anyone who wants it.
People experiencing homelessness doesn't seem like an obvious source of cash.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10498607/San-Franci...
Imagine writing a story like that, adding a dozen pictures of random homeless people looking homeless and paragraphs of copy about Biden buying people crack pipes, but not bothering to either check out the claim or to list the sources of the funds, even if only to shame them.
edit: ah, 100% based on some reactionary twitter poster who interviewed the first homeless guy he saw, and must be too lazy to follow up on anything.
This is key to the 'housing first' model, which I don't think has worked well in California where close to half the US homeless currently live.
We see endless positive pr about the huge non profit industry that 'service' the homeless, but having been pretty involved in researching this for a while it is very important to get accurate data and answers.
A 12 billion homeless budget and astonishing sums spent on housing people with serious mental illness and serious substance abuse problems is not working well for anyone except arguably the California homeless industry.
('LA spending up to $837,000 to house a single homeless person A Los Angeles audit finds that a $1.2 billion program intended to quickly build housing for the city's homeless residents is moving too slowly, and costs are climbing' etc)
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/la-spending-837000...
As SF mayor Newsom pledged to 'end homelessness in two years' in 2001 and totally failed after spending vast sums.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/archive/item/A-decade-of-homeles...
The previous SMI/SA/transient model triaged people far more effectively imo, with shelters that ideally routed people to sobriety, mental health and wellness resources, with those responding and recovering being housed.
We currently have shelters in places like LA & SF that are too dangerous and understaffed for terrified newly homeless to stay, an almost total lack of sobriety triage compounded by budgets being spent on housing first pipe dreams and 'safe consumption sites' for opioids and meth. Many of the treatment beds in SF are empty. (Twitter is a good place to follow this slow moving disaster).
Many of the hotels in SF that were commandeered by the state for 'shelter in place' accommodation of homeless are now suing for huge sums as they are completely trashed. Many drug addicts would rather be on the street rather than behind a closed door because if/when they OD they can be seen and revived.
With the end of the rent moratorium and economic disaster we are going to have a fresh wave of homeless working poor who will need housing.
I don't know enough about the Houston model to comment - I hope it's working - but we have a dire situation on our hands that is getting worse by the day and is not working well at all. we have the cartels preying on the homeless as opioid cash cows.
This is a federal level problem. Cities, counties and states are squandering resources on various patchwork solutions. I really hope Newsom isn't the next president because he has spent two decades going in the wrong direction.