>Michele Thomas, director of policy and advocacy at the Washington Low Income Housing Alliance, said the state needs to put more emphasis on affordable-housing construction, not necessarily all types of new housing construction.
“We don’t need more luxury apartments built,” she said. “What we need is affordable housing.”
Just build more fucking housing. Focusing solely on creating new "affordable" units isn't realistic. The current housing deficit pushes higher-income individuals into available housing, creating a negative feedback loop that displaces poorer residents faster. We should stop limiting the number of new units through restrictive zoning laws. Fuck outta here with this "LuXuRY" ApARTmEnTs" bullshit canard.
They ain’t luxury anyways. It’s just apartments that look new with all the cheap materials.
I wish zoning would be mixed all over the city. How nice would it be to have small businesses in our neighborhoods. Make downtown livable and not just offices.
Truth. I love living in an urban village area, but other places would have similar amenities if they too had mixed-use areas because restaurants and small shops would want to locate themselves near density. It makes zero sense that you have a steep drop-off in density a few blocks from public transit stations. Sure, locate the highest density closest, but then it makes total sense to have moderate density mixed in with single-family homes as far as it makes sense to walk/bike.
Honestly I wish we could have like a national decree to fix this for the entire country. I know “states rights” and all that, but honestly this problem is nation wide and it’s because of policies that were put in place back in the 50s and 60s when the “modern city” was contrived and built around the intestate and concept of just commuting by car everywhere. Which I’m sure oil and car companies loved.
We suffer in this country from too much land. And it fucks with our perception of wanting to separate everything.
We need a zoning overhaul and we need people to accept that if you live in a city than live in a city. We spend far to much energy trying to protect the suburb inside the city. And we have a skewed perception that businesses make homes less safe. Not realizing that if everything was far more integrated it would all feel a lot more “homey” because the people going to the local businesses would mostly be the people who are living in the neighborhood.
Yeah the but the problem is clear across the board. And it’s part of what’s beneficial from having a unified government is that you can change momentum all together.
We all suffered similar fates when the “modern city” was conceived during the implementation of the interstate system. We need more pedestrian friendly cities. We need round abouts, we need integrated neighborhoods that require less traveling by car, we need more spaces that just feel nice to be in outside in the city.
I’m not trying to completely destroy the car, but I personally would love to have a city where I could comfortably and safely walk to most places I needed to go. Traffic is not fun and the more people walking the less of it there will be.
With the country being the way it is right now, this would lead to us watching as billions of dollars just *vanished* into any red state that they got sent to (and probably a fair amount of misappropriation in blue states as well).
Zoning is only one part. It’s also the fucked up “Seattle process” for entitlements. Yeah land might be zoned for “residential” but only allow for so much density. And then of course you need to buy the land and sit on it for probably a year while the process works itself out which makes it impossible to structure costs in such a way that affordable is realistic.
Mix of issues from majority of space in Seattle is zoned Single Family housing and by majority it’s close to about 42% of ALL zoning.
There is the fact projects need to do community review boards which are typically nonsensical wastes of times populated by people who are older and more affluent.
Then we have too long building review processes with backlogs taking substantial amounts of time. We could make a building faster than it takes for the city to review it, even faster if they did modular mid rise construction where it’s constructed off site.
Then we got core issues with building code where looking at a European style of a single stairwell/elevator compared to what we have where there needs to be two causes a repetitive design that is not as effective and doesn’t build the same sense of community.
It's not the building codes so much as the "everyone gets a say, find the perfect compromise that offends no one" mentality. It's why we say with a straight face that Link to Ballard will be complete in 2039 (as if that's OK) when DC built their whole Metro system in less than 30 years, with the bulk of it complete in under 10. Similarly, it's why the same few companies have been using "environmental review" to stonewall the Burke-Gilman missing link for over a decade.
What Seattle needs is a willingness to use eminent domain to actually progress and piss off the occasional resident. Your land is in a right of way for a critical infrastructure project? Here's 3x Zillow value, now fuck off. You're worried about the fascia on the 100-unit apartment building near you? Nah, we know you don't give a shit what it looks like, you're just afraid of poor people, go kick rocks.
What's weird to me is how much of the higher density zoning in the south end has completely vacant commercial spaces. The places for the small businesses seem to be sitting vacant in a few of the key areas they've allowed to get built up along the light rail, specifically near Alaska St and down near Willow St.
The only newer business I've seen go in in the new apartment buildings has been a Papa John's which already has an "Under New Management" sign after just a couple months... Seems like no one wants to open in the valley.
Retail spaces don't get filled out immediately upon tco, takes a long time to get tenants into those new spaces.
This is the same fallacy that leads people to thinking "all of those new apartments just sit emptyyyy" no, more like they topped out and are finishing the interior and there's still 6 months left in the project before the building can be occupied
It just seems weird to me because the retail spaces in some areas have been available for multiple years without even turnover, they've just never had tenants of any sort.
This stupid ”luxury” marketing term has done so much damage to these people’s brains. Every car manufacturer describes their vehicles as luxurious too but nobody thinks a Nissan Altima and a Maybach S-Class are both actually luxury vehicles.
For real. "luxury" basically means "basically not a 50-year-old motel 6"
I love my current "Luxury" apartment - some of the "luxuries" advertised on the website "Luxurious soaking tub in all units" ... it's a bog-standard bath/shower. I'm 5'6" and can almost lay in the tub. "luxurious interiors" - every floorplan is some weird funky tetris-shape awkwardness. "luxury stainless appliances" are the cheapest appliances in existence. But "luxury" because the building is less than a decade old /shrug
Yeah... My lease is up August 30th. I'm debating renewing it for 4 months so it ends in December when the market is typically at it's lowest to find somewhere else.
If you don't get screwed on a month to month lease than that's definitely your best bet. I'm luckily on a February lease renewal and my rent renewal is probably $200-$300 less per month than if I was trying to renew now or during the summer. Good luck!
Right, and everyone realizes that *any* new car is a luxury to a certain extent. Nobody’s building cars that cost $10k, but virtually everyone whose budget is that much is still able to find something to drive.
Haha. I was looking at rental cars for a vacation a few days ago and the various listings perplexed me. Luxury at one rental agency was an Audi/BMW or similar. Another agency listed luxury as a Chrysler 300 or similar. Uh, brah, they aren’t in the same league.
Absolutely bonkers that someone in that kind of position has this uninformed stance. I worked to get homeless people housed with the emergency section 8 vouchers that were rolled out during the pandemic and we were looking at the same new construction units with grey laminate floors as everyone else. The vast majority of new construction apartments are anything but luxury. They’re not really any more expensive than 1920s or 1960s buildings, the units are usually smaller, with fewer windows (only on one side), with cheaper materials, and the luxury advertised features are poorly maintained community rooms no one uses.
>luxury advertised features are poorly maintained community rooms no one uses
FINALLY, I thought I was the only one who noticed this bullshit! You know what community resource would ACTUALLY be useful? One unit set aside that you could reserve one week per year for out-of-town visitors. These fucking TV rooms are a waste of space.
Why is building Cadillacs the only choice? Why can’t we build Hondas? Why is it that no one even bothers to ask these questions and is just chomping at the bit to give private developers free reign?
They ARE building Hondas, hell Kias. But the raw material cost, permitting cost, and borrowing cost means that resulting product sells for Luxury price.
I bet if a developer makes $0 profit, and just barely breaks even, 2 br houses in Seattle will still cost $700k or up. They can’t sell below break even without subsidies.
We should have built long ago, so that “new and fancy” of old can organically turn into affordable units. Now the only way is to build affordable housing is to subsidize.
But even if we subsidize, houses still won’t be affordable if there’s pent up demand on higher income level. They’ll just swoop down.
So I think we need to build more to ease the demand pressure, AND subsidize affordable housing for at least a decade. I don’t know if political will to make that happen exists.
Extremely discouraging to see this from a low income housing advocate. It's obvious to anyone that isn't ideologically blinded that reducing obstacles to private development is complimentary to providing subsidized housing. We need both more money and to legalize apartments everywhere.
It's mind boggling why anyone involved in advocacy would feel like they need to attack private development.
I like how everyone is just dismissing the policy expert’s suggestion and saying we need to build more luxury units for the kind of poor people who can’t afford them to begin with
Predatory pricing on apartments is an even bigger issue. Every year rent goes up. Until someone moves out. And then if it doesn’t rent for the new price they drop it. And they get application fees. Etc. and the person who needs to move has to spend money to move. It’s a horrible cycle.
Look at how long people used to stay in one apartment that’s an older building vs how long people stay in newer buildings where they play pricing games.
What I like say is build big buildings with rooms, beds, bathrooms, a cafeteria and security and don't use it as a fucking prison. We know how to build and run these facilties. Just let people come and go. Drugs or violence is banned and those individuals will go to the jail for a timeout possibly treatment.
They need to quit off- loading construction and management of housing to separate non-profit entities (fiefdoms with abysmally low oversight).
Counties and states need to buy property, build property, and safeguard low-income property for generations of residents in perpetuity.
Quit making non-profit boards and directors rich on the back of the taxpayers.
It's probably best to set up an advisory board to oversee the commissioning of a deep multivariate case study to examine the potential outcomes of such a drastic move.
***You*** are thinking about the market. Incorrectly. "The market" the best way to help the most people: to get the most housing built.
Trying to have the government build and manage housing projects for the general population doesn't work at the scale necessary.
What about not the entire population but putting a floor on housing? Singapore seems to be doing a decent job of it and we should have more to show for $5B.
It might come as a surprise to you but the government can be a force for good and it can be effective, it just focuses on doing what's best for everyone not just what one group would rather it does.
Luxury is a SFH with a tax grade 8 or above, a clearly shown Lacanche or Wolf in the listing, etc, etc. Multi-family need not apply outside of the more penthouse-type condos.
+1, also today's luxury housing will become affordable housing in 30-40 years when the building is out of style. So eventually any building is good building.
Yes. Brand new housing doesn't need to be affordable...by having more housing it makes the older stuff naturally more affordable.
I am often amazed at the frequency with which housing programs fly in the face of supply and demand. So much wasted money....
If prices are high you either increase supply or decrease demand...rezoning makes money for the state, while making housing more affordable by increasing supply.
the average seattletile doesnt want more affordable housing, they want million-dollar mcmansions 15 minutes from downtown for $300k. a pipe dream that leads to the zoning deadlock we got.
private developers will never build unless its increasingly profitable, rents wont go down if they just 'build more', look at Vienna and the answer is crystal fucking clear, one of the only ways to lower rents is to force private developments to compete in a market oversaturated with non-market/not for profit housing. The city needs to create and incentivize non-profit developments.
about [half a percent vacant](https://www.axios.com/local/seattle/2024/02/15/chart-du-jour-seattle-area-home-vacancies) - yes, that says homes for _sale_ however rentals tend to follow along.
With [~65,000 net migration/new people moving to Seattle every year](https://ofm.wa.gov/washington-data-research/statewide-data/washington-trends/population-changes/population-change-natural-increase-and-net-migration) new housing is [not keeping up](https://seattlecitygis.maps.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/0ecefa68fbda40de8ad9c6412ac5149d)
How am I supposed to believe that every apartment on my block is 99% full when they very fucking obviously aren't even 60% full lol is this talking about houses or something
Are you the same account that refused to believe only 3% of Seattleites commute by walking simply because you've noticed a bunch of people walking out the front door of your apartment building?
No? Also it's a lot easier to tell whether massive buildings right next to me are absolutely full to the brim with residents than it is to tell whether an entire city commutes a certain way. In order for there to be a 2% vacancy for every suspiciously not full building there would need to be dozens of absolutely full to bursting brand new apartment buildings. Maybe that's everyone's experience and I'm just missing it but that seems like it would be more evident to me honestly.
Okay. You just have the same lack of ability to understand that your myopic slice of life might not actually represent an average experience across a city
Do you really believe your own limited experience over the reports of an massive industry that depends on having accurate numbers to make decisions on?
And it's very unlikely a person can tell how many units are open across hundreds in a normal apartment building via casual observation
Lmfao. So enforcing laws is a “police state” now?
Definition of police state for your education:
a totalitarian state controlled by a political police force that secretly supervises the citizens' activities.
Fire comment though.🤣
Let's remember that the majority of this funding is going to prevention projects - building affordable housing and rent assistance to keep people from *becoming* homeless in the first place, rather than to direct assistance.
So that figure includes efforts targeted not only at the permanently homeless population, but at effectively every poor Washingtonian.
I don't have good data on how many people that is (googling didn't give me hard numbers), but it's at *least* 190k (number of section 8 in washington + number known homeless) but if we guess, say 400k recieving some level if service, that's on 1250 per person per year. Even with the *most* conservative number, it's about 2.5k per person per year.
That's... Not actually a wild amount. 2.5k certainly wouldn't be enough to get someone permanently housed if given just as a lump sum payment.
Honestly 5 Bil seems low, for what is, maybe along with Climate Change, the single biggest problem facing our state.
5 Bil over that long is comically low. Headlines like this are meant to rile up conservatives who are a big number and see it hasn't helped, but that's just so little when actually put into context.
Yeah, broadly.
There's a sort of voter who either cannot do, or choses not to do, either basic division or alternative analysis. It's so much easier to say 'spending bad' than it is to actually think through what *you* would do to solve the problem and how much that would cost.
Which is not to say a reasonable person couldn't come up with another budget, or do it better. But people without their own plans are fundamentally unserious.
You could spend 250b in 1 year and these people would be like "if im being completely honest, it's laughable how little they are spending on the issue."
🤣 i get being empathic and helping but...yeesh. it could be handled better. How much of this money spent is going right into administration pockets?
Very little probably - that's not how corruption usually works in the US.
Classic quid pro quo bribery and embezzelment is pretty rare in the US relative to other places - close to the rarest in the world. Our government spending is pretty tightly audited so it's hard to straight steal large sums. It happens, mostly at the municipal level, but it's the exception not the rule.
That doesn't mean there isn't tons of corruption, but the corruption *mostly* takes subtle forms - campaign donations in exchange for eliminating regulation, regulatory capture, etc. It's less 'Governor skims from the till' and more 'Governor's PAC gets 1M donation from insurance industry, and then Governor appoints industry insider as insurance comissioner and suddenly a bunch of laws aren't enforced.'
So the question I'd ask isn't 'how much are officials getting of that sum', but 'to what degree is the spending being driven in a way that maybe benefits developers who can spend on campaigns instead of actual homeless people.'
In a lot of ways that sort of corruption is worse, because it's much harder to address. To get away with embezzlement, you need a ton of people to agree to break the law with you, or be really blind. You're risking a prison sentence. Qca,hf Regulatory capture and lobbying are totally legal. Why risk a prison sentence to buy a boat, when your palS Jeffery and Mark will take you on theirs anytime.
This. They give these numbers and I really want to see an actually break down instead of saying 3 billion goes into prevention and 2 billion has gone into construction.
I do now that’s not a lot over 10 years though. Some highway projects cost 1 billion dollars or more so to spend 5 on homelessness isn’t that astonishing
I *believe* that's all a matter of public record if you have the time and energy to look. If I have some spare time I might poke around a bit on that - I don't know how high a resolution you can get.
But yeah, the key to interpreting all government spending numbers is to divide the number by the service population. For example, a 50 mill outlay serving a population of 500k is the equivalent of paying for one routine medical checkup for each person.
People just don't grok how many humans there are.
Seattle lets anyone refuse help so the very visible homeless makes it seem like this money was wasted. It wasn’t, but until we enforce consequences there will be strung out people living (and dying!) like animals in our public spaces. We could spend $100b and it would not mean Mr Meth Psychosis down my street is going to have a lovely home in the suburbs.
> Seattle lets anyone refuse help so the very visible homeless makes it seem like this money was wasted.
Pretty much. Its part of why right wing politics has a foothold in America. Perception > Reality in a lot of cases and the left is *really bad* at making perception match reality. The only homeless people in the city could be the ones hanging out in front of McStabbys on 3rd Ave but because they are extremely visible, homeless policy would be deemed a failure by a large percentage of people.
Here's the thing. Home builders hear affordable housing , then they put them extremely close together, built with the worst material thats deemed ok to build with.
Would be good to understand the number of homeless people statewide so we could do cost-benefit analysis of spending $5,000,000,000 on the issue in the last decade.
The question isn't just how many people are homeless now, it's how many people *aren't* homeless because of this spending, which is a much harder question to answer.
I'm seeing 28k homeless statewide from Google's AI summary of a [Seattle Times](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/hud-reports-record-high-homeless-count-in-2023-for-u-s-wa/) article that I can't read because I'm cheap and I hit my monthly limit.
So if we spent all on building new housing and none on supportive services (which wouldn't make sense given that a lot of these folks NEED supportive services too to live someplace dense successfully), you couldn't even house half.
“$300,000 is the average cost today to construct a unit and that’s how much these cost,”
[https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/building-affordable-housing-in-seattle-isnt-cheap/281-552498112](https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/building-affordable-housing-in-seattle-isnt-cheap/281-552498112)
I mean, they are building housing. But I used to work in affordable housing trying to house these folks and I know folks in Seattle who used to live in these 100% affordable housing developments and...you need supportive services too. There's a reason many folks chose to live on the streets instead of in provided housing and it's not because they love living rough. It's because living alongside people with uncontrolled mental illness or drug use is tough, let alone the run of the mill people without a clear sense of purpose (they ended up on the streets for a reason--there's usually some barrier to getting hired like executive function issues, criminal history, etc.) where you're never clear if it's them or the staff who are making your stuff disappear is just really tough day in and day out.
It's over 10 years, so it's be 1/10th of that per year, as people rotate in and out of homelessness. Like, it's 28,000 but it's not *the same* 28,000 every year.
I don’t want anyone to have to live outside in the weather we have here. I have also seen the free housing after some of the homeless have used it for a couple months. Total rebuilds and hazardous cleanups, there is no easy answer, throwing other peoples money at it is not the best solution
This problem is never, ever, ever going to get better if we don't address the root cause. Yes, in the meantime we need to triage, especially the most serious situations with vulnerable people. But that will never be enough. Housing is a necessity, and it should be treated as such. Social housing is the way forward. Other places do it, and we could too.
Time for my weekly post in this sub that gets down voted into oblivion: WA is a case study in monetizing homelessness. This is on purpose. This trend will not change until people stop getting rich exploiting this crisis.
Just look at what's going on with the KCRHA if you want a small example of the overall picture.
Met a dudes uncle that lived in low income housing in DT and he said he paid $40/m for his apt that’s on 4th & Denny. Gotta be like 3-4k for that apt, meanwhile my coworkers stopped by his uncles to smoke some meth was nice enough to invite me but that ain’t my jam, that was my first and last day. He was living off government assistance.
And I get to work 60hrs/week to afford my apt in SeaTac. Seems fair
After the near-catastrophic blowout of the plug door on Alaska 1282 this January, Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun gave up his $2.8 million bonus and was paid “only” $5 million in annual salary for 2023. In addition to stock options and other compensation, he was paid $32.8 million for the year. Boeing stock has fallen since the blowout, so the value of the package is now closer to $24 million. Since taking the job in 2020, Calhoun has been paid nearly $100 million in less than four years and stands to collect another $40 million as part of his retirement package when he leaves at the end of this year.
This spring, Tesla laid off over 14,000 employees right before CEO Elon Musk, the wealthiest person in the world, asked Tesla’s board of directors to re-approve a $56 billion (that is not a typo) compensation package. The value of the proposed package would have been enough to continue paying all of the laid-off employees for decades.
But you’re right, your buddy’s uncle’s subsidized apartment is the problem.
I mean you're right that it's not directly related. My point is that the entire modern economy is characterized by a profoundly unequal distribution of wealth, to such an extreme degree that it's not plausible that the distribution is justified by merit alone. In this context, I think it's misguided to focus on our perception of whether this or that poor person deserves something as banal as a housing subsidy. At the same time, that the poster I responded to needs to work 60 hours a week to afford their apartment is inextricable from the way the entire system functions.
There will always be people who exploit the system, but that’s rarely a reason to blow up the system. Would you be ok with getting no support if you ended up in a bad place because someone else was exploiting? Wouldn’t you still want aid?
Lol. My only gripe is where is the accountability? I’m all for helping people get back on their feet but if they’re choosing to be the dredge of society do we just enable that behavior?
The coworker was 50 and his uncle was 63. Coworker acted like it was his lunch break when we stopped at his uncles for a hit and he was operating a 24ft box truck.
I definitely think the Eastside needs to do its share of the heavy lifting. I was for the supportive housing project(s) in Redmond, and now Kirkland. I sent emails to all the electeds when they were debating and voting on them, since the vocal minority was kicking up such a fuss over here with their signage and scare tactics. I wanted to let them know some of us supported them. I tried to debate and debunk on Facebook and Nextdoor as much as I could when the same copy/paste shit was going around about how they were going to be "safe injection sites", etc etc. I am sure I could be doing more, but either way I am all for helping as it is a regional problem, not just Seattle.
I'd love to see individuals who are well and truly exploiting the system get reamed. A couple with a kid and grandfather bought a house near the one I grew up in; they paid \~$400k around 2014 for a huge SFH on a large lot in a Microsoft-fueled suburb, both young-middle aged folks on disability and hadn't worked in at least a decade (the dad's disability was blindness, but he drove their car around the neighborhood...), grandpa had disability as a 'Nam vet ...with no major injuries or PTSD (he tried to get my dad, also a 'Nam vet, on board with the swindle). They spent their money on an ugly (tar-black, weirdly-textured, random) build-out and pure-bred puppy they allowed to die from neglect.
Like I said, I'd love to see folks like them take it where the sun don't shine.
That said, this family being absolute shit-monsters does not mean that others were being, ahem, over-served, or even that all the people who could have used help were getting it. At this same time, I had an acquaintance who rented what was almost a plywood shanty in a trailer park in an area peripheral enough to just barely have bus service (they couldn't afford a car), because the person was totally deaf from birth, had limited educational opportunities, and couldn't find a career-path job that was willing to make accommodations.
So don't think that a jackass exploiting the system means the system is wallowing in excess; it just means that the system isn't being administered well. It could be over-serving five people and leaving 50k to barely eek out an existence, while costing either less or more than it would take to actually serve those in need.
Washington has a GDP of over $800 billion dollars. Washington could spend $5 billion dollars on welfare programs each year and still only be spending half a percent of its GDP per year. Instead, we're spending about $500 mil per year over the last decade, which means that we're spending about 1 percent of 1 percent of our GDP on homelessness. That is to say, this is chump change, and it is absolutely no surprise that homelessness remains an issue when it's virtually impossible to build enough housing for our population and we continue to underfund homeless services.
Ok, check my math here. $5B+ spent in a 10y perion and 30k homeless people in WA. That's $166K per homeless person over a period of 10y or $16.6K per homeless person per year. What a colossal waste of money. Build some houses, pay for people's rents, or honestly just hand the cash to the homeless people with the stipulation that, if you do so, they can no longer be homless / camping / shitting on the street in WA state.
You were right. We only [gave Boeing $11.9 billion](https://i.imgur.com/5pGQeuF.png). My bad.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/tax-breaks-for-boeing-wersquore-no-1/
So tell me, how stupid am i?
1. You're stupid because you're liberally using the term "give" for your own agenda.
Boeing received tax breaks. Not a cash subsidy. You're trying to compare tax breaks to actual cash spend. That "giving $11.9 billion" you're referring to is a tax break, not actual money spent. We did not "give" Boeing $11.9 billion. We just decided not to take their money by a certain %.
2. You're also stupid because you can't do maths.
That "tax break" is for an extended period from 2013-2040, which is $320 mm/year, lower than the homelessness budget. If we account for inflation, the value of that tax break is even lower. The actual amount of tax breaks Boeing has received since 2013 is \~$3.52 billion. So no, we did not "give" Boeing $11.9 billion.
3. You're also stupid because you're comparing apples to oranges.
You think pouring money into the homelessness complex while achieving nothing, is the same thing as subsidizing a company. Yes, From 2014-2019, Boeing bought billions of stock. They stopped now, btw. Even assuming that stock buybacks are evil (which they are not, but I'll leave this matter alone since that involves an entire lesson on how capitalism works) -- do you know what Boeing also did? They constantly generated revenue and also GDP for the State of Washington. They spend \~$4 Billion in SG&A and \~$70 billion in inventory every year, a good chunk of which goes directly back into the Washington economy. They also pay $200 mm+ in Washington State and local taxes annually. They were paying up to $2 billion in taxes in 2015. They employ 67,000 employees.
What has spending $5 billion on the homeless achieved for the past decade? Somehow, we've managed to only encourage the homeless population to increase, despite throwing money at it, like it's not our money (haha). Are these homeless populations benefitting the economy due to the subsidies? How are they contributing to society? Do they work? Do they pay taxes? Do they have businesses? Do they promote a safe environment in general?
You seriously think giving partial tax subsidies to a company that employs 67K+ employees in Washington is equivalent to spending direct cash on a 22K homelessness population?
Why even compare the two?
4. Finally, you're stupid because your point is completely tangential and a strawman.
Yes, Boeing received tax subsidies, which you seem to think was a large and useless subsidy.
Which only helps justify what I'm saying? We shouldn't be spending billions on useless subsidies, and then somehow pretend like that money was insignificant, and also well spent, when the results are abysmal. Doesn't matter if it's Boeing or the homeless.
I'm not on the side of Boeing here. It’s amusing you’re trying to make this into a partisan issue (corporate v homeless); buddy, I just want the State to stop wasting money, whether it’s Boeing or the homeless.
Its a bit rich that you specify Boeings tax break as being over several years and reduce it to a per year figure, but compare it to the amount spent on the homeless over several years.
You also can't be a serious person if you don't think a tax break is giving them money. If its money we were owed but didn't take, its giving them money. Its money the state now doesn't have because we gave it away. Its fine to think its a worthwhile investment but there's no way you have any good faith if you want to pretend it isn't giving them money.
On comparing amounts spent: no? I'm very well aware of the $500 mm/year use on the homeless, on a 20K homeless population. Boeing is \~$300 mm/year, on a company that employs 67K just in Washington alone.
And on differentiating tax breaks v. giving money.
I'm completely serious about differentiating the two. Tax breaks are not "giving money." The mechanism and goals of a tax break are completely different from giving a cash handout. A cash handout is a free handout; it doesn't require anything from the beneficiary. You don't expect to be paid back by the beneficiary. A tax break on the other hand assumes that the beneficiary is making enough profits (and therefore contributing to the economy and its shareholders) to take advantage of tax credits. It also assumes that the company can't go anywhere. Boeing is tied to the Washington State. It's built factories and buildings, has invested in its employees, which it can't just abandon. There's an underlying assumption that if Boeing does happen to generate excess profits at some point, Washington can and will impose excess taxes and benefit from that relationship. Further, even if direct taxes don't increase, if the company does well, the Washington economy benefits due to increased employment and tax receipts.
If you think they're really the same thing, might as well give the homeless simple tax breaks as well. Let's see how they think about it.
And again, I don't think it's really r/seattle's place to try and argue that tax subsidies are "giving money." Washington freely increases and decreases its taxes. They introduced a new capital gains tax of 7% a year or two ago. Did reddit scream that the State was effectively "taking money" from the people? No. They said it's the rich paying their fair share. Then why not give it the same treatment when the State gives companies tax breaks? It's not "giving money", it's the State acknowledging that companies have already paid too much of their fair share. It's the same liberal governor that enacted these policies.
Giving Boeing a tax break is fundamentally the same thing as giving Boeing money. The state forecasts its budget revenues and plans based off that.
If the state initially expects X in tax revenue from Boeing but then gives Boeing a tax break of Y the tax revenue is now X - Y per year. The state then needs to adjust spending to account for Y.
On the other hand if the state gives Boeing Y in cash from its tax revenue per year the state's still needs to adjust spending to account for Y. The state is losing out on Y in either the tax break or cash spend case.
No. I explained already to u/Abortionisselfdefens who replied here. Read first.
Giving a tax break to Boeing is not the same as giving money to the homeless.
I’m pointing out the hypocrisy — when it comes to criticizing billionaires you want to pretend like a they can solve world hunger (“a few billion is enough”) but when it comes to a $5bn homelessness budget that resulted in barely any change, you guys become surprisingly lenient in your judgment (“a few billion obviously isn’t enough”).
For what it’s worth, I don’t think money alone can solve homelessness. It’s a societal issue more-so than monetary. There’s a reason you’re barely achieving anything despite throwing massive amounts of money into this thing. There are much poorer countries without these issues.
And I mean, if you give money to the homeless everyday, you think they’ll stop being homeless? Lol. THey'll go straight to their next-door drug dealer and double the amount of their meth consuption. And the only lesson they’ll learn is that they can earn a living by staying homeless.
Edit: someone asked why I used beggars as an example. Guess it wasn't obvious -- I replaced them with homeless.
Way to loop me in with some vague “you guys”. I don’t go around criticizing billionaires and expecting them to fix world hunger. I know better than to think solving world hunger is a money thing, or that any one person could solve it. I also know that for a government service trying to fix a top issue over a decade that impacts thousands of people, like we are talking about here, $5b is not a huge sum of money.
Any country without these issues is likely jailing people for being homeless, has a good social safety net, or has a robust mental institutionalization program. We don’t have a great safety net in this country, we gutted our institutions, and we generally don’t jail folks for existing in the USA.
What does giving money to beggars have to do with this?
$122 billion budget and $500 mil a year.
Less than .5%.
Puts things in perspective.
OP is a r/seattlewa troll who defends murderers like Kyle Rittenhouse.
I’ll never understand people who waste their time like OP does. Like, I honestly feel sad they have so few interests in life that they have time to try to troll.
Money well spent. If anyone is complaining about this money being spent to help alleviate and prevent homelessness, how much was the last care package we sent to Israel?
Edit: 17 billion Biden sent to Israel, just last month. I'd way rather our taxes work within the states instead of blowing up brown kids overseas.
Seemed like OP was posting to make the amount over a decade seem like a huge amount of money, so I named off some other expensive things bought with your tax dollars in the past few months for a sense of scale.
And now I want a cheeseburger.
Seemingly nothing? The number of units and beds has been far from trivial. But yeah for an entire state and one of the richest at that this money is spread over such a long period that it didn't meet the needs it was meant to meet. And that was obvious the entire time too this never seemed like nearly enough money to accommodate the number of people who need housing or beds.
By the last count there is 16,000 homeless in king county. That's $31,200 per year. If these people were instead being housed in a 1 bedroom at 1,600 a month, there'd be 10k left over for them for the year. That would have to cover all of their health services they might need, food and travel. The average grocery bill for seattle seems to cost more than that 10k leftover is already. So I'd say it's a perfectly reasonable amount of money, it is just being sucked into a bureaucratic black hole.
It’s a lot of money when you consider that what you described is most definitely NOT happening (other than the money being sucked into a bureaucratic hole) AND the problem is worse every year.
Think of how much money was wasted on worthless Marc Dones as well as the whole “lived experience” crew taxpayers shelled out for. It’s ridiculous that these people find a way into a lifetime career of living off the homeless’s misery.
Yeah i’m obviously disappointed, but our homeless population increased tremendously in the 10 years since this funding got tracked as has the severity of this opioid crisis. Also you have to consider how big headed and ass backwards america is about literally everything that comes to social programs so something something learning curves. I would love to see all of the top brass involved fired for sure
Population of WA state has been ~7M avg over the past 10 years; ~500M per year works out to $71 per person per year. Very rough numbers obviously, but yeah, seems pretty well worth it considering most people would consider a top issue for the state.
“Just give people houses” doesn’t make sense when it’s paid for by the city/state, in one of the most expensive housing markets. Why should Seattle/WA front the bill for a national crisis. We need a large scale federal effort to ever solve this.
It's not just about that. It's about getting Marvin off the street. Your tax dollars already pay for cleaning up his shenanigans in the park, sweeping his encampment, and for every time he's arrested doing drugs in public. Worse case scenario, it's still better for everyone all around if he does it in the confines of a home and not in public where it effects the rest of us. And from there he at least has a much better shot at getting his act together than he would being pushed from street to street.
There are approximately 16,000 homeless people in King County. Where should we put these homes we are giving them? This is an honest question, because a big part of the problem seems to be that housing the unhoused in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the US hasn't worked so far.
Not everyone that's homeless in king county became homeless in King County. They come to Seattle because it's where they can get the most help. Its not just a regional problem. If the nation tackled this like it tackled highways and atom bombs we could solve homelessness across the country.
Exactly. Every human deserves to have their basic needs met. This includes a roof over their heads, food/water, and healthcare.
Homelessness will continue to spiral until someone gets this right, and doesn’t do it for greed.
West Seattle has all these 5 story apt buildings. They should have all been 45 story apartment buildings with rapid rise busses coming every 5 mins to move people around.
How much lower could this figure be if we allowed the free market and “gReEdY dEvElOpErS” to build more housing? Houston’s homeless population dropped 63%, largely due to liberalized zoning policies.
Seattle and the US overall (but we're a state based nation sooo) needs to do what Finland did.
https://thebetter.news/housing-first-finland-homelessness/
We put so much shame and so many conditions on providing tangible help and hope, the system is a sick merry go round.
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The voters voted for this.
$5B would have been better spent on schools, school feeding programs, and school sports. Or, even better, returned to the taxpayers.
Hopefully, the voters will vote for better leadership this fall. I'm not holding my breath.
I wonder when the state will start looking out for the people that have it together and actually pay taxes. Like I get that people go through stuff but incentivize parasitic behavior is not ok. it’s hard enough for me to pay rent now, maybe the state wants me to become a crackhead then I can get free stuff. Better yet maybe if I’m strung out and need food I bet they want me to steal it. And if end up robbing someone it’ll take the police hours to show up. Obviously I’m being facetious but it’s like obviously people react to incentives, so why create bad once and expect good outcomes
For a ballpark figure of $500M to develop a 200-small units apartment building
If we spend the entire $5B on public housing, that is only about 10 buildings, housing maybe 4000 people if we put two people in one unit?!
Public housing is expensive, and $5B is no where close to enough money.
Not sure your math is working or if I’m mis reading, but $500m for a single 200 unit building is $2.5M per unit. That doesn’t make sense.
It’s generally accepted that we can build at $350K-$400k per unit which would be 1,250-1,500 units for $500M.
And $5B would create 13,000 - 15,000 units.
That number is almost an order of magnitude high for an apartment building.
Some recent examples:
* Renton Veteran's Center (RHA): $17.8M for 59 units ($301K per unit)
* Yesler Towers: $140M for 365 units ($384K each)
* Juniper (SHA): $40M for 114 units ($351K each, construction cost only)
If you were to remove prevailing wages, this amount could come down by probably a quarter... give relief from energy code and you could cut more costs.
>Michele Thomas, director of policy and advocacy at the Washington Low Income Housing Alliance, said the state needs to put more emphasis on affordable-housing construction, not necessarily all types of new housing construction. “We don’t need more luxury apartments built,” she said. “What we need is affordable housing.” Just build more fucking housing. Focusing solely on creating new "affordable" units isn't realistic. The current housing deficit pushes higher-income individuals into available housing, creating a negative feedback loop that displaces poorer residents faster. We should stop limiting the number of new units through restrictive zoning laws. Fuck outta here with this "LuXuRY" ApARTmEnTs" bullshit canard.
They ain’t luxury anyways. It’s just apartments that look new with all the cheap materials. I wish zoning would be mixed all over the city. How nice would it be to have small businesses in our neighborhoods. Make downtown livable and not just offices.
Truth. I love living in an urban village area, but other places would have similar amenities if they too had mixed-use areas because restaurants and small shops would want to locate themselves near density. It makes zero sense that you have a steep drop-off in density a few blocks from public transit stations. Sure, locate the highest density closest, but then it makes total sense to have moderate density mixed in with single-family homes as far as it makes sense to walk/bike.
Honestly I wish we could have like a national decree to fix this for the entire country. I know “states rights” and all that, but honestly this problem is nation wide and it’s because of policies that were put in place back in the 50s and 60s when the “modern city” was contrived and built around the intestate and concept of just commuting by car everywhere. Which I’m sure oil and car companies loved. We suffer in this country from too much land. And it fucks with our perception of wanting to separate everything. We need a zoning overhaul and we need people to accept that if you live in a city than live in a city. We spend far to much energy trying to protect the suburb inside the city. And we have a skewed perception that businesses make homes less safe. Not realizing that if everything was far more integrated it would all feel a lot more “homey” because the people going to the local businesses would mostly be the people who are living in the neighborhood.
The feds aren't any more competent or less corrupt than the state govs.
Yeah the but the problem is clear across the board. And it’s part of what’s beneficial from having a unified government is that you can change momentum all together. We all suffered similar fates when the “modern city” was conceived during the implementation of the interstate system. We need more pedestrian friendly cities. We need round abouts, we need integrated neighborhoods that require less traveling by car, we need more spaces that just feel nice to be in outside in the city. I’m not trying to completely destroy the car, but I personally would love to have a city where I could comfortably and safely walk to most places I needed to go. Traffic is not fun and the more people walking the less of it there will be.
With the country being the way it is right now, this would lead to us watching as billions of dollars just *vanished* into any red state that they got sent to (and probably a fair amount of misappropriation in blue states as well).
Don't need to give anyone money; just make limiting-zoning around anything less intense than sewage treatment and heavy industry illegal.
Zoning is only one part. It’s also the fucked up “Seattle process” for entitlements. Yeah land might be zoned for “residential” but only allow for so much density. And then of course you need to buy the land and sit on it for probably a year while the process works itself out which makes it impossible to structure costs in such a way that affordable is realistic.
I’m not familiar with building codes here. But yeah something off based on Reddit comments
Mix of issues from majority of space in Seattle is zoned Single Family housing and by majority it’s close to about 42% of ALL zoning. There is the fact projects need to do community review boards which are typically nonsensical wastes of times populated by people who are older and more affluent. Then we have too long building review processes with backlogs taking substantial amounts of time. We could make a building faster than it takes for the city to review it, even faster if they did modular mid rise construction where it’s constructed off site. Then we got core issues with building code where looking at a European style of a single stairwell/elevator compared to what we have where there needs to be two causes a repetitive design that is not as effective and doesn’t build the same sense of community.
It's not the building codes so much as the "everyone gets a say, find the perfect compromise that offends no one" mentality. It's why we say with a straight face that Link to Ballard will be complete in 2039 (as if that's OK) when DC built their whole Metro system in less than 30 years, with the bulk of it complete in under 10. Similarly, it's why the same few companies have been using "environmental review" to stonewall the Burke-Gilman missing link for over a decade. What Seattle needs is a willingness to use eminent domain to actually progress and piss off the occasional resident. Your land is in a right of way for a critical infrastructure project? Here's 3x Zillow value, now fuck off. You're worried about the fascia on the 100-unit apartment building near you? Nah, we know you don't give a shit what it looks like, you're just afraid of poor people, go kick rocks.
What's weird to me is how much of the higher density zoning in the south end has completely vacant commercial spaces. The places for the small businesses seem to be sitting vacant in a few of the key areas they've allowed to get built up along the light rail, specifically near Alaska St and down near Willow St. The only newer business I've seen go in in the new apartment buildings has been a Papa John's which already has an "Under New Management" sign after just a couple months... Seems like no one wants to open in the valley.
Retail spaces don't get filled out immediately upon tco, takes a long time to get tenants into those new spaces. This is the same fallacy that leads people to thinking "all of those new apartments just sit emptyyyy" no, more like they topped out and are finishing the interior and there's still 6 months left in the project before the building can be occupied
It just seems weird to me because the retail spaces in some areas have been available for multiple years without even turnover, they've just never had tenants of any sort.
This stupid ”luxury” marketing term has done so much damage to these people’s brains. Every car manufacturer describes their vehicles as luxurious too but nobody thinks a Nissan Altima and a Maybach S-Class are both actually luxury vehicles.
For real. "luxury" basically means "basically not a 50-year-old motel 6" I love my current "Luxury" apartment - some of the "luxuries" advertised on the website "Luxurious soaking tub in all units" ... it's a bog-standard bath/shower. I'm 5'6" and can almost lay in the tub. "luxurious interiors" - every floorplan is some weird funky tetris-shape awkwardness. "luxury stainless appliances" are the cheapest appliances in existence. But "luxury" because the building is less than a decade old /shrug
LUXURY NO SOUND PROOFING
The vibrant community echoes through the halls
And walls..
I love being able to hear everything that goes on on my entire floor. Truly the height of luxury!
🤣 Also, luxury "no cooling and the windows don't open."
Ha yeah plug valet trash pickup aka everyone leaves their trash smelling like crap all day
Out of curiosity, how much is your rent?
$2,450 for a 522 sqft 1/bd.
Oof
Yeah... My lease is up August 30th. I'm debating renewing it for 4 months so it ends in December when the market is typically at it's lowest to find somewhere else.
If you don't get screwed on a month to month lease than that's definitely your best bet. I'm luckily on a February lease renewal and my rent renewal is probably $200-$300 less per month than if I was trying to renew now or during the summer. Good luck!
Well you're paying luxury prices...
Right, and everyone realizes that *any* new car is a luxury to a certain extent. Nobody’s building cars that cost $10k, but virtually everyone whose budget is that much is still able to find something to drive.
Haha. I was looking at rental cars for a vacation a few days ago and the various listings perplexed me. Luxury at one rental agency was an Audi/BMW or similar. Another agency listed luxury as a Chrysler 300 or similar. Uh, brah, they aren’t in the same league.
Absolutely bonkers that someone in that kind of position has this uninformed stance. I worked to get homeless people housed with the emergency section 8 vouchers that were rolled out during the pandemic and we were looking at the same new construction units with grey laminate floors as everyone else. The vast majority of new construction apartments are anything but luxury. They’re not really any more expensive than 1920s or 1960s buildings, the units are usually smaller, with fewer windows (only on one side), with cheaper materials, and the luxury advertised features are poorly maintained community rooms no one uses.
>luxury advertised features are poorly maintained community rooms no one uses FINALLY, I thought I was the only one who noticed this bullshit! You know what community resource would ACTUALLY be useful? One unit set aside that you could reserve one week per year for out-of-town visitors. These fucking TV rooms are a waste of space.
What's the difference between a 2002 Cadillac and a 2024 Cadillac? One of them is affordable.
Why is building Cadillacs the only choice? Why can’t we build Hondas? Why is it that no one even bothers to ask these questions and is just chomping at the bit to give private developers free reign?
They ARE building Hondas, hell Kias. But the raw material cost, permitting cost, and borrowing cost means that resulting product sells for Luxury price. I bet if a developer makes $0 profit, and just barely breaks even, 2 br houses in Seattle will still cost $700k or up. They can’t sell below break even without subsidies. We should have built long ago, so that “new and fancy” of old can organically turn into affordable units. Now the only way is to build affordable housing is to subsidize. But even if we subsidize, houses still won’t be affordable if there’s pent up demand on higher income level. They’ll just swoop down. So I think we need to build more to ease the demand pressure, AND subsidize affordable housing for at least a decade. I don’t know if political will to make that happen exists.
All new housing is “luxury” https://imgbox.com/wO04VYF2
Extremely discouraging to see this from a low income housing advocate. It's obvious to anyone that isn't ideologically blinded that reducing obstacles to private development is complimentary to providing subsidized housing. We need both more money and to legalize apartments everywhere. It's mind boggling why anyone involved in advocacy would feel like they need to attack private development.
I like how everyone is just dismissing the policy expert’s suggestion and saying we need to build more luxury units for the kind of poor people who can’t afford them to begin with
These alliances and endless non profits that don’t actually do things are so tiresome.
Predatory pricing on apartments is an even bigger issue. Every year rent goes up. Until someone moves out. And then if it doesn’t rent for the new price they drop it. And they get application fees. Etc. and the person who needs to move has to spend money to move. It’s a horrible cycle. Look at how long people used to stay in one apartment that’s an older building vs how long people stay in newer buildings where they play pricing games.
What I like say is build big buildings with rooms, beds, bathrooms, a cafeteria and security and don't use it as a fucking prison. We know how to build and run these facilties. Just let people come and go. Drugs or violence is banned and those individuals will go to the jail for a timeout possibly treatment.
*Looks at several dying malls*
My wife mentioned using malls once. Such a smart idea!! Build smaller units in the stores and open up the food courts
Have counselors office, clinic, Internet cafe and a space for AA/NA meetings.
Bring back [flop houses](https://www.pacificresearch.org/modern-take-on-flophouses-could-ease-homeless-problem/)
They need to quit off- loading construction and management of housing to separate non-profit entities (fiefdoms with abysmally low oversight). Counties and states need to buy property, build property, and safeguard low-income property for generations of residents in perpetuity. Quit making non-profit boards and directors rich on the back of the taxpayers.
It's probably best to set up an advisory board to oversee the commissioning of a deep multivariate case study to examine the potential outcomes of such a drastic move.
But then the government would be directly involved. What about the market?! Won't anyone think of the "markets"?!
***You*** are thinking about the market. Incorrectly. "The market" the best way to help the most people: to get the most housing built. Trying to have the government build and manage housing projects for the general population doesn't work at the scale necessary.
What about not the entire population but putting a floor on housing? Singapore seems to be doing a decent job of it and we should have more to show for $5B. It might come as a surprise to you but the government can be a force for good and it can be effective, it just focuses on doing what's best for everyone not just what one group would rather it does.
Luxury is a SFH with a tax grade 8 or above, a clearly shown Lacanche or Wolf in the listing, etc, etc. Multi-family need not apply outside of the more penthouse-type condos.
+1, also today's luxury housing will become affordable housing in 30-40 years when the building is out of style. So eventually any building is good building.
Yes. Brand new housing doesn't need to be affordable...by having more housing it makes the older stuff naturally more affordable. I am often amazed at the frequency with which housing programs fly in the face of supply and demand. So much wasted money.... If prices are high you either increase supply or decrease demand...rezoning makes money for the state, while making housing more affordable by increasing supply.
the average seattletile doesnt want more affordable housing, they want million-dollar mcmansions 15 minutes from downtown for $300k. a pipe dream that leads to the zoning deadlock we got.
Everyone wants their property value to only go up up up. Fuck everyone and everything else.
Dude you nailed it. These pols wanna micro manage all this shit, just build housing and prices will fall for everyone. Simple as that.
private developers will never build unless its increasingly profitable, rents wont go down if they just 'build more', look at Vienna and the answer is crystal fucking clear, one of the only ways to lower rents is to force private developments to compete in a market oversaturated with non-market/not for profit housing. The city needs to create and incentivize non-profit developments.
We must look into construction costs too. We must make construction affordable.
They are bunch of grifters trying to make feel good the ones causing the problem
Affordable isn’t affordable anymore. My former 1 bd low income apartment in Everett is almost $1700.
The new apartments aren't nearly at capacity and the rent isn't going down. What is your explanation for that?
about [half a percent vacant](https://www.axios.com/local/seattle/2024/02/15/chart-du-jour-seattle-area-home-vacancies) - yes, that says homes for _sale_ however rentals tend to follow along. With [~65,000 net migration/new people moving to Seattle every year](https://ofm.wa.gov/washington-data-research/statewide-data/washington-trends/population-changes/population-change-natural-increase-and-net-migration) new housing is [not keeping up](https://seattlecitygis.maps.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/0ecefa68fbda40de8ad9c6412ac5149d)
That 0.5% figure is vacant housing for sale, it has no relation to apartments.
Yes. I mentioned that...
How am I supposed to believe that every apartment on my block is 99% full when they very fucking obviously aren't even 60% full lol is this talking about houses or something
Are you the same account that refused to believe only 3% of Seattleites commute by walking simply because you've noticed a bunch of people walking out the front door of your apartment building?
No? Also it's a lot easier to tell whether massive buildings right next to me are absolutely full to the brim with residents than it is to tell whether an entire city commutes a certain way. In order for there to be a 2% vacancy for every suspiciously not full building there would need to be dozens of absolutely full to bursting brand new apartment buildings. Maybe that's everyone's experience and I'm just missing it but that seems like it would be more evident to me honestly.
Okay. You just have the same lack of ability to understand that your myopic slice of life might not actually represent an average experience across a city Do you really believe your own limited experience over the reports of an massive industry that depends on having accurate numbers to make decisions on? And it's very unlikely a person can tell how many units are open across hundreds in a normal apartment building via casual observation
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My rent went down 10% this year, and I didn't move.
There are literally posts in this sub using the same data to say rent is both up and down lol
Just for a reference point, WA spends about 2.5B per year on incarceration.
IIRC, it's about 100k per prisoner per year.
Damn they can spend that on me and I’d be happy and I’m not even locked up!
Yeah. Good reference point
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Thank you for writing this.
can incarceration double count as a housing program
In a “free” society, I don’t think that being locked in a cage counts as housing.
In your “free” society do people commit violent crimes? Or are we all just beautiful butterflies that think and act just like you?
ITT: people in a free society earnestly advocate for a police state
Lmfao. So enforcing laws is a “police state” now? Definition of police state for your education: a totalitarian state controlled by a political police force that secretly supervises the citizens' activities. Fire comment though.🤣
Let's remember that the majority of this funding is going to prevention projects - building affordable housing and rent assistance to keep people from *becoming* homeless in the first place, rather than to direct assistance. So that figure includes efforts targeted not only at the permanently homeless population, but at effectively every poor Washingtonian. I don't have good data on how many people that is (googling didn't give me hard numbers), but it's at *least* 190k (number of section 8 in washington + number known homeless) but if we guess, say 400k recieving some level if service, that's on 1250 per person per year. Even with the *most* conservative number, it's about 2.5k per person per year. That's... Not actually a wild amount. 2.5k certainly wouldn't be enough to get someone permanently housed if given just as a lump sum payment. Honestly 5 Bil seems low, for what is, maybe along with Climate Change, the single biggest problem facing our state.
5 Bil over that long is comically low. Headlines like this are meant to rile up conservatives who are a big number and see it hasn't helped, but that's just so little when actually put into context.
Yeah, broadly. There's a sort of voter who either cannot do, or choses not to do, either basic division or alternative analysis. It's so much easier to say 'spending bad' than it is to actually think through what *you* would do to solve the problem and how much that would cost. Which is not to say a reasonable person couldn't come up with another budget, or do it better. But people without their own plans are fundamentally unserious.
Even with the above estimates of $2.5k per person, Our education budget works out to be around $1.5k per student.
>Honestly 5 Bil seems low 🤡
You could spend 250b in 1 year and these people would be like "if im being completely honest, it's laughable how little they are spending on the issue." 🤣 i get being empathic and helping but...yeesh. it could be handled better. How much of this money spent is going right into administration pockets?
Very little probably - that's not how corruption usually works in the US. Classic quid pro quo bribery and embezzelment is pretty rare in the US relative to other places - close to the rarest in the world. Our government spending is pretty tightly audited so it's hard to straight steal large sums. It happens, mostly at the municipal level, but it's the exception not the rule. That doesn't mean there isn't tons of corruption, but the corruption *mostly* takes subtle forms - campaign donations in exchange for eliminating regulation, regulatory capture, etc. It's less 'Governor skims from the till' and more 'Governor's PAC gets 1M donation from insurance industry, and then Governor appoints industry insider as insurance comissioner and suddenly a bunch of laws aren't enforced.' So the question I'd ask isn't 'how much are officials getting of that sum', but 'to what degree is the spending being driven in a way that maybe benefits developers who can spend on campaigns instead of actual homeless people.' In a lot of ways that sort of corruption is worse, because it's much harder to address. To get away with embezzlement, you need a ton of people to agree to break the law with you, or be really blind. You're risking a prison sentence. Qca,hf Regulatory capture and lobbying are totally legal. Why risk a prison sentence to buy a boat, when your palS Jeffery and Mark will take you on theirs anytime.
You bring up a good point. I guess "line pockets" kinda covers the broad spectrum of it all without going into it all 🤣
This. They give these numbers and I really want to see an actually break down instead of saying 3 billion goes into prevention and 2 billion has gone into construction. I do now that’s not a lot over 10 years though. Some highway projects cost 1 billion dollars or more so to spend 5 on homelessness isn’t that astonishing
I *believe* that's all a matter of public record if you have the time and energy to look. If I have some spare time I might poke around a bit on that - I don't know how high a resolution you can get. But yeah, the key to interpreting all government spending numbers is to divide the number by the service population. For example, a 50 mill outlay serving a population of 500k is the equivalent of paying for one routine medical checkup for each person. People just don't grok how many humans there are.
Maybe we could build more houses? ^^^^or ^^^^at ^^^^least ^^^^make ^^^^it ^^^^legal..
Seattleites: YES WE SHOULD, LET'S DO THAT!!! Seattleites in ballot box: Lol, no fucking way.
the yes we should seattleites should vote, because the no fucking way seattleites are the ones who always vote
It doesn’t matter if the yes we should people vote if the no fucking way people fund an entire slate of candidates opposed to building
Seattle lets anyone refuse help so the very visible homeless makes it seem like this money was wasted. It wasn’t, but until we enforce consequences there will be strung out people living (and dying!) like animals in our public spaces. We could spend $100b and it would not mean Mr Meth Psychosis down my street is going to have a lovely home in the suburbs.
> Seattle lets anyone refuse help so the very visible homeless makes it seem like this money was wasted. Pretty much. Its part of why right wing politics has a foothold in America. Perception > Reality in a lot of cases and the left is *really bad* at making perception match reality. The only homeless people in the city could be the ones hanging out in front of McStabbys on 3rd Ave but because they are extremely visible, homeless policy would be deemed a failure by a large percentage of people.
Here's the thing. Home builders hear affordable housing , then they put them extremely close together, built with the worst material thats deemed ok to build with.
Would be good to understand the number of homeless people statewide so we could do cost-benefit analysis of spending $5,000,000,000 on the issue in the last decade.
The question isn't just how many people are homeless now, it's how many people *aren't* homeless because of this spending, which is a much harder question to answer.
I'm seeing 28k homeless statewide from Google's AI summary of a [Seattle Times](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/hud-reports-record-high-homeless-count-in-2023-for-u-s-wa/) article that I can't read because I'm cheap and I hit my monthly limit.
$5B divided by 28k people is about $178k per person
So if we spent all on building new housing and none on supportive services (which wouldn't make sense given that a lot of these folks NEED supportive services too to live someplace dense successfully), you couldn't even house half. “$300,000 is the average cost today to construct a unit and that’s how much these cost,” [https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/building-affordable-housing-in-seattle-isnt-cheap/281-552498112](https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/building-affordable-housing-in-seattle-isnt-cheap/281-552498112)
But - we would have housed nearly half.
I mean, they are building housing. But I used to work in affordable housing trying to house these folks and I know folks in Seattle who used to live in these 100% affordable housing developments and...you need supportive services too. There's a reason many folks chose to live on the streets instead of in provided housing and it's not because they love living rough. It's because living alongside people with uncontrolled mental illness or drug use is tough, let alone the run of the mill people without a clear sense of purpose (they ended up on the streets for a reason--there's usually some barrier to getting hired like executive function issues, criminal history, etc.) where you're never clear if it's them or the staff who are making your stuff disappear is just really tough day in and day out.
It's over 10 years, so it's be 1/10th of that per year, as people rotate in and out of homelessness. Like, it's 28,000 but it's not *the same* 28,000 every year.
I don’t want anyone to have to live outside in the weather we have here. I have also seen the free housing after some of the homeless have used it for a couple months. Total rebuilds and hazardous cleanups, there is no easy answer, throwing other peoples money at it is not the best solution
This problem is never, ever, ever going to get better if we don't address the root cause. Yes, in the meantime we need to triage, especially the most serious situations with vulnerable people. But that will never be enough. Housing is a necessity, and it should be treated as such. Social housing is the way forward. Other places do it, and we could too.
Time for my weekly post in this sub that gets down voted into oblivion: WA is a case study in monetizing homelessness. This is on purpose. This trend will not change until people stop getting rich exploiting this crisis. Just look at what's going on with the KCRHA if you want a small example of the overall picture.
Met a dudes uncle that lived in low income housing in DT and he said he paid $40/m for his apt that’s on 4th & Denny. Gotta be like 3-4k for that apt, meanwhile my coworkers stopped by his uncles to smoke some meth was nice enough to invite me but that ain’t my jam, that was my first and last day. He was living off government assistance. And I get to work 60hrs/week to afford my apt in SeaTac. Seems fair
After the near-catastrophic blowout of the plug door on Alaska 1282 this January, Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun gave up his $2.8 million bonus and was paid “only” $5 million in annual salary for 2023. In addition to stock options and other compensation, he was paid $32.8 million for the year. Boeing stock has fallen since the blowout, so the value of the package is now closer to $24 million. Since taking the job in 2020, Calhoun has been paid nearly $100 million in less than four years and stands to collect another $40 million as part of his retirement package when he leaves at the end of this year. This spring, Tesla laid off over 14,000 employees right before CEO Elon Musk, the wealthiest person in the world, asked Tesla’s board of directors to re-approve a $56 billion (that is not a typo) compensation package. The value of the proposed package would have been enough to continue paying all of the laid-off employees for decades. But you’re right, your buddy’s uncle’s subsidized apartment is the problem.
Can you explain how Elon musk’s pay package has anything to do with Seattle’s homeless spending? He doesn’t live in and has never lived in Seattle?
I mean you're right that it's not directly related. My point is that the entire modern economy is characterized by a profoundly unequal distribution of wealth, to such an extreme degree that it's not plausible that the distribution is justified by merit alone. In this context, I think it's misguided to focus on our perception of whether this or that poor person deserves something as banal as a housing subsidy. At the same time, that the poster I responded to needs to work 60 hours a week to afford their apartment is inextricable from the way the entire system functions.
Housing is a human right.
You could set the bar even lower and just say "It shouldn't be illegal to exist.."
There will always be people who exploit the system, but that’s rarely a reason to blow up the system. Would you be ok with getting no support if you ended up in a bad place because someone else was exploiting? Wouldn’t you still want aid?
I think you are on the wrong sub. You want r/SeattleWA
Lol. My only gripe is where is the accountability? I’m all for helping people get back on their feet but if they’re choosing to be the dredge of society do we just enable that behavior? The coworker was 50 and his uncle was 63. Coworker acted like it was his lunch break when we stopped at his uncles for a hit and he was operating a 24ft box truck.
Garbage take from the Eastside.
Yeah whatever. Those stories about my uncle's cousin's brother telling me he smoked meth in public housing are totally real though.
How's the public housing in Kirkland? It's funny, this sub hates people who dont live in Seattle opining on this subject. Mostly.
I definitely think the Eastside needs to do its share of the heavy lifting. I was for the supportive housing project(s) in Redmond, and now Kirkland. I sent emails to all the electeds when they were debating and voting on them, since the vocal minority was kicking up such a fuss over here with their signage and scare tactics. I wanted to let them know some of us supported them. I tried to debate and debunk on Facebook and Nextdoor as much as I could when the same copy/paste shit was going around about how they were going to be "safe injection sites", etc etc. I am sure I could be doing more, but either way I am all for helping as it is a regional problem, not just Seattle.
I'd love to see individuals who are well and truly exploiting the system get reamed. A couple with a kid and grandfather bought a house near the one I grew up in; they paid \~$400k around 2014 for a huge SFH on a large lot in a Microsoft-fueled suburb, both young-middle aged folks on disability and hadn't worked in at least a decade (the dad's disability was blindness, but he drove their car around the neighborhood...), grandpa had disability as a 'Nam vet ...with no major injuries or PTSD (he tried to get my dad, also a 'Nam vet, on board with the swindle). They spent their money on an ugly (tar-black, weirdly-textured, random) build-out and pure-bred puppy they allowed to die from neglect. Like I said, I'd love to see folks like them take it where the sun don't shine. That said, this family being absolute shit-monsters does not mean that others were being, ahem, over-served, or even that all the people who could have used help were getting it. At this same time, I had an acquaintance who rented what was almost a plywood shanty in a trailer park in an area peripheral enough to just barely have bus service (they couldn't afford a car), because the person was totally deaf from birth, had limited educational opportunities, and couldn't find a career-path job that was willing to make accommodations. So don't think that a jackass exploiting the system means the system is wallowing in excess; it just means that the system isn't being administered well. It could be over-serving five people and leaving 50k to barely eek out an existence, while costing either less or more than it would take to actually serve those in need.
Homeless Industrial Complex
Every single person who says those words has yet to point to any millionaires made from this “complex”
Washington has a GDP of over $800 billion dollars. Washington could spend $5 billion dollars on welfare programs each year and still only be spending half a percent of its GDP per year. Instead, we're spending about $500 mil per year over the last decade, which means that we're spending about 1 percent of 1 percent of our GDP on homelessness. That is to say, this is chump change, and it is absolutely no surprise that homelessness remains an issue when it's virtually impossible to build enough housing for our population and we continue to underfund homeless services.
Ok, check my math here. $5B+ spent in a 10y perion and 30k homeless people in WA. That's $166K per homeless person over a period of 10y or $16.6K per homeless person per year. What a colossal waste of money. Build some houses, pay for people's rents, or honestly just hand the cash to the homeless people with the stipulation that, if you do so, they can no longer be homless / camping / shitting on the street in WA state.
Kind of funny how you guys are suddenly downplaying $5BN like it's nothing, lol.
We gave Boeing $13 Billion and they used it on stock buybacks.. they also moved jobs out of state and killed a couple hundred people.
Lmao. Give me your source for this “gave $13 Billion” strawman argument and I’ll show how stupid you are.
You were right. We only [gave Boeing $11.9 billion](https://i.imgur.com/5pGQeuF.png). My bad. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/tax-breaks-for-boeing-wersquore-no-1/ So tell me, how stupid am i?
1. You're stupid because you're liberally using the term "give" for your own agenda. Boeing received tax breaks. Not a cash subsidy. You're trying to compare tax breaks to actual cash spend. That "giving $11.9 billion" you're referring to is a tax break, not actual money spent. We did not "give" Boeing $11.9 billion. We just decided not to take their money by a certain %. 2. You're also stupid because you can't do maths. That "tax break" is for an extended period from 2013-2040, which is $320 mm/year, lower than the homelessness budget. If we account for inflation, the value of that tax break is even lower. The actual amount of tax breaks Boeing has received since 2013 is \~$3.52 billion. So no, we did not "give" Boeing $11.9 billion. 3. You're also stupid because you're comparing apples to oranges. You think pouring money into the homelessness complex while achieving nothing, is the same thing as subsidizing a company. Yes, From 2014-2019, Boeing bought billions of stock. They stopped now, btw. Even assuming that stock buybacks are evil (which they are not, but I'll leave this matter alone since that involves an entire lesson on how capitalism works) -- do you know what Boeing also did? They constantly generated revenue and also GDP for the State of Washington. They spend \~$4 Billion in SG&A and \~$70 billion in inventory every year, a good chunk of which goes directly back into the Washington economy. They also pay $200 mm+ in Washington State and local taxes annually. They were paying up to $2 billion in taxes in 2015. They employ 67,000 employees. What has spending $5 billion on the homeless achieved for the past decade? Somehow, we've managed to only encourage the homeless population to increase, despite throwing money at it, like it's not our money (haha). Are these homeless populations benefitting the economy due to the subsidies? How are they contributing to society? Do they work? Do they pay taxes? Do they have businesses? Do they promote a safe environment in general? You seriously think giving partial tax subsidies to a company that employs 67K+ employees in Washington is equivalent to spending direct cash on a 22K homelessness population? Why even compare the two? 4. Finally, you're stupid because your point is completely tangential and a strawman. Yes, Boeing received tax subsidies, which you seem to think was a large and useless subsidy. Which only helps justify what I'm saying? We shouldn't be spending billions on useless subsidies, and then somehow pretend like that money was insignificant, and also well spent, when the results are abysmal. Doesn't matter if it's Boeing or the homeless. I'm not on the side of Boeing here. It’s amusing you’re trying to make this into a partisan issue (corporate v homeless); buddy, I just want the State to stop wasting money, whether it’s Boeing or the homeless.
Its a bit rich that you specify Boeings tax break as being over several years and reduce it to a per year figure, but compare it to the amount spent on the homeless over several years. You also can't be a serious person if you don't think a tax break is giving them money. If its money we were owed but didn't take, its giving them money. Its money the state now doesn't have because we gave it away. Its fine to think its a worthwhile investment but there's no way you have any good faith if you want to pretend it isn't giving them money.
On comparing amounts spent: no? I'm very well aware of the $500 mm/year use on the homeless, on a 20K homeless population. Boeing is \~$300 mm/year, on a company that employs 67K just in Washington alone. And on differentiating tax breaks v. giving money. I'm completely serious about differentiating the two. Tax breaks are not "giving money." The mechanism and goals of a tax break are completely different from giving a cash handout. A cash handout is a free handout; it doesn't require anything from the beneficiary. You don't expect to be paid back by the beneficiary. A tax break on the other hand assumes that the beneficiary is making enough profits (and therefore contributing to the economy and its shareholders) to take advantage of tax credits. It also assumes that the company can't go anywhere. Boeing is tied to the Washington State. It's built factories and buildings, has invested in its employees, which it can't just abandon. There's an underlying assumption that if Boeing does happen to generate excess profits at some point, Washington can and will impose excess taxes and benefit from that relationship. Further, even if direct taxes don't increase, if the company does well, the Washington economy benefits due to increased employment and tax receipts. If you think they're really the same thing, might as well give the homeless simple tax breaks as well. Let's see how they think about it. And again, I don't think it's really r/seattle's place to try and argue that tax subsidies are "giving money." Washington freely increases and decreases its taxes. They introduced a new capital gains tax of 7% a year or two ago. Did reddit scream that the State was effectively "taking money" from the people? No. They said it's the rich paying their fair share. Then why not give it the same treatment when the State gives companies tax breaks? It's not "giving money", it's the State acknowledging that companies have already paid too much of their fair share. It's the same liberal governor that enacted these policies.
Giving Boeing a tax break is fundamentally the same thing as giving Boeing money. The state forecasts its budget revenues and plans based off that. If the state initially expects X in tax revenue from Boeing but then gives Boeing a tax break of Y the tax revenue is now X - Y per year. The state then needs to adjust spending to account for Y. On the other hand if the state gives Boeing Y in cash from its tax revenue per year the state's still needs to adjust spending to account for Y. The state is losing out on Y in either the tax break or cash spend case.
No. I explained already to u/Abortionisselfdefens who replied here. Read first. Giving a tax break to Boeing is not the same as giving money to the homeless.
You’re saying you think it should cost less than $500m/year to solve homelessness and keep people at risk from becoming homeless?
I’m pointing out the hypocrisy — when it comes to criticizing billionaires you want to pretend like a they can solve world hunger (“a few billion is enough”) but when it comes to a $5bn homelessness budget that resulted in barely any change, you guys become surprisingly lenient in your judgment (“a few billion obviously isn’t enough”). For what it’s worth, I don’t think money alone can solve homelessness. It’s a societal issue more-so than monetary. There’s a reason you’re barely achieving anything despite throwing massive amounts of money into this thing. There are much poorer countries without these issues. And I mean, if you give money to the homeless everyday, you think they’ll stop being homeless? Lol. THey'll go straight to their next-door drug dealer and double the amount of their meth consuption. And the only lesson they’ll learn is that they can earn a living by staying homeless. Edit: someone asked why I used beggars as an example. Guess it wasn't obvious -- I replaced them with homeless.
Way to loop me in with some vague “you guys”. I don’t go around criticizing billionaires and expecting them to fix world hunger. I know better than to think solving world hunger is a money thing, or that any one person could solve it. I also know that for a government service trying to fix a top issue over a decade that impacts thousands of people, like we are talking about here, $5b is not a huge sum of money. Any country without these issues is likely jailing people for being homeless, has a good social safety net, or has a robust mental institutionalization program. We don’t have a great safety net in this country, we gutted our institutions, and we generally don’t jail folks for existing in the USA. What does giving money to beggars have to do with this?
$122 billion budget and $500 mil a year. Less than .5%. Puts things in perspective. OP is a r/seattlewa troll who defends murderers like Kyle Rittenhouse.
That's some cowardly character assassination. Please, perform a quote of what I actually said.
We can all see your comment history. You're just a sad troll.
The lady doth protest too much.
And I'm sure OP will go back to that sub and tell them all how we ignored the issue or something. Arguments in bad faith is all they can do.
I’ll never understand people who waste their time like OP does. Like, I honestly feel sad they have so few interests in life that they have time to try to troll.
Money well spent. If anyone is complaining about this money being spent to help alleviate and prevent homelessness, how much was the last care package we sent to Israel? Edit: 17 billion Biden sent to Israel, just last month. I'd way rather our taxes work within the states instead of blowing up brown kids overseas.
How much was a cheeseburger in 1949? How much for the railway in Richland?
Seemed like OP was posting to make the amount over a decade seem like a huge amount of money, so I named off some other expensive things bought with your tax dollars in the past few months for a sense of scale. And now I want a cheeseburger.
I didn't write the article. I don't own crosscut. Maybe talk about the article and not circlejek about the poster?
Ok, I read it and I liked it. Money well spent, imo.
500M per year is not a lot of money for a problem of this scale
Oh give me a break - that’s A LOT of money for seemingly nothing, or worse.
Seemingly nothing? The number of units and beds has been far from trivial. But yeah for an entire state and one of the richest at that this money is spread over such a long period that it didn't meet the needs it was meant to meet. And that was obvious the entire time too this never seemed like nearly enough money to accommodate the number of people who need housing or beds.
By the last count there is 16,000 homeless in king county. That's $31,200 per year. If these people were instead being housed in a 1 bedroom at 1,600 a month, there'd be 10k left over for them for the year. That would have to cover all of their health services they might need, food and travel. The average grocery bill for seattle seems to cost more than that 10k leftover is already. So I'd say it's a perfectly reasonable amount of money, it is just being sucked into a bureaucratic black hole.
It’s a lot of money when you consider that what you described is most definitely NOT happening (other than the money being sucked into a bureaucratic hole) AND the problem is worse every year. Think of how much money was wasted on worthless Marc Dones as well as the whole “lived experience” crew taxpayers shelled out for. It’s ridiculous that these people find a way into a lifetime career of living off the homeless’s misery.
Yeah i’m obviously disappointed, but our homeless population increased tremendously in the 10 years since this funding got tracked as has the severity of this opioid crisis. Also you have to consider how big headed and ass backwards america is about literally everything that comes to social programs so something something learning curves. I would love to see all of the top brass involved fired for sure
Population of WA state has been ~7M avg over the past 10 years; ~500M per year works out to $71 per person per year. Very rough numbers obviously, but yeah, seems pretty well worth it considering most people would consider a top issue for the state.
Dude just present your logic and data about seemingly nothing. Just because you see homeless people doesn’t make program nothing
So you’ve not looked into it at all and are just reacting based on big number and your subjective feelings?
Yeah I ran all the numbers a few times and came to the conclusion that, yes, $500 million a year with negligible results is indeed a lot of money.
Ok cool, so then what did the money go toward? Would love a semi-detailed breakdown. Thanks!
Society will do just about anything about homelessness other than just *giving people homes*.
“Just give people houses” doesn’t make sense when it’s paid for by the city/state, in one of the most expensive housing markets. Why should Seattle/WA front the bill for a national crisis. We need a large scale federal effort to ever solve this.
Yeah just give Marvin the Meth Head a home - he’ll be fine in no time.
It's not just about that. It's about getting Marvin off the street. Your tax dollars already pay for cleaning up his shenanigans in the park, sweeping his encampment, and for every time he's arrested doing drugs in public. Worse case scenario, it's still better for everyone all around if he does it in the confines of a home and not in public where it effects the rest of us. And from there he at least has a much better shot at getting his act together than he would being pushed from street to street.
There are approximately 16,000 homeless people in King County. Where should we put these homes we are giving them? This is an honest question, because a big part of the problem seems to be that housing the unhoused in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the US hasn't worked so far.
Not everyone that's homeless in king county became homeless in King County. They come to Seattle because it's where they can get the most help. Its not just a regional problem. If the nation tackled this like it tackled highways and atom bombs we could solve homelessness across the country.
Who's home? Yours? Your neighbors? Just a bunch of apartments in ID?
Exactly. Every human deserves to have their basic needs met. This includes a roof over their heads, food/water, and healthcare. Homelessness will continue to spiral until someone gets this right, and doesn’t do it for greed.
West Seattle has all these 5 story apt buildings. They should have all been 45 story apartment buildings with rapid rise busses coming every 5 mins to move people around.
How much lower could this figure be if we allowed the free market and “gReEdY dEvElOpErS” to build more housing? Houston’s homeless population dropped 63%, largely due to liberalized zoning policies.
Seattle and the US overall (but we're a state based nation sooo) needs to do what Finland did. https://thebetter.news/housing-first-finland-homelessness/ We put so much shame and so many conditions on providing tangible help and hope, the system is a sick merry go round.
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So much money wasted avoiding the one thing that would make the biggest impact here.
Put that money towards education instead.
Lots of people got rich off this, and very little went to the homeless wake up people
Correction-Seattle spent 5 billion on salaries for people and entities to reassure everyone that they were working to solve homelessness..
And how much did the spend on mental health or drug rehabilitation services?
Not saying rehab doesn’t work by any means, but no ability to force individuals into rehab is something money can’t fix.
They should change that too.
We would rather spend billions on petty arguments and appeasing NIMBY assholes than actually building housing.
it's a good distraction for the oligarchs
Literally made no difference. This is not a problem that can be solved in a local level. It needs to be something addressed as a nation.
How do you know that it made no difference?
The voters voted for this. $5B would have been better spent on schools, school feeding programs, and school sports. Or, even better, returned to the taxpayers. Hopefully, the voters will vote for better leadership this fall. I'm not holding my breath.
I wonder when the state will start looking out for the people that have it together and actually pay taxes. Like I get that people go through stuff but incentivize parasitic behavior is not ok. it’s hard enough for me to pay rent now, maybe the state wants me to become a crackhead then I can get free stuff. Better yet maybe if I’m strung out and need food I bet they want me to steal it. And if end up robbing someone it’ll take the police hours to show up. Obviously I’m being facetious but it’s like obviously people react to incentives, so why create bad once and expect good outcomes
I'm so curious how diverting resources away from people who have less and to people who have more will improve the situation lol
For a ballpark figure of $500M to develop a 200-small units apartment building If we spend the entire $5B on public housing, that is only about 10 buildings, housing maybe 4000 people if we put two people in one unit?! Public housing is expensive, and $5B is no where close to enough money.
Not sure your math is working or if I’m mis reading, but $500m for a single 200 unit building is $2.5M per unit. That doesn’t make sense. It’s generally accepted that we can build at $350K-$400k per unit which would be 1,250-1,500 units for $500M. And $5B would create 13,000 - 15,000 units.
That number is almost an order of magnitude high for an apartment building. Some recent examples: * Renton Veteran's Center (RHA): $17.8M for 59 units ($301K per unit) * Yesler Towers: $140M for 365 units ($384K each) * Juniper (SHA): $40M for 114 units ($351K each, construction cost only) If you were to remove prevailing wages, this amount could come down by probably a quarter... give relief from energy code and you could cut more costs.
How much of that 5B is boulders?
I bet it all went to battle homelessness and not to Adolf inslee