You run into the issue - once you start giving out free homes, you will suddenly have a lot more homeless people. It's called induced demand (people who were borderline homeless will prefer to go homeless to get a home rather than keep fighting to stay off the street).

People who quote a number like $8B forget that proposed solutions to the problem can actually change the scope of the problem.

I'm sure that while the number of homeless might be 600K, the number of close-to-homeless is likely at least 10X that number.

> They need to give them homes to live in for free, no strings attached.

Possibly. But you need to address the fact that a lot of these folks need expensive medical assistance. That isn't just housing.

Somewhere around 15% of SF homeless have a traumatic brain injury. That's about 1 in 8 homeless who desperately need expensive medical assistance.

Single payer/medicare for all would have a larger impact on the homeless than mere housing or cash.

Can I get one of the free houses also? Happy to stop paying $4600 a month in rent.

The situation with LA's Proposition HHH was pure graft, imho. The voters were duped into thinking that their increase in sales tax was going to end the encampments, but there was fine print in the measure that enabled two devopers to rake in vast amounts of money while not remotely solving the problem.

The language of the housing first measure stipulated that the developers of the housing had to have previous experience developing permanent supportive housing. There were only two developers that qualified, making them for all practical purposes no-bid contracts.

LA could've sheltered every human being on the streets with that money, and still would've had hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase cheaper, existing housing. That whole thing was just wicked, brazen corruption that extended the needless suffering of everyone living on the street.