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Trump's DC Occupation Costs 4 Times More Than It Would Take to House City's Entire Homeless Population
(www.commondreams.org)
this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2025
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I'm very supportive out housing the homeless as a fix, but to be clear math is on a per-day basis, it isn't some sort of long term fix.
I hate these stupid math headlines that don't actually make any sense.
Current deployment costs are around $1.1 million per day, housing all of those people in shelters at $45 per person works out to something like $250,000 per day.
This math calculation entirely ignores the fact that there aren't enough shelters to actually do that.
Would other costs go down over time? Housed people don’t need emergency healthcare nearly as much, and with a permanent address that would open doors to a lot of things.
I can’t believe you would forget the interests of the shareholders here
It's a simplistic calculation, but it does seem that often doing the right thing ends up cheaper in the long run. It just doesn't benefit certain groups, so it's not an option. If a million a day was applied to not just pay for sheltering, but to find solutions there wouldn't be a problem to throw authoritative measures at, or use as a reason to tighten security and control. They don't want to fix the problem, it works for them.
Michael Parenti talking about American empire and it's cost to the workers in the imperial core.
Which is fitting because I believe he also said (or he quoted someone that did)
When communist were forced on Poland by soviets in 1945 one of their tasks for the next decade (that continued until 1980 collapse) was to build houses and give it to people. Other tasks were less nice like killing opposition, but housing was indeed how they decided to spent the resources.
US could start a massive communal housing programm on federal budget. They chose not to.
We don't even need to build housing. That's the worst part.
We just need to outlaw landlords.
"But no one will purchase our valueable real estate and we lose money by keeping it!"
And what happens when you have a supply of housing that far exceeds demand? Well if it's an actual functioning economy the cost of housing decreases. The ifs are doing a lot of fucking lifting in this idea though.
Ok what about we increase the budget 4x? We can put each homeless person in hotel for $180 a day. The hotel shareholders would be happy too.